Blame Canada

Travel is a dangerous thing, as J.R.R. Tolkien tells us: “You step on a Road and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Like Canada, for example.

We turn today to The European Discovery of America — The Northern Voyages by Samuel Eliot Morison. The title tells all, this is the discovery of the New World, meaning “America” in the sense of North and South America, not just the United States of America. It is encyclopedic in both its listing of voyages and in their ports of call within the New World. And it is a two-volume work, this being the “Northern” volume, which considers the exploration efforts of the Norse, French and English in North America…which, as we shall see, means that most of the book has to do with Canada. Sheesh. The other big thing to know is that Morison was himself a sailor…man alive was this guy a sailor. His topic is the actual voyages themselves, he is only tangentially concerned with the politics back home that led to them. The result is a surprisingly readable volume.

Since the voyages were many and the discoveries numerous (and often tedious), let us consider a few key excursions that led us to the New World.

First a non-excursion: Ptolemy produced his Geography in the second century A.D. It became the standard atlas for 1400 years or so; his were the maps that the early explorers relied upon. One error in Ptolemy’s maps actually helped fuel the voyages of discovery: knowing that the Earth is a sphere, Ptolemy calculated the length of Eurasia as degrees of longitude; he estimated this length at 177 degrees, rather than the correct 131 degrees. Since the size of the Earth was known (Eratosthenes figured it out in the second century B.C.), overstating the size of Eurasia reduced the implied size of the Atlantic Ocean, making its traversal more approachable. Morison is clear, however, that Ptolemy and his contemporaries could not have undertaken a trans-oceanic voyage. Their shipbuilding skills were not up to constructing vessels that could transport men and their needed supplies both directions on the long haul to what turned out to be the New World.

We then turn to the sixth century A.D. and a group of Irish monks who constructed light craft and set out to open sea in them. They traveled both to spread the faith and for the mortification of the flesh…the craft were so light that death at sea was an ever-present possibility. Led by St. Brenden (who was real, although facts about him are sketchy) the Irish monks likely got as far as Iceland and may have traveled with some regularity a route encompassing Iceland, the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and the Faroes. They did not, however, get as far as North America.

Which brings us to the Norse, who we do believe made it to the New World in the tenth century…largely due Eric the Red being on the lam.

Eric was Norwegian, but he left the country around A.D. 982 to avoid punishment for manslaughter. He emigrated to Iceland, which the Norse had discovered a century or so earlier. Eric did not settle any more easily in Iceland than he had Norway: he got involved in some sort of local Icelandic feud and “decided to leave.” He heard of a land seen by a friend who had been blown off course, so he set off to settle that new land to the west. (You gotta give Eric credit for self-awareness: an unsettled, possibly uninhabited, land seems a good fit for his personality.) He also understood the value of PR, since he named the place Greenland on the theory that a good-sounding name attracts settlers. After an exploratory mission, he set out in the summer of A.D. 985 with a dozen or more ships of colonists to settle the place. Belying its market-driven name, they found the east coast of Greenland shrouded in ice, and they were unable to make landfall. Ultimately they found harbor on the west coast, and established two settlements there.

Fast forward to the summer of A.D. 1001 and Eric’s second son, Lief. Driven by a need for lumber (Greenland has little woody vegetation beyond bushes), he traveled to a place now called L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern coast of Newfoundland…in doing so he became the first European to set foot on mainland North America. The Norse settlement in Newfoundland lasted until the mid-fifteenth century, when it died out from attrition: the bottom fell out of the market for walrus ivory, leaving the Norse colonists with little trade and little contact with the homeland.

Enter the English, Henry VII, and a Genoese navigator. It was A.D. 1496.

If Brenden traveled for religion and Eric traveled for personal and legal reasons, English King Henry was interested in money. Christopher Columbus had completed his first voyage in 1493 looking for a trade route to the far East, returning with gold. All of Europe took notice. To compete, Henry sought a northwest passage to China, bypassing Spanish and Portuguese interests. He turned to Venice to find a captain for his mission, ultimately hiring a Genoese named John Cabot. (Cabot sounds as English as Elizabeth Windsor, but Cabot’s name was rendered as Cabotto, Chiabotto, and Savato, and other variants, depending on the port he was in.) In March 1496 Henry granted Cabot a charter to sail under the royal banner and search for a northern passage to the far East. In doing so, he was placing himself in opposition to the pope, who had divided the New World between the Spanish and Portuguese.

Cabot’s first voyage in many ways retraced Eric and Lief’s journeys…Cabot even landed near the location of Lief Ericsson’s failed colony. Cabot was unaware of the Norse exploration and the location of his landing was coincidental. Like the Norse before him, Cabot found little of financial interest in North America…certainly there was no gold, although Cabot brought back some iron pyrite, quickly determined to be “fool’s gold,” and found excellent fishing off the Canadian shore. Cabot considered this first mission pure reconnaissance, and the results of his mission were encouraging enough that Henry funded a second voyage. Cabot set out in the spring of 1498, and then disappeared: all were lost at sea, we know not where or when. That also put the kabosh on English exploration of the New World for a while. Henry’s son, Henry VIII, ascended in 1509 and showed little interest in the Americas. English activity was relegated to cod fishers and tourists…in 1536 entrepreneur Richard Hore chartered two ships to fish for cod and give “certain gentlemen of London a pleasure voyage.”

England’s lack of interest inevitably created an opening for the French.

King François d’Angoulême (a.k.a. François-premier) ascended the French throne in 1515. In 1523, he commissioned Giovanni Verrazzano (Columbus was Italian, so François wanted an Italian) to search for the still-elusive passage to China through the New World. Which Verrazzano did not find, but he did finally realize that they were exploring a new continent, not islands and not a promontory of Asia, as maps of the period had shown. In 1534 François sent Jacques Cartier on the first of what turned out to be three voyages to find and claim new lands for France...François had given up on the passage to China. During Cartier’s second voyage, he made it to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, following the St. Lawrence River, which he described as le chemyn de Canada, “the path to Canada.” “Canada” was a name used by the native Huron to describe the fertile headland of a great river, something of a land of milk and honey…the Huron did on occasion exaggerate for the foreign tourist. In 1541 Cartier made his third voyage, an attempt to found a colony in Canada. The winter of 1541-1542, native attack, and the odd bouts of scurvy convinced Cartier to sail home, which he did.

Despite Cartier’s failure, colonies were the order of the day.

The English re-engaged the New World under Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I. Her interest lay in setting up a base in North America from which to raid Spanish treasure ships…there's more than one way to mine gold. She allowed Walter Raleigh, a favorite and occasionally a pirate, to found two colonies in “Virginia;” actually both were in what is now North Carolina. The settlers of the first colony were evacuated, and those of the second colony mysteriously disappeared, the famous “Lost Colony” of North Carolina. Ironically, although Elizabeth allowed Raleigh to colonize in her name, she forbade him to sail. She kept him at court, and he “commanded” from the capital.

With Raleigh’s colonies, Morison deems the exploratory phase of the New World closed, and its colonial period begun. Closed, too, is this volume. Columbus, Magellan, and the Southern voyages belong to the second volume, which we look forward to reviewing in due course.

There are a few books that just “nail it,” and The European Discovery of America is one of them. The work combines deep scholarship, extensive collateral learning (did I mention the guy was a sailor?), and solid research (Morison includes plates and figures in his footnotes) to frame the entire exploratory period. Highly recommended.

The Norse, the English, the French, and most all European culture north of Florida arrived with those initial landings in Newfoundland. So go ahead…blame Canada. She is the mother of us all.