Note XXXIV-2 — Chapter XXXIV · INTEROCEANIC COMMUNICATION. 1801-1887.

They thus argued from the first: Quintus Metellus Celer, proconsul of Rome in Gaul, was presented by the king of Suevia with a number of red men, who had been thrown upon his coast. So said Cornelius Nepos, and Pliny repeated it. Now these savages, having no knowledge of ships or navigation, could not have come from America; they were not black, and consequently were not from Africa. There were no people in Europe like them; so they must have come from Asia. But how? Either from the east or from the west; they could not have rounded the eastern hemisphere either by its northern or southern side, for obvious reasons; therefore they must have come from the north-west, and hence there must be a way from Asia north-eastward to Europe, running round the north pole. Upon this logic were staked thousands of lives and millions of money. Dominicus Marius Niger, the geographer, speaks of men who were driven from India through the north sea to Germany, while on a trading expedition. As late as 1160, some strange persons arrived on the coast of Germany. Humboldt thought they might have been Eskimos. Othon, in his Storie of the Gothes, speaks of such arrivals, arguing that they must have drifted in through a north-west passage. Gilbert's Discourse, in Hakluyt, iii. 16-17. Again, Hakluyt finds it recorded that some 200 years before the coming of Christ, the Romans sent a fleet against the Grand Khan, which, crossing the strait of Gibraltar, and steering toward the N. W., in lat 50° found a channel, in which it sailed to the westward until it reached Asia, and after fighting the king of Cathay, returned by the way it went.