url at the heads of his adversaries!
If he could have said, "Five hundred years ago some Icelanders coasted
westward in the polar regions, and then coasted southward until they
reached a country beyond the ocean and about opposite to France or
Portugal; therefore that country must be Asia, and I can reach it by
striking boldly across the ocean, which will obviously be shorter than
going down by Guinea,"--if he could have said this, he would have had
precisely the unanswerable argument for lack of which his case was
waiting and suffering. In persuading men to furnish hard cash, for his
commercial enterprise, as Colonel Higginson so neatly says, "an ounce of
Vinland would have been worth a pound of cosmography."[480] We may be
sure that the silence of Columbus about the Norse voyages proves that he
knew nothing about them or quite failed to see their bearings upon his
own undertaking. It seems to me absolutely decisive.

[Footnote 477: "The fault that we find with Columbus is, that
he was not honest and frank enough to tell where and how he had
obtained his previous information about the lands which he
pretended to discover." Anderson, _America not discovered by
Columbus_, p. 90.]

[Footnote 478: See below, p. 398, note.]

[Footnote 479: For example, the pilot Martin Vicenti told
Columbus that 1,200 miles west of Cape St. Vincent he had
picked up from the sea a piece of carved wood evidently not
carved with iron tools. Pedro Correa, who had married
Columbus's wife's sister, had seen upon Porto Santo a similar
piece of carving that had drifted from the west. Huge reeds
sometimes floated ashore upon those islands, and had not
Ptolemy mentioned enormous reeds as growing in eastern Asia?
Pine-trees of strange species were driven by west winds upon
the coast of Fayal, and two corpses of men of an unknown race
had been washed ashore upon the neighbouring island of Flores.
Certain sailors, on a voyage from the Azores to Ireland, had
caught glimpses of land on the west, and believed it to be the
coast of "Tartary;" etc., etc. See _Vita dell' Ammiraglio_,
cap. ix. Since he cited these sailors, why did he not cite the
Northmen also, if he knew what they had done?]

[Footnote 480: _Larger History of the United States_, p. 54.]