white men. Mr. Payne's generalization, that superior food-supply
occasioned the Old World's primacy in civilization, and also that of the
Mexicans and Peruvians here, seems too sweeping, yet it evidently
contains large truth.

PART FIRST

THE FORE-HISTORY

PERIOD I.

DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT

1492-1660

CHAPTER I.

COLUMBUS

[1000]

There is no end to the accounts of alleged discoveries of America before
Columbus. Most of these are fables. It is, indeed, nearly certain that
hardy Basque, Breton, and Norman fishermen, adventuring first far north,
then west, had sighted Greenland and Labrador and become well acquainted
with the rich fishing-grounds about Newfoundland and the Saint Lawrence
Gulf. Many early charts of these regions, without dates and hitherto
referred to Portuguese navigators of a time so late as 1500, are now
thought to be the work of these earlier voyagers. They found the New
World, but considered it a part of the Old.

Important, too, is the story of supposed Norse sea-rovers hither,
derived from certain Icelandic manuscripts of the fourteenth century. It
is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to
Helluland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of the subsequent
tours by Thorwald Ericson in 1002, Thorfinn Karlsefne, 1007-1009, and of
Helge and Finnborge in 1011, to points still farther away. Such voyages
probably occurred. As is well known, Helluland has been interpreted to
be Newfoundland; Markland, Nova Scotia; and Vineland, the country
bordering Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, R. I. These identifications are
possibly correct, and even if they are mistaken, Vineland may still have
been somewhere upon the coast of what is now the United States.

In the present condition of the evidence, however, we have to doubt
this. No scholar longer believes that the writing on Dighton Rock is
Norse, or that the celebrated Skeleton in Armor found at Fall River was
a Northman's, or that the old Stone Mill at Newport was constructed by
men from Iceland. Even if the manuscripts, composed between three and
four hundred years after the events which they are alleged to narrate,
are genuine, and if the statements contained in them are true, the
latter are far too indefinite to let us be sure that they are applicable
to United States localities.

[Illustration: Dighton Rock]

[l260]

But were we to go so far as to admit that the Northmen came here and
began the settlements asc