Some Pre-Columbian Discoveries of America. E-book. Formato PDF - 9780243668298

However, as this discovery was too great an acquisition to human knowledge, and too grand an element in human destiny to be entirely suppressed, the report of it did somehow transpire, and find its way to Greek schools of philosophy and the pages of the poet. If Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo and Pliny say so little or nothing on so important a portion of the earth's surface, ignorance may not have been the sole motive for their reticence. To tell the Greeks who dare scarcely venture out of sight of land, of a country at the distance of forty days' sail from their homes, across an ocean overshadowed with darkness and whelmed with storms, as their mariners reported and their poets sung, would have been a useless waste of learning. But then these writers were not altogether silent on the subject; their testimony will be introduced after we notice another objection that may be Offered. This is, that if the knowledge Of so great a fact once existed among men who wrote books, it would not have been lost. So far as this knowledge was committed to the books it has not been lost, excepting what may have been destroyed in the burning of the Alexandrian library. But that oral or traditional knowledge, when not used in daily employment, may readily be lost, we have already seen in its summary suppression by the Carthaginian Senate. Another notable instance is the discovery of New England by the Northmen in the tenth century 987, under Biaru, or if his voyage is discredited, then under Leif in the year 1010 A. D.* These sea kings of Norway there after for several years made frequent voyages and repeated attempts at a settlement, and all record of them was buried in oblivion for eight hundred years until Rafn, scholar and antiquarian, discovered the narrative of the event in long forgotten manuscripts.