o have been, in the days of Wolfe and
Montcalm, about twelve thousand. At the opening of the twentieth
century there were in America north of Mexico about 403,000 Indians, of
whom 108,000 were in Canada. Some writers go so far as to say that the
numbers of the natives were probably never much greater than they are
to-day. But even if we accept the more general opinion that the Indian
population has declined, there is no evidence to show that the
population was ever more than a thin scattering of wanderers over the
face of a vast country. Mooney estimates that at the coming of the
white man there were only about 846,000 aborigines in the United
States, 220,000 in British America, 72,000 in Alaska, and 10,000 in
Greenland, a total native population of 1,148,000 from the Mississippi
to the Atlantic.

The limited means of support possessed by the natives, their primitive
agriculture, their habitual disinclination to settled life and
industry, their constant wars and the epidemic diseases which, even as
early as the time of Jacques Cartier, worked havoc among them, must
always have prevented the growth of a numerous population. The explorer
might wander for days in the depths of the American forest without
encountering any trace of human life. The continent was, in truth, one
vast silence, broken only by the roar of the waterfall or the cry of
the beasts and birds of the forest.

CHAPTER IV

THE LEGEND OF THE NORSEMEN

There are many stories of the coming of white men to the coasts of
America and of their settlements in America long before the voyage of
Christopher Columbus. Even in the time of the Greeks and Romans there
were traditions and legends of sailors who had gone out into the 'Sea
of Darkness' beyond the Pillars of Hercules--the ancient name for the
Strait of Gibraltar--and far to the west had found inhabited lands.
Aristotle thought that there must be land out beyond the Atlantic, and
Plato tells us that once upon a time a vast island lay off the coasts
of Africa; he calls it Atlantis, and it was, he says, sunk below the
sea by an earthquake. The Phoenicians were wonderful sailors; their
ships had gone out of the Mediterranean into the other sea, and had
reached the British Isles, and in all probability they sailed as far
west as the Canaries. We find, indeed, in classical literature many
references to supposed islands and countries out beyond the Atlantic.
The ancients called these places the Islands of