The First Americans in Europe

— If it is doubtful whether Columbus was the first European to land in America, it is equally doubtful whether the seven Indians he took back with him were the first Americans to land in Europe. In the first century B. C., some men, taken by the Romans for Hindoos, who had been carried round by the Arctic regions, were cast ashore on the Belgic coast, and some modern writers fancy they may have been Caribbee Islanders. Gomara speaks of savages wrecked on the German coast in the reign of Frederick Barbarossa (1152—90), and æneas Sylvius, apparently relating the same event, talks of an Indian (Hindoo) trading-vessel being captured in German waters. These statements, however, are too vague to warrant positive conclusions. In any case, such involuntary visitors were not known at the time to be denizens of a new world, any more than the Northmen knew of their having discovered such a world. To Columbus, therefore, remains the honor of introducing Americans to Europe ; and we may fancy the curiosity of the crowds who collected, as he passed on his way from Palos to Barcelona with seven Indians (others had died at sea) carrying green and variegated parrots, and other wonderful objects never before seen in Castile. There may have been equal curiosity on the part of the Indians, who were baptized with great solemnity at Barcelona, King Ferdinand and his son, Prince John, being sponsors for two of them, their namesakes. The prince took his godson into his service, but the young stranger was destined to an early grave ; “ the first of his race,” says Herrera, “ to enter heaven.” The others were sent to Seville, to be trained as missionaries and interpreters ; but when Columbus, on his second voyage, sent one of them ashore at San Domingo to report the marvels and kindnesses of his hosts, the envoy never returned. Either his fine apparel and trinkets caused him to be murdered, or the love of liberty was too strong for him. Three others, apparently, had died, and but one was left, whom Columbus had named after his brother, Diego Colon, and who, remaining with the Spaniards, has been sometimes confused with his homonym.

Columbus, on his second voyage, sent home to Spain not only a young Jamaican, so anxious to visit Europe that, to escape kinsmen’s remonstrances, he hid himself in the ship, but five hundred captives, who, he suggested, should be sold as slaves at Seville. Alas that Americo-European intercourse should so soon lose its romance ! Queen Isabella, who was relentless enough to Jews and Moors, but had strictly enjoined humanity towards the Americans, seems to have been alone in demurring to the suggestion ; yet her scruples were dispelled, or at least silenced, by her ecclesiastical advisers. Whether the three “ savages ” exhibited in London and introduced to Henry VII. in 1502 were Americans or negroes is not clear. The romantic element reappears for a moment in 1508, when a French ship picked up near the English coast a small boat, made of bark and osiers, containing seven men of medium height, darkish hue, and attired in fish (seal ?) skins and painted straw caps. Their broad faces, with their habit of eating raw flesh and drinking blood, would imply that they were Eskimos; but it is difficult, as in the cases already cited, to conceive of a boat drifting across the Atlantic with sufficient stores of food to avoid cannibalism. Cardinal Bembo, the sole authority for the story, adds, however, that six of them died, — which may mean that they had been starving,— and that the sole survivor was taken to Louis XII.

Thus far transatlantic, visitors had not been seen or interrogated by men capable of more than a superficial curiosity, but the interest increases when the interviewer is Montaigne, and when he not only asks them about their own country, but elicits from them the first American opinion on Europe. He does not specify the date, but it must have been in October, 1562, and here is his account:—

“ Three of them, unaware how costly to their tranquillity and happiness would be the knowledge of our corruptions, and how from such intercourse would spring their ruin, already, I suppose, far advanced, — pitiable for having been deluded by the thirst for novelty, and for having quitted their mild sky to come and see ours, — were at Rouen at the time the late King Charles IX. was there. The king had a long talk with them. They were shown our way of living, our pomp, and the arrangements of a fine town. After this some one asked their opinion, wishing to know what they thought most wonderful. They mentioned three things ; the third, I am sorry to say, I have forgotten, but I still remember two. They said, in the first place, they thought it very strange that so many bearded, strong, and armed men round the king [they probably spoke of his Swiss guards] should submit to obey a child [Charles IX. was then twelve years of age], instead of choosing one of their own number to command. Secondly, — they have a way of calling men ‘ halves ’ of one another, — they had noticed that there were among us men loaded with all sorts of luxuries, while their ‘ halves ’ were beggars at their gates, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They thought it strange that these needy ‘ halves ’ could tolerate such an injustice, and that they did not seize the others by the throat or set fire to their houses. I talked a good while with one of them, but I had an interpreter who was so dull at seeing what I wanted to know that I could extract little. When I asked him what advantage he derived from his preëminence among his people (for he was a captain, and our sailors styled him ‘king’), he told me he marched in front in war. Asked how many men followed him, he showed me what space they would fill, implying four or five thousand men. Asked whether, during peace, he had no authority, he said there remained this : that when he visited villages under his sway paths were made for him through the woods, so that he could pass easily. All this is not amiss, but then they do not wear breeches.”

This last touch is quite Montaignesque. But Montaigne’s knowledge of America did not end here. He had long in his service a man who had spent ten or twelve years in Brazil, and who introduced to him several sailors and merchants who had voyaged with him. These informants stated that the Americans scarcely knew sickness or the infirmities of age ; that they had dwellings accommodating two or three hundred persons ; that they slept singly in hammocks, and had only one daily meal, but drank several times a day a claret-colored beverage made from a root ; that they spent much time in dancing, hunted wild beasts with bow and arrow, and believed in a paradise and a hell. They had priests living in the mountains, who, on their occasional visits, inculcated valor and conjugal fidelity, and made predictions, which if proved false by events exposed them to being cut to pieces. They had wars with the mountaineers, each warrior bringing back the head (scalp ?) of an enemy, to be suspended over his door. They roasted and ate their prisoners, after keeping them and treating them well for some months. Montaigne even gives the earliest specimen of American literature, a song in which a prisoner taunts his jailers, telling them that in eating him they will simply be eating the flesh of their own ancestors, on which he himself had feasted, He likewise quotes a stanza of a love song, which he pronounces Anacreontic. These particulars, which inspire Montaigne with a variety of reflections and parallels, are, as hearsay, less interesting and trustworthy than his own interview at Rouen, and it is evident that his informants indulged in the travelers’ license of embellishment ; but his picture of a people without private property, trade, literature, corn, or wine, as well as without dissimulation or envy, was almost literally incorporated by Shakespeare into The Tempest (Act II. Scene i.). It is curious, by the way, to see some of the customs thus attributed by Montaigne to the Brazilians, and adopted by Shakespeare in Gonzalo’s Utopia, revived by Mr. Bellamy for the American paradise of the twentieth century.

Montaigne regretted that America had not been discovered by the ancient Greeks, so that Lycurgus and Plato might have witnessed a commonwealth surpassing all their ideals, and the natives might have escaped Spanish barbarities. His interest in the New World is in striking contrast with the indifference of Bacon and of Shakespeare. In his Henry VII. Bacon curtly mentions the discovery, and Shakespeare, though he makes Ariel “ fetch dew from the still-vex’d Bermoothes,” ignores the discovery, except that In The Comedy of Errors Drontio compares the kitchen-wench Nell’s nose to America and the Indies. Nevertheless, Shakespeare, through the passage borrowed from Montaigne, is indirectly associated with America ; nor should we forget that 1892, the fourth centenary of Columbus’s discovery, is the third centenary of Montaigne’s death.