Travels in America and Italy (Volumes I & II) E-Book

François René Chateaubriand

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 779

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Chateaubriand was born in Brittany, Sept. 14, 1768. At the time of the French Revolution he took part at first with the exiled royalists, but, returning to France, was employed in a diplomatic service by Napoleon. On the murder of the Duc d'Enghein, he threw up his office as ambassador to the Republic of Valais. He supported the restoration monarchy, becoming a minister of state, and was appointed ambassador-extraordinary to England. He visited America when a young man, and afterwards traveled in the east. Chateaubriand's books abound in passages of brilliant description, and there is no French author before him whose prose writings can compare with his in the power of conveying the beauty and mystery of nature. He is called the father of the French romantic school of writers and died at Paris, July 4, 1848. This historical travelogue recounts his travels in America and, later, in Italy.

Leseprobe

Travels in America and Italy

Volumes I & II

FRANCOIS-RENÉ CHATEAUBRIAND

Travels in America and Italy, Francois-René Chateaubriand

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

Printed by Bookwire, Voltastraße 1, 60486 Frankfurt/M.

ISBN: 9783849663544

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

ADVERTISEMENT.1

PREFACE. 2

INTRODUCTION.36

TRAVELS IN AMERICA.41

THE ONONDAGAS.52

LAKES OF CANADA.61

DESCRIPTION OF SCENES IN THE INTERIOR OF THE FLORIDAS.81

MANNERS OF THE SAVAGES.89

NOTES.130

MEMOIR FIRST.130

SECOND MEMOIR.140

ON THE ORIGIN AND DATE OF THE ANCIENT WORKS OF OHIO161

CONCLUSION.167

MANNERS OF THE SAVAGES (CONTINUED).169

UNITED STATES.215

SPANISH REPUBLICS.222

CONCLUSION OF THE TRAVELS IN AMERICA.. 231

NATURAL HISTORY.233

TRAVELS IN ITALY.243

TO M. JOUBERT – LETTER I243

TO M. JOUBERT. – LETTER II.250

TO M. JOUBERT. – LETTER III.252

TO M. DE FONTANES.281

FIVE DAYS AT CLERMONT, IN AUVERGNE.297

JOURNEY TO MONT BLANC.310

NOTES.320

NOTICE ON THE EXCAVATIONS OF POMPEII358

ADVERTISEMENT.

I have nothing particular to say respecting the Travels in America here submitted to the reader: the narrative of them is taken, like the subject of The Natchez, from the original manuscript of the latter work. These Travels carry with them their commentary and their history.

My different works contain frequent recollections of my peregrinations in America. I thought at first to collect them and to introduce them under their proper dates into my narrative, but I relinquished this intention to avoid inserting them twice; I have therefore contented myself with referring to these passages. Some, however, I have quoted when they appeared necessary to the due understanding of the text and were not too long.

In the Introduction I give a fragment of the Memoirs of my life in order to familiarize the reader with the young traveller whom he is to follow beyond sea. I have carefully corrected the part previously written; that which relates to circumstances posterior to the year 1791, and which brings us down to the present time, is entirely new.

In treating of the Spanish republics I have related (as far as my duty permitted me to relate) what I should have wished to do in behalf of those rising States, when my political situation gave me some influence upon the destinies of nations.

I have not been so rash as to touch on this important subject before I had collected such information as I needed. A great number of printed volumes and unpublished papers have contributed to the composition of a dozen pages, I have consulted persons who have travelled and resided in the Spanish republics; and I am indebted to the kindness of the Chevalier d'Esmenard for valuable information respecting the American loans.

The Preface to the Travels in America is a sort of history of travels: it presents to the reader a general survey of geographical science, and as it were the map of the route of man upon the globe. Of my Travels in Italy nothing is known to the public but my letter addressed from Rome to M. de Fontanes, and a few pages relative to Vesuvius: the letters and notes which will be found appended to those papers had not yet been published. Another unpublished piece, Five Days in Auvergne, follows in chronological order the letters and notes on Italy. The Visit to Mont Blanc appeared in 1806, a few months before my departure for Greece.

To these two volumes of Travels I have added only such pieces and documents as were absolutely necessary to confirm the facts or the arguments of the text. These two volumes, with the three relative to my four in Greece, Palestine, &c. form and complete the collection of my Travels.

PREFACE. [1]

SKETCH OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS.

Travels are one of the sources of history: by the narratives of travellers the history of foreign nations is placed beside the particular history of each country.

Travels date as far back as the infancy of society: the books of Moses represent to us the first migrations of men. In those books we see the Patriarch driving his herds to the plains of Canaan, the Arab wandering in the sandy deserts, and the Phoenician exploring the seas.

Moses represents the second family of men issuing from the mountains of Armenia: this point is central with respect to the three great races, tawny, black, and white-the Indians, the Negroes, and the Celts, or other nations of the north.

The pastoral nations find their progenitor in Shem, the commercial in Ham, and the military in Japhet. The Greeks and Romans designate Japetus as the father of mankind.

Homer-whether there ever existed a poet of that name, or whether the works attributed to him are but a collection of the traditions of Greece-Homer has left us in the Odyssey the narrative of a voyage. He also transmits to us the notions entertained in this remote antiquity respecting the figure of the earth. According to these notions the earth represented a disk surrounded by the river Ocean. Hesiod has the same cosmography.

Herodotus, the father of history, as Homer is the father of poetry, was, like Homer, a traveller. He traversed the whole known world of his time. How charmingly he has described the manners of nations? In those days they had but a few coasting charts of the Phoenician navigators, and Anaximander's map of the world corrected by Hecatæus: Strabo mentions an itinerary of the world by the latter.

Herodotus distinguishes only two divisions of the earth, Europe and Asia: Libya, or Africa, would seem from his accounts to be but a vast peninsula of Asia. He gives the routes of some caravans in the interior of Libya, and the concise narrative of a voyage round Africa. An Egyptian king, Necos, sent out Phoenicians from the gulph of Arabia; these Phoenicians returned to Egypt by way of the Pillars of Hercules; they were three years in performing their voyage, and related that they had seen the sun on their right. Such is the statement of Herodotus.

The ancients had therefore, like ourselves, two sorts of travellers: the one traversed the land, the other the sea. Nearly about the time that Herodotus wrote, Hanno, the Carthaginian, accomplished his Periplus. Something is yet extant of the collection made by Scylax of the maritime excursions of his time.

Plato has left us the romance of that Atlantis which some have conjectured to be America. Eudoxus, the fellow-traveller of the philosopher, composed a universal itinerary, in which he combined geography with astronomical observations.

Hippocrates visited the tribes of Scythia: he applied the results of his experience to the alleviation of human suffering.

Xenophon holds a conspicuous place among those armed travellers who have contributed to make us acquainted with the world which we inhabit.

Aristotle, who outstripped the progress of knowledge, considered the earth as being spherical: he computed its circumference at four hundred thousand stadia; he believed, as Christopher Columbus afterwards did, that the coasts of Hesperia were opposite to those of India. He had a vague idea of England and Ireland, which he calls Albion and Ierne; the Alps were not unknown to him, but he confounded them with the Pyrenees.

Dicearchus, one of his disciples, wrote a charming description of Greece, some fragments of which are still extant, while another of Aristotle's disciples, Alexander the Great, carried the name of that same Greece to the banks of the Indus. The conquests of Alexander effected a revolution in the sciences as well as among nations.

Androsthenes, Nearchus, and Onesicritus, visited the southern coasts of Asia. After the death of the son of Philip, Seleucus Nicanor penetrated to the Ganges; Patroclus, one of his admirals, navigated the Indian Ocean. The Greek kings of Egypt opened a direct commerce with India and Taprobane; Ptolemy Philadelphus sent geographers and fleets to India; Timosthenes published a description of all the known ports, and Eratosthenes furnished mathematical bases for a complete system of geography. The caravans also penetrated into India by two routes; the one, descending the Ganges, terminated at Palibothra; the other turned Mount Imaus.

Hypparchus, the astronomer, announced an extensive land as connecting India with Africa: this you may consider if you please as the world discovered by Columbus.

The rivalry of Rome and Carthage made Polybius a traveller and caused him to visit the coast of Africa as far as Mount Atlas, that he might make himself better acquainted with the people whose history he purposed to write. Eudoxus of Cyzicus endeavoured, during the reigns of Ptolemy Physcon and Ptolemy Lathures, to make the tour of Africa by the west; he also sought a more direct route from the ports of the Arabian Gulph to those of India.

Meanwhile the Romans removed other veils by extending their conquests toward the north. Pythias of Marseilles had already reached those shores whence the destroyers of the empire of the Cæsars were to issue. Pythias sailed as far as the seas of Scandinavia, fixed the position of the Sacred Cape and of Cape Calbium (Finisterre) in Spain, visited the island of Uxisama (Ushant), that of Albion, one of the Cassiterides of the Carthaginians, and pushed on to the famous Thule, which some will have to be Iceland, but which, according to all appearance, is the coast of Jutland.

Julius Cæsar elucidated the geography of the Gauls and commenced the discovery of Germany and the coast of the isle of the Britons: Germanicus carried the Roman eagles to the banks of the Elbe.

During the reign of Augustus, Strabo combined together in one work the information left by preceding travellers and that which he had himself acquired. But, if his geography throws new light upon some part of the globe, on other points he makes the science retrograde. Strabo distinguishes the Cassiterides from Great Britain, and he appears to believe that the former, (which, in his hypothesis, can be no other than the Scilly islands) produced tin; now, the tin was extracted from the mines of Cornwall; and long before the Greek geographer wrote, the tin of Albion had been imported by way of Gaul into the Roman world.

In Gaul or Celtica, Strabo nearly suppresses the Armorican peninsula; he knows nothing of the Baltic, though it was already regarded as a large salt lake, along which was the coast of Yellow Amber, the modern Prussia.

At the period in which Strabo flourished, Hyppalus fixed the navigation of India by the Gulph of Arabia, by trying the regular winds which we call monsoons; one of these winds, the south-west, that which wafted him to India, assumed the name of Hyppalian. Roman fleets sailed regularly from the port of Berenice about the middle of summer, arrived in thirty days at the port of Ocelis, or at that of Cané in Arabia, and thence in forty days at Muziris, the first mart of India. The return in winter was accomplished in the same space of time; so that the ancients were less than five months in going to India and returning from it. Pliny and the Periplus of the Eythrean Sea (in the minor geographers) furnish these curious details.

After Strabo, Dionysius Periegetes, Pomponius Mela, Isidorus of Charax, and Pliny, add to the knowledge previously acquired concerning foreign nations. Pliny, in particular, is valuable for the number of voyages and relations which he quotes. In reading his work, we see that we have lost a complete description of the Roman empire, compiled by command of Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus; that we have likewise lost commentaries on Africa by king Juba, extracted from Carthaginian books; that we have lost an account of the Fortunate Islands by Statius Sebosus, Memoirs on India by Seneca, and a Periplus of Polybius, the historian; losses that must ever be regretted. Pliny knows something of Tibet; he fixes the easternmost part of the world at the mouth of the Ganges; towards the north he has a glimpse of the Orkneys; he is acquainted with Scandinavia and gives to the Baltic Sea the name of the Codan Gulph.

The ancients had both maps of routes and a sort of books of posts; Veges distinguishes the former by the epithet of picta, and the latter by that of annotata. Three of these itineraries are still extant: the Itinerary of Antoninus, the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, and the Table of Peutinger. The top of this table, which began at the west, has been torn; the Spanish peninsula is wanting, as well as western Africa; but the table extends eastward to the mouth of the Ganges, and exhibits the routes in the interior of India. This map is twenty-one feet long, and about a foot wide; it is a zone, or a high road of the ancient world.

Such was the extent of the labours and knowledge of travellers and geographers before the appearance of Ptolemy's work. Homer's world was a perfectly circular island, surrounded, as we have said, by the river Ocean. Herodotus makes this world a plain without any precise limits. Eudoxus of Gnidus transformed it into a globe about thirteen thousand stadia in diameter; Hipparchus and Strabo gave to it a circumference of two hundred and fifty-two thousand stadia, of eight hundred and thirty-three stadia to a degree. On this globe was marked a parallelogram, the longer side of which ran from west to east; this parallelogram was divided by two lines, which intersected each other at right angles: the one, called the diaphragm, marked the length or longitude of the earth from west to east; it was seventy-seven thousand eight hundred stadia long; and the other, shorter by one half, indicated the width or latitude of this earth from north to south. The calculations are made from the meridian of Alexandria. From this geography, which represented the earth as being much longer than broad, we see how we came by those improper terms longitude and latitude.

In this map of the inhabited world were placed Europe, Asia, and Africa; Africa and Asia were joined to the austral regions or were separated by a sea which very much shortened the former. In the north, the continents terminated at the mouth of the Elbe; in the south, about the banks of the Niger; in the west, at the Sacred Cape, in Spain; and in the east, at the mouths of the Ganges; under the equator a torrid zone, under the poles a frigid zone, were reputed uninhabitable.

It is curious to remark, that almost all the nations called Barbarians, who conquered the Roman empire, and from whom the modern nations are descended, dwelt beyond the limits of the world known to Pliny and Strabo; in countries the very existence of which was not suspected.

Ptolemy, though he fell into important errors, nevertheless gave mathematical bases to the position of places. In his work a considerable number of Sarmatian nations made their appearance. He clearly indicates the Volga, and again descends to the Vistula.

In Africa he confirms the existence of the Niger, and perhaps his Tucabath may also mean Timbuctoo; he also mentions a large river which he calls Gyr.

In Asia, his country of the Sines is not China, but probably the kingdom of Siam. Ptolemy supposes that the continent of Asia stretches southward till it joins an unknown land, which land is united towards the west with Africa. In the Serica of this geographer, we cannot but recognize Tibet, which furnished Rome with the first raw silk.

With Ptolemy ends the history of the travels of the ancients, and Pausanias is the last who exhibits to us that antique Greece, the spirit of which has nobly roused itself in our days at the call of a new civilization. The barbarous nations appear; the Roman empire crumbles to pieces; and from the race of the Goths, Franks, Huns, and Slavonians, issue another world and other travellers.

These nations were themselves vast armed caravans, which set out from the rocks of Scandinavia and the frontiers of China to discover the Roman empire. They came to teach these pretended masters of the world, that there were other men besides the slaves subject to the yoke of the Tiberiuses and the Neroes; they came to make the geographers of the Tiber acquainted with their country: the latter could not avoid placing these nations on the map; they could not help believing the existence of the Goths and Vandals, when Alaric and Genseric had inscribed their names on the walls of the Capitol. It is not my intention to describe here the migrations and settlements of these Barbarians; I shall merely seek among the ruins which they heaped up the links of the chain which connects the ancient travellers with the travellers of modern times.

An extraordinary derangement took place in geographical investigations, in consequence of the derangement of nations. What the ancients have furnished us with the best account of, was the country which they themselves inhabited; beyond the limits of the Roman empire all was to them deserts and darkness. After the invasion of the Barbarians, we know scarcely any thing of Greece and Italy, but we begin to penetrate the countries which produced the destroyers of ancient civilization.

Three causes revived travels among the nations established on the ruins of the Roman world: religious zeal, desire of conquest, and a spirit of adventure and enterprise, mixed with the greediness of commerce.

Religious zeal led the earliest as well as the latest missionaries into the most distant countries. Before the fourth century, and almost in the time of the Apostles, who were themselves pilgrims, the priests of the true God carried the torch of the faith into all quarters. While the blood of the martyrs flowed in the amphitheatres, ministers of peace preached mercy to the avengers of the Christian sufferers: the conquerors were already in part conquered by the Gospel, when they arrived under the walls of Rome.

The works of the fathers of the Church mention a great number of pious travellers. They are a mine which has not been sufficiently wrought, and which, merely with reference to the geography and history of nations, contains rich treasures.

So early as the fifth century of our era, an Egyptian monk traversed Ethiopia and composed a topography of the Christian world; and an Armenian, named Chorenenzis, wrote a geographical work. The historian of the Goths, Jornandes, bishop of Ravenna, in his history and in his book De Origine Mundi, records in the sixth century important particulars respecting the northern and eastern countries of Europe. Warnfrid, the deacon, published a history of the Lombards; another Goth, the anonymous writer of Ravenna, produced, a century later, a general description of the world. St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, sent to the Pope a kind of memorial respecting the people of Slavonia. The Poles appeared for the first time during the reign of Otho II. in the eight books of the valuable Ditmar Chronicle. St. Otho, bishop of Bamberg, at the invitation of a Spanish hermit, named Bernard, travelled through Prussia, preaching the faith. Otho saw the Baltic and was astonished at the magnitude of that sea. We have unfortunately lost the journal of travels in Sweden and Denmark, performed, under Louis le Debonnaire, by Anscaire, a monk of Corbie; unless this journal, which was sent to Rome in 1260, should still exist in the Vatican library. From this work Adam of Bremen has derived part of his own account of the kingdoms of the North; he makes mention moreover of Russia, the capital of which was Kiev, though in the Sagas the empire of Russia is called Gardavike, and Holmgard, the present Novogorod, is designated as the principal city of that nascent empire.

Giraldus Barry and Dicuil have, the one drawn a picture of the principality of Wales and Ireland during the reign of Henry II.; and the other returned to the examination of the measures of the Roman empire under Theodosius.

We have maps of the Middle Ages; a topographical delineation of all the provinces of Denmark about the year 1231, seven maps of the kingdom of England and the neighbouring islands in the twelfth century, and the famous book known by the name of Domesday Book, undertaken by command of William the Conqueror. In this statistical survey we find a register of the cultivated, inhabited, and waste lands of England; the number of free inhabitants and serfs, and even that of the cattle and beehives. On these maps are rudely drawn the towns and abbeys: if, on the one hand, these designs are prejudicial to geographical details, they afford on the other some idea of the arts of that time.

The pilgrimages to the Holy Land form a considerable part of the graphic monuments of the middle ages. They took place so early as the fourth century, since St. Jerome asserts, that pilgrims came to Jerusalem from India, Ethiopia, Britain, and Hibernia: it appears even that the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem was composed about the year 333 for the use of the pilgrims from Gaul.

The first years of the sixth century present us with the Itinerary of Antoninus of Placentia. After Antoninus comes in the seventh century St. Arculf, of whom Adamannus wrote an account; in the eighth century we have two narratives of travels to Jerusalem, that of St. Wilibald, and an account of the holy places by the Venerable Bede; in the ninth century, Bernard Lemoine; in the tenth and eleventh, Olderic, bishop of Orleans, Eugisippus the Greek; and lastly, Peter the Hermit.

Then commence the Crusades; Jerusalem remained in the hands of French princes eighty-eight years. After the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, the faithful continued to visit Palestine, and from Phocas in the thirteenth century to Pococke in the eighteenth, pilgrimages succeed each other without interruption.

We see those traveller-historians of whom antiquity presented models, re-appearing with the crusades. Raymond d'Agiles, canon of the cathedral of Puy en Velay, accompanied the celebrated bishop Adhemar to the first crusade. Having become chaplain to the count of Toulouse, he wrote, with Pons de Balazun, a valiant knight, an account of all that he had witnessed by the way and at the taking of Jerusalem. Raoul de Caen, a faithful servant of Tancred's, relates the life of that knight; and Robert Lemoine was present at the siege of Jerusalem.

Sixty years later, Foulcher de Chartres and Odon de Deuil likewise went to Palestine; the former with Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, the latter with Louis VII. king of France. Jacques de Vitry became bishop of St. Jean d'Acre.

William of Tyre, who flourished towards the end of the kingdom of Jerusalem, passed his life on the roads of Europe and Asia. Several writers of our ancient chronicles were either monks and itinerant prelates, as Raoul, Glaber, and Flodoard, or warriors, as Nithard, grandson of Charlemagne, William of Poitiers, Ville Hardouin, Joinville, and many others who relate their distant expeditions. Pierre Devaulx Cernay was a kind of hermit in the terrible camps of Simon de Montfort.

Once arrived at the chronicles in the vulgar tongue, we ought particularly to notice Froissart, who wrote, properly speaking, nothing but his own travels: it was almost on horseback that he penned his history. He passed from the court of the king of England to that of the king of France, and from the latter to the little chivalrous court of the counts of Foix. "When I had sojourned in the city of Paumiers three days, there came to me by chance a knight of the count of Foix who was returning from Avignon, the which was named Messire Espaing du Lyon, a brave man, and a prudent and comely knight, who might then be about fifty years of age. I joined his company, and we were six days by the way. In riding along, the said knight (for he had said his prayers in the morning) chatted most of the day with me, enquiring the news; and so when I asked him in like manner he answered me." We see Froissart arriving at great inns, dining nearly at the same hours that we dine, going to the bath, &c. The careful perusal of the travels of that period leads me to believe that the domestic civilization of the fourteenth century was infinitely more advanced than we imagine it to have been.

Turning back to the moment of the invasion of civilized Europe by the nations of the North, we find Arabian voyagers and geographers exploring in the Indian seas shores unknown to the ancients: they made highly important discoveries in Africa also. Massudi, Ibn-Haukal, Al-Edrisi, Ibn-Alouardi, Hamdoollah, Abulfeda, El-Bakooi, give very circumstantial descriptions of their own country and of the country subdued by the arms of the Arabs. They saw in the north of Asia a frightful country, surrounded by an enormous wall and a castle of Gog and Magog. About the year 715, under the caliph Walid, the Arabs were acquainted with China, whither they sent merchants and ambassadors by land; they penetrated to that country by sea also in the ninth century. Wahab and Abuzaid landed at Canton. So early as the year 850 the Arabs had a commercial agent in the province of that name; they traded with some towns in the interior, and, strange to tell, they there met with Christian communities.

The Arabs gave to China several names: Cathay comprised the northern provinces, Tchin, or Sin, the southern. Entering India under the protection of their arms, the disciples of Mahomet speak in their descriptions of the beautiful valleys of Kashmir as pertinently as of the voluptuous valleys of Grenada. They had thrown colonies into several islands of the Indian Ocean, as Madagascar and the Moluccas, where the Portuguese found them after they had doubled the Cape of Good Hope.

While the military merchants of Asia were making in the east and south discoveries unknown to Europe, overrun by barbarians, such of those barbarians as remained in their original country, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Danes, set about, in the north and west, other discoveries alike unknown to Frankish and German Europe. Other, the Norwegian, penetrated to the White Sea, and Wulfstan, the Dane, described the Baltic Sea, which Eginhard had already described, and which was called by the Scandinavians the Salt Lake of the East. Wulfstan relates that the Estians, or people dwelling to the east of the Vistula, drank the milk of their mares, like the Tartars, and bequeathed their property to the best horseman of their tribe.

King Alfred has transmitted to us an abridgment of these accounts. He it was who first divided Scandinavia into provinces, or kingdoms, as they still subsist. In the Gothic languages Scandinavia bore the name of Mannaheim, which signifies the land of men, and which the Latin of the sixth century has energetically rendered in the words officina gentium, the manufactory of mankind.

The Norman pirates established in Ireland the colonies of Dublin, Ulster, and Connaught; they explored and subjected the Shetland Islands, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides; they advanced to the Fero Islands, to Iceland, which became the archives of the history of the north, to Greenland, which was then habitable and inhabited; and lastly, perhaps to America. We shall treat hereafter of this discovery, and also of the voyage and map of the two brothers Zeni.

But the empire of the caliphs was overthrown: out of its ruins were formed several monarchies: the kingdom of the Aglabites, and subsequently of the Fatimites in Egypt, and the despotisms of Algiers, Fez, Tripoli, and Morocco, on the coast of Africa. The Turcomans, converted to Islamism, subdued western Asia from Syria to mount Casbhar. The Ottoman power passed over into Europe, swept away the last traces of the Roman name, and pushed its conquests beyond the Danube.

Genghis Khan appeared; Asia was overrun, and again subjugated. Oktai Khan destroyed the kingdom of the Cumanes and the Nioutchis; Mangu possessed himself of the caliphate of Bagdad; Kublai Khan conquered China and part of India. From this Mongol empire, which reduced almost the whole of Asia under one and the same yoke, have arisen almost all the Khanats found by the Europeans in India.

The European princes, alarmed by these Tartars, who had extended their ravages to Poland, Silesia and Hungary, sought to make themselves acquainted with the countries where such prodigious movements originated: popes and kings sent ambassadors to these new Scourges of God. Ascelin, Carpin, Rubruquis, penetrated into the country of the Mongols. Rubruquis found that Karakorum, the chief city of this Khan, the sovereign of Asia, was about as large as the village of St. Denis: it was surrounded by a mud wall and contained two mosques and a Christian church.

There were itineraries of Great Tartary for the use of the missionaries: André Lusimel preached Christianity to the Mongols; Ricold de Monte Crucis also penetrated into Tartary.

Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela left an account of all that he saw or heard concerning the three parts of the world (1160).

Lastly, Marco Polo, a Venetian noble, was for twenty-six years incessantly travelling in Asia. He was the first European that penetrated into China, India beyond the Ganges, and some of the islands of the Indian Ocean (1271-95). His work became the manual of all the merchants in Asia and of all the geographers in Europe.

Marco Polo speaks of Pekin and Nanking; he names also a city of Quinsaï as the largest in the world: there were reckoned to be twelve thousand bridges over the canals which ran through it, and the daily consumption of pepper there amounted to ninety-four quintals. The Venetian traveller makes mention in his accounts of porcelain, but he says nothing of tea. It was he who made us acquainted with Bengal, Japan, the island of Borneo, and the Chinese sea, in which he calculates that there are seven thousand four hundred and forty islands rich in spices.

These Tartar or Mongol princes, who swayed Asia and overran some provinces of Europe, were not princes destitute of merit: they neither sacrificed their prisoners nor reduced them to slavery. Their camps were filled with European artisans, missionaries, and travellers, who even held important posts under their government. It was easier to penetrate into their empire than into those feudal countries where an abbot of Clugny regarded the environs of Paris as a region so remote and so unknown that he durst not venture to repair thither.

Marco Polo was followed by Pegoletti, Oderic, Mandeville, Clavijo, Josaphat, Barbaro: they completed the description of Asia. At that time people frequently travelled by land to Pekin; the expenses of the journey amounted to three hundred or three hundred and fifty ducats. China had then a paper-money, called babisci or balis.

The Genoese and the Venetians traded with India and China in caravans by two different routes: Pegoletti marks with the utmost detail the stations of one of these routes (1353). In 1312 we find at Pekin a bishop, named John de Monte Corvino.

Meanwhile time passed on: civilization made rapid progress: discoveries owing to chance or to the genius of man forever separated the modern ages from the ages of antiquity and stamped new generations with a new seal. The mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing, were invented to guide the navigator, to defend him, and to preserve the cords of his perilous expeditions.

The Greeks and Romans had been bred on the shores of that extensive inland water which is more like a vast lake than an ocean. The empire having passed into the hands of Barbarians, the centre of the political power became fixed principally in Spain, in France, and in England, in the vicinity of that Atlantic, which, toward the west, washed unknown shores. It therefore behoved mariners to brave the long nights and the tempests, to pay no regard to seasons, to sail out of port in the days of winter as well as in those of summer, and to build ships, the strength of which was proportionate to that of the new Neptune which, they had to encounter.

We have already adverted to the bold enterprises of those pirates of the north, who, according to the expression of a panegyrist, seemed to have seen the bottom of the abyss disclosed. In another quarter the republics formed in Italy out of the ruins of Rome and the relics of the kingdoms of the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, had continued and perfected the ancient navigation of the Mediterranean. The Venetian and Genoese fleets had carried the crusaders to Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, and Greece; and they had gone to Alexandria and the Black Sea to fetch the rich productions of India.

The Portuguese at length pursued into Africa the Moors, who were already expelled from the banks of the Tagus. Ships were required to follow and to subsist the combatants along the coast. The pilots were long stopped by Cape Nunez; Jilianez doubled it in 1433; the island of Madeira was discovered or rather found again; the Azores emerged from the bosom of the deep, and as people were still persuaded with Ptolemy that Asia approximated to Africa, they took the Azores for the islands, which, according to Marco Polo, bordered Asia in the Indian Ocean. It was asserted that an equestrian statue, pointing with its finger to the west, had been seen on the shore of the isle of Corvo: and some Phoenician coins have also been brought from that island.

From Cape Nunez the Portuguese pushed on to Senegal; they successively reached the Cape de Verd islands, the coast of Guinea, Cape Mesurado, Benin, and Congo. In 1486 Bartholomew Diaz arrived at the famous Cape of Storms, which soon received a more propitious appellation.

Thus was discovered that southern extremity of Africa, which, according to the Greek and Roman geographers, was joined to Asia. There opened mysterious regions, which none had ever yet entered but by that sea of prodigies which beheld God and fled: mare vidit et fugit.

"An immense frightful phantom stood before us: his attitude was menacing, his look ferocious, his complexion pale, his beard bushy and muddy, his hair covered with slime and gravel, his teeth black, his lips livid: his sparkling eyes rolled beneath thick brows.

"He spoke: his awful voice seemed to issue from the depths of the abyss.

"I am the Spirit of Storms," said he; "I animate this vast promontory which neither Ptolemy nor Strabo, neither Pliny, Pomponius, nor any of your men of science ever knew. Here I bound the continent of Africa by that mountain which looks towards the Antarctic Pole, and which, heretofore veiled from the eyes of mortals, feels at this moment indignant at your audacity.

"With my parched flesh, with my bones converted into rocks, the gods, the inflexible gods, have formed the vast promontory which overlooks this boundless deep.

"At these words he shed a torrent of tears and disappeared. With him the murky cloud rolled away, and Ocean seemed to heave a long sigh."

Vasco de Gama, at the conclusion of an everlastingly memorable voyage, landed in 1498 at Calicut, on the coast of Malabar.

Everything on the globe was now changed; the world of the ancients was destroyed. The Indian Sea was no longer an inland sea, a basin surrounded by the coast of Asia and Africa; it was an ocean, connected on the one hand with the Atlantic, on the other with the sea of China and an Eastern Ocean of still greater extent. A hundred civilized kingdoms, Arab or Indian, Mahometan or idolatrous, isles embalmed with fragrant spices, were revealed to the people of the West. A wholly new nature was displayed; the curtain which for thousands of years had concealed part of the world was withdrawn; the strangers discovered the land of the Sun, the abode whence he issues every morning to dispense light; they beheld unveiled that wise and resplendent East, the history of which mingles in our minds with the voyages of Pythagoras, the conquests of Alexander, the recollection of the Crusades, and the perfumes of which come to us across the plains of Arabia and the seas of Greece. Europe sent a poet to salute, to sing, and to delineate it-a noble ambassador, whose genius and fortune seem to have had a secret sympathy with the regions and the destinies of the people of India! The poet of the Tagus raised his plaintive and melodious voice on the banks of the Ganges; he borrowed of them their lustre, their renown, and their misfortunes; he left them nothing but their wealth.

And it was a petty nation, cooped up by a circle of mountains at the westernmost extremity of Europe, that opened the way to the most splendid portion of the abode of man!

And it was another nation of the same peninsula, a nation that had not yet attained the greatness from which it is fallen; it was a poor Genoese pilot, long repulsed by every court; who discovered a new world at the gates of the West, at the moment when the Portuguese were landing in the fields of Aurora.

Had the ancients any knowledge of America?

Homer placed Elysium in the western sea beyond the Cimmerian darkness: was this the world of Columbus?

The tradition of the Hesperides, and afterwards of the Fortunate Islands, succeeded that of Elysium. The Romans regarded the Canaries as the Fortunate Islands; but destroyed not the belief in the existence of a still more remote country in the west.

Everybody has heard of Plato's Atlantis: it was supposed to be a continent more extensive than Asia and Africa put together, situate in the western ocean opposite to the strait of Gades-the precise position of America. As to the flourishing cities, the ten kingdoms governed by kings the offspring of Neptune, &c. the imagination of Plato may have added these details to the Egyptian traditions. The Atlantis, it is related, was engulphed in a day and a night by the waves. This was an easy way of getting rid at once of the accounts of the Phoenician navigators and the romances of the Greek philosopher.

Aristotle speaks of an island so replete with charms, that the senate of Carthage forbade its seamen to frequent the neighbouring seas upon penalty of death. Diodorus gives us the history of a considerable and remote island, to which the Carthaginians had resolved to remove the seat of their empire, if they experienced any disaster in Africa.

What is the Panchæa of Evhemerus, denied by Strabo and Plutarch, described by Diodorus and Pomponius Mela, a large island situated in the ocean to the south of Arabia, an enchanted island where the phoenix built its nest on the altar of the sun?

According to Ptolemy the extremities of Asia joined an unknown land, which was connected with Africa in the west.

Almost all the geographical records of antiquity indicate a southern continent: I cannot coincide in the opinion of those scholars who perceive in this continent nothing more than a systematic counterpoise, imagined to balance the northern regions. This continent was, no doubt, well adapted to fill a vacant space on the map, but it is also very possible that it was delineated there as the relic of a confused tradition. Its position to the south of the rose of the winds, rather than to the west, would be a trifling error among the enormous transpositions of the geographies of antiquity.

The last indications left are the statues and Phoenician medals of the Azores, if, however, the statues are not mere graphic ornaments attached to the old maps of that archipelago.

Since the downfall of the Roman empire, and the re-construction of society by the Barbarians, have ships reached the coasts of America before those of Columbus?

It appears indubitable that the rude explorers of the ports of Norway and the Baltic reached North America in the first year of the eleventh century. They had discovered the Fero Islands about the year 861, Iceland from 860 to 872, Greenland in 892, and perhaps fifty years earlier. In 1001 an Icelander named Bjorn, on his passage to Greenland, was driven by a tempest to the south-west, and fell in with a low land quite covered with wood. On reaching Greenland he related his adventure. Leif, son of Eric Rauda, founder of the Norwegian colony of Greenland, embarked with Bjorn; they sought and found the coast seen by the latter: they gave the name of Helleland to a rocky island, and that of Marcland to a sandy shore. Hurried away to a second coast, they ascended a river, and wintered on the border of a lake. Here, on the shortest day of the year, the sun was eight hours above the horizon. A German seaman in the service of the two chiefs showed them some wild vines. Bjorn and Leif, on quitting this country, gave it the name of Winland.

Thenceforward Winland was frequented by the Greenlanders, and there they trafficked with the Savages for furs. In 1121 Bishop Eric went from Greenland to Winland to preach the gospel to the natives.

From these particulars it is obvious that the country in question must be some part of North America, about the 49th degree of latitude, since the travellers took notice that on the shortest day of the year the sun was eight hours above the horizon. At the 49th degree of latitude they would come to the mouth of the St. Laurence, or thereabout. The same degree would also bring them to the northern part of the island of Newfoundland. There are to be found several small rivers which communicate with numerous lakes in the interior of the island.

Nothing further is known respecting Leif, Bjorn, and Eric. The most ancient authority for the circumstances relative to them is the collection of the Annals of Iceland by Hauk, who wrote in 1300, consequently three hundred years after the real or supposed discovery of Winland.

The brothers Zeni, Venetians, who entered into the service of a chief of the islands of Fero and Shetland, are conjectured to have visited the Winland of the ancient Greenlanders afresh about 1380: a map and account of their voyage are extant. The map exhibits, to the south of Iceland and to the north-east of Scotland, between the 61st and 65th degrees of north latitude, an island called Friesland: to the west of this island, and to the south of Greenland, at the distance of nearly four hundred leagues, this map indicates two coasts, by the names of Estotiland and Droceo. Some fishermen of Friesland, says the narrative, being cast on Estotiland, found there a well built and very populous town; in this town there was a king and an interpreter who spoke Latin.

The shipwrecked Frieslanders were sent by the king of Estotiland to a country lying to the south, which country was called Droceo, where they were devoured by cannibals, one alone excepted. This man returned to Estotiland, after having been a long time a slave in Droceo, a country which he represented as being of immense extent; in fact, a new world.

Estotiland could scarcely be any other than the ancient Winland of the Norwegians; this Winland must be Newfoundland. In this case the town of Estotiland would present the remnant of the Norwegian VOL. I. D colony, and the country of Droceo or Drogeo would be New England.

It is certain that Greenland was discovered so early as the middle of the tenth century; it is certain that the south point of Greenland approximates very closely to the coast of Labrador; it is certain that the Esquimaux, placed between the nations of Europe and those of America, seem to resemble the former more than the latter; it is certain that they could have shown the first Norwegian settlers in Greenland the route to the new continent: but still too many fables and uncertainties are mingled with the adventures of the Norwegians and the brothers Zeni, for us to wrest from Columbus the glory of having been the first who landed on the American shores.

The chart of the navigation of the two Zeni and the narrative of their voyage, executed in 1380, were not published till 1558, by a descendant of Nicolo Zeno, at which date the prodigies of Columbus were universally known: national jealousies might induce some persons to claim an honour which certainly was worthy of envy; the Venetians claimed Estotiland for Venice, as the Norwegians did Winland for Berghen.

Several charts of the fourteenth and fifteenth century exhibit discoveries made or to be made in the great ocean to the south-west and west of Europe. According to the Genoese historians, Doria and Vivaldi sailed with the intention of proceeding to India in a western direction, but they never returned. The island of Madeira appears on a Spanish chart of the year 1384, by the name of Isola di Leguame. The Azores also make their appearance so early as 1380. Lastly, a chart drawn in 1436 by Andrea Bianco, a Venetian, lays down a land called, Antilla, to the west of the Canary Islands, and to the north of this Antilla is another island named Isola de la Man Satanaxio.

It has been insisted that these islands were the Antilles and Newfoundland: but we know that Marco Polo prolonged Asia to the south-west, and placed before it an Archipelago, which, approaching our continent on the west, must have been nearly in the same position with regard to us as America. It was in seeking these Indian Antilles, these West Indies, that Columbus discovered America, and thus a prodigious error gave birth to a miraculous truth.

The Arabs have some pretension to the discovery of America: the Almagrabins, brothers, of Lisbon, penetrated, we are told, to the most remote regions of the west. An Arabic manuscript gives an account of an unsuccessful attempt made in these regions, where all was sky and water.

Let us not dispute with a great man the work of his genius. Who can tell what were the feelings of Christopher Columbus, when, having crossed the Atlantic, when, amidst a mutinous crew, when, on the point of returning to Europe without having accomplished the object of his voyage, he perceived a faint light on an unknown land, which the darkness of night concealed from his view. The flight of birds had guided him towards America; the flame of the fire of a Savage discovered to him a new world. Columbus must have experienced somewhat of that sentiment which the Scripture attributes to the Creator, when, after calling forth the earth from nothing, he saw that his work was good: Vidit Deus quod esset bonum. Columbus created a world. The rest is known: the immortal Genoese gave not his name to America; he was the first European who recrossed in chains that Ocean, the expanse of which he had first measured. When glory is of such a nature as to be serviceable to mankind it is almost always punished.

While the Portuguese were coasting the kingdoms of Quiloa, Sofala, Mozambique, and Melinda, imposing tribute on the kings of the Moors, penetrating into the Red Sea, completing the circumnavigation of Africa, visiting the Persian Gulph and the two Peninsulas of India, ploughing the China seas, touching at Canton, reconnoitering Japan, the Spice Islands, and even the shores of New Holland, a multitude of navigators followed the track steered by Columbus. Cortes overthrew the empire of Mexico, and Pizarro that of Peru. The conquerors marched from surprise to surprise and were themselves not the least astonishing thing in their adventures. On reaching the last waves of the Atlantic, they conceived that they had explored all the seas, and from the tops of the mountains of Panama they descried a second Ocean which covered half the globe. Nunez Balboa descended to the beach, waded into the water up to his waist, and, drawing his sword, took possession of that sea in the name of the king of Spain.

The Portuguese were then exploring the coasts of India and China: the companions of Vasco de Gama and Christopher Columbus saluted one another from the two shores of the unknown sea which separated them: the one had found again an ancient world, the others discovered a new world; from the coast of America to the coast of Asia the strains of Camoens responded to those of Ercylla, across the solitudes of the Pacific Ocean.

John and Sebastian Cabot gave to England North America; Cortereal surveyed Newfoundland, named Labrador, and observed the entrance to Hudson's Bay, which he called the Strait of Anian, and by which hopes were entertained of finding a passage to the East Indies. Jacques Cartier, Verrazano, Ponce de Leon, Walter Raleigh, and Ferdinand de Soto, examined and colonized Canada, Acadia, Virginia, and the Floridas. The Dutch, pushing on to Spitzbergen, left far behind them the limits fixed for the problematical Thule; and Hudson and Baffin penetrated into the bays which bear their names.

The islands of the Mexican Gulph were placed in their mathematical positions. Americus Vespucius had made a delineation of the coasts of Guiana, Terra Firma, and Brazil; Solis found Rio de la Plata; Magellan, entering the strait named after him, penetrated into the great Ocean, and was slain in the Philippines. His ship arrived in India by the West, returned to Europe by the Cape of Good Hope, and thus was the first that completed the circumnavigation of the globe. The voyage occupied eleven hundred and eighty-four days: it can now be performed in the space of eight months.

It was still believed that the Strait of Magellan was the only outlet to the Pacific Ocean, and that to the south of this strait the land of America joined a southern continent. Francis Drake first, and Shouten and Lemaire afterwards, doubled the southernmost point of America. The geography of the globe was then fixed in that quarter: it was known that America and Africa, terminating at Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, narrowed away to points towards the Antarctic pole, in a southern sea studded with a few islands.

In the great Ocean, California, its gulph, and the Vermilion Sea were known to Cortes; Cabrillo proceeded along the coast of New California as far as the 43rd degree of north latitude; Galbi advanced to the 57th degree. Amidst so many real peripluses, Maldonado, Juan de Fuca, and Admiral de Fonte, placed their chimerical voyages. It was Behring who fixed in the north-west the limits of North America, as Lemaire had fixed in the south-east the limits of South America. America bars the way to India like a long dyke between two seas.

A fifth part of the world, towards the south pole, had been descried by the first Portuguese navigators: nay, this part of the world is very accurately laid down in a chart of the sixteenth century preserved in the British Museum; but this country, being coasted afresh by the Dutch, the successors of the Portuguese in the Moluccas, was named by them Dieman's Land. It received at length the name of New Holland, when, in 1642, Abel Tasman had completed the circumnavigation of it. In this voyage Tasman acquired a knowledge of New Zealand.

It was not long that commercial interests and political wars left the Spaniards and Portuguese in the peaceful enjoyment of their conquests. In vain did the Pope draw that celebrated line which divided the world between the heirs of the genius of Gama and of Columbus. Magellan's ship had proved physically, to the most incredulous, that the earth was round, and that there were antipodes. The straight line of the sovereign pontiff therefore divided nothing but a circular surface and was lost in the atmosphere. The pretensions and rights of the parties were soon mingled and confounded.

The Portuguese established themselves in America, and the Spaniards in India; the English, the French, the Danes, the Dutch, hastened to obtain a share of the prey. They landed pell-mell on every shore, planted a pole, set up a flag, took possession of a sea, an island, a continent, in the name of a European sovereign, without enquiring whether the people, the kings, the inhabitants, polished or savage, were not the rightful masters of those countries. The missionaries thought that the world belonged to the Cross, inasmuch as Christ, the pacific conqueror, was to subject all nations to the Gospel; but the adventurers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century took things in a more material sense: they thought to sanctify their rapacity by unfurling the standard of salvation in an idolatrous land. That emblem of a power of charity and peace became the sign of persecution and discord.

The Europeans attacked one another in all quarters; a handful of foreigners spread over immense continents seemed nevertheless to want room to stand on. Not only did men fight for those lands and those seas where they hoped to find gold, diamonds, and pearls; those countries which produce ivory, incense, aloes, tea, coffee, silk, and rich stuffs; those islands in which grow cinnamon, nutmegs, pepper, the sugar-cane, and the sago-palm; but they even slaughtered one another for the sake of a barren rock imbedded in the ice of the pole, or for a paltry establishment in the corner of a vast desert. These wars, which formerly stained their cradles alone with blood, spread with the European colonies over the whole surface of the globe, and involved nations who knew not so much as the names of the countries and kings to whom they were immolated. A cannon-shot fired in Spain, in Portugal, in France, in Holland, in England, at the extremity of the Baltic, caused a tribe of savages in Canada to be slaughtered, threw a negro family on the coast of Guinea into fetters, or overturned a kingdom in India. According to various treaties of peace, Chinese, Hindus, Africans, Americans, found themselves transformed into French, English, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, and Danes; and some parts of Africa, Asia, and America changed masters according to the colour of a flag sent out from Europe. It was not the governments alone of our continent that arrogated to themselves this supremacy; mere companies of merchants and bands of freebooters waged war on their own behalf, and ruled tributary kingdoms and fertile islands by means of a factory, a commercial agent, or a captain of pirates.

The first narratives of all these discoveries are mostly delightful for their quaint simplicity: they are interspersed with many fables, but these fables obscure not the truth. The authors of these relations are no doubt too credulous, but they speak often conscientiously: unenlightened Christians, frequently hurried away by passion, but sincere, if they deceive you, it is because they are themselves mistaken. Monks, mariners, soldiers, employed in these expeditions, all narrate to you their dangers and their adventures, with a piety and warmth which are catching. A kind of new crusaders, going in quest of new worlds, they relate what they observed or heard: without suspecting it, they excel in delineation, because they faithfully reflect the image of the object placed before their eyes. We feel in their accounts the astonishment and admiration which they experience at sight of those virgin seas, of those primitive regions, which are outspread before them, of that nature which is overshadowed by gigantic trees, watered by immense rivers, peopled by unknown animals; a nature which Buffon has divined in his description of the Kamitchi, which he has sung, we may say, when treating of "those birds attached to the car of the sun, under the burning zone that is bordered by the tropics; birds which are incessantly upon the wing beneath that fiery sky, without ever passing beyond the two extreme limits of the track of the magnificent luminary."

Among the travellers who wrote the journal of their peregrinations, must be reckoned some of the great men of that age of prodigies. We have four letters from Cortes to Charles V.; we have one letter from Christopher Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, dated West Indies, July 7th, 1503. M. de Navarette has published another addressed to the Pope, in which the Genoese pilot promises to give the sovereign pontiff an account of his discoveries, and to leave commentaries like Cæsar. What a treasure, should these letters and these commentaries ever be found in the Vatican library! Columbus was a poet also like Cæsar: Latin verses by him are still extant. Nothing more natural assuredly than that this man was inspired by Heaven. Accordingly Giustiniani, in his Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Chaldee Psalter, placed the life of Columbus as a note under the psalm Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei, as a recent miracle which proclaimed the glory of God.

It is probable that the Portuguese in Africa, and the Spaniards in America, collected facts which were at that time kept secret by jealous governments. The new political state of Portugal, and the emancipation of Spanish America will favour interesting researches. Already has the young and unfortunate traveller, Bowdich, published an account of the discoveries of the Portuguese in the interior of Africa, between Angola and Mozambique, extracted from original manuscripts. We now possess a secret, and extremely curious report of the state of Peru during the voyage of La Condamine. M. de Navarette is giving to the world a collection of the voyages of Spaniards, with other unpublished memoirs concerning the history of navigation.

Coming down towards our own age, we see the commencement of those modern voyages and travels in which civilization displays all its resources, and science all its means. By land a Chardin, a Tavernier, a Bernier, a Tournefort, a Niebuhr, a Pallas, a Norden, a Shaw, a Hornemann, unite their interesting works with those of the writers of the Lettres Edifiantes. Greece and Egypt behold explorers, who brave dangers to discover a past world, like the mariners who sought a new one: Buonaparte and his forty thousand travellers clapped their hands at the ruins of Thebes.

At sea Drake, Sarmiento, Cavendish, Sebald de Weert, Spilberg, Noort, Rogers, Dampier, Gemelli Carreri, la Barbinais, Byron, Wallis, Anson, Bougainville, Cook, Carteret, La Perouse, Entrecasteaux, Vancouver, Freycinet and Duperré, have not left a rock unexplored.

The Pacific Ocean, ceasing to be an immense solitude, is become a delightful archipelago, which reminds us of the beauty and enchantments of Greece.

India, once so mysterious, has no longer any secrets; its three sacred languages are divulged, its most hidden books are translated: we have penetrated into the philosophic creeds which divided the opinions of that ancient region, and the succession of the patriarchs of Buddha is as well-known as the genealogy of our own families. The Society of Calcutta regularly publishes scientific news concerning India: the Sanskrit is read, and the Chinese, Javanese, Tartar, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, spoken at Paris, Bologna, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Petersburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm and London. We have even recovered the language of the dead, that language lost with the race by which it was invented. The obelisk of the desert has presented its mysterious characters-they have been deciphered. The mummies have displayed their passports to the tomb-they have been read. Words have been again given to the mute thought which no living mortal was able to express.

The sources of the Ganges have been explored by Webb, Raper, and Hodgson. Moorcroft has penetrated into Tibet. The peaks of the Himalaya are measured. 'Tis impossible to enumerate with Major Rennell the thousand travellers to whom science is forever indebted.

In Africa, the sacrifice of Mungo Park has been followed by many other sacrifices: Bowdich, Tuckey, Belzoni, Beaufort, Peddie, Oudney have perished: that formidable continent will nevertheless be finally explored.

In the fifth continent, the Blue Mountains have been passed; the settlers are penetrating further and further into that singular portion of the globe, where the rivers seem to run the wrong way, from the sea into the interior; where the animals are unlike those previously known; where the swans are black; where the kangaroo leaps like a grasshopper; where Nature unfinished, as Lucretius describes her on the banks of the Nile, rears a species of monster, an animal which at once resembles the fish, the bird, the serpent, which dives under water, lays an egg, and pierces with a mortal dart.

In America, the illustrious Humboldt has delineated and described everything.

The result of all these efforts, the positive information acquired concerning so many places, the movement of politics, the renewal of generations, and the progress of civilization, have changed the primitive aspect of the globe.

The cities of India now blend the architecture of the Brahmins with Italian palaces and Gothic monuments: the elegant carriages of London are seen travelling together with palanquins and caravans the roads of the tiger and the elephant. Large ships ascend the Ganges and the Indus: Calcutta, Bombay, Benares, have theatres, learned societies, printing-offices. The country of the Thousand and One Nights, the kingdom of Kashemir, the empire of the Mogul, the diamond mines of Golconda, the seas enriched with oriental pearls, one hundred and twenty millions of men, whom Bacchus, Sesostris, Darius, Alexander, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, conquered, or attempted to conquer, have for their owners and masters a dozen English merchants, whose names nobody knows, and who reside four thousand leagues from Hindustan, in some obscure street in the city of London. These merchants care very little for that ancient China which is the neighbour of their one hundred and twenty million of vassals, and which Lord Hastings offered to subdue with twenty thousand men. But then the price of tea would fall on the banks of the Thames! This is all that saves the empire of Tobi, founded two thousand six hundred and thirty-seven years before the Christian era;[2] of that Tobi who was contemporary with Rehu, the great-great-grandson of Abraham.

In Africa a European world commences at the Cape of Good Hope. The Rev. John Campbell, setting out from that Cape, penetrated into South Africa to the distance of eleven hundred miles: he found very populous cities (Macheou, Kurrechane), well cultivated tracts, and iron foundries. In Northern Africa, in the kingdom of Bornou and Sudan, properly so called, Clapperton and Denham found thirty-six towns more or less considerable, an advanced state of civilization, and a negro cavalry armed like the knights of the olden time.

The ancient capital of a Mahometan negro kingdom exhibited ruins of palaces, the haunts of elephants, lions, serpents, and ostriches. We are in momentary expectation of hearing that Major Laing has reached that Timbuctoo which is so well known and so unknown. Other Englishmen, attacking Africa by the coast of Benin, are going to meet, or have already rejoined, by ascending the rivers, their courageous countrymen penetrating from the Mediterranean. The Nile and the Niger will soon have disclosed to us their springs and their courses. In those scorching regions the lake Stad cools the air; in those deserts of sand, in that torrid zone, water freezes in the skins in which it is carried, and Dr. Oudney, a celebrated traveller, died of intense cold.

Towards the Antarctic pole, Captain Smith has discovered New Shetland: this is all that remains of the famous southern region of Ptolemy. In these latitudes the whales are innumerable and of immense magnitude: one of them, in 1820, attacked the American ship Essex and sunk her.

Australasia is no longer a dreary desert: English malefactors, mingled with voluntary colonists, have built towns in this world, the last opened to mankind. The bowels of the earth have been investigated, and in them have been found iron, coal, salt, slate, lime, plumbago, potter's earth, alum-all that is useful for the establishment of a society. The New Wales of the South has for its capital the town of Sydney in Port Jackson. Paramatta is situated at the bottom of the bay; Windsor prospers at the confluence of the South Creek and the Hawkesbury. The large village of Liverpool has communicated fertility to the banks of George River, which discharges itself into Botany Bay, situated fourteen miles to the south of Port Jackson.

The island of Van Diemen is also peopled; it has excellent harbours and entire mountains of iron: its capital is called Hobart-Town.

According to the nature of their crimes the convicts transported to New Holland are either employed on the public works or placed as labourers with settlers. Such as reform become free or remain in the colony with billets of permission.

The colony has revenues already: in 1819 the taxes amounted to £21,179 sterling and served to diminish by one-fourth the expenses of the government.

New Holland has printing-presses, political and literary journals, theatres, horse-races, high roads, stone bridges, religious and civil edifices, steam engines, manufactures of cloth, hats, and pottery, and ships are built there. The fruits of every climate, from the pine to the apple, from the olive to the grape, prosper in this land, which was a land of malediction. The sheep, a cross between the English and the breed of the Cape of Good Hope, and the pure merinos in particular, have here become remarkably beautiful.

Australasia carries its corn to the Cape, its leather to India, its salted meat to the Isle of France. This country which, twenty years ago, sent to Europe nothing but kangaroos and a few plants, now exhibits its merino wool in the markets of England; it is there sold as high as 11s. 6d. per lb., being four shillings more than the finest Spanish wools fetch in the same markets.