Note 633 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Bohn’s ed., English transl., ii. 603; Lond. ed., 1849, ii. 233-36. Humboldt expresses the opinion that Columbus, during his visit to Iceland, got no knowledge of the stories, so little an impression had they made on the public mind (Cosmos, Bohn, ii. 611), and that the enemies of Columbus in his famous lawsuit, when every effort was made to discredit his enterprise, did not instance his Iceland experience, should be held to indicate that no one in southern Europe believed in any such prompting at that time. Wheaton and Prescott (Ferdinand and Isabella, orig. ed., ii. 118, 131) hold similar opinions. (Cf. Vol. II. p. 33.) Dr. Webb says that Irving held back from accepting the stories of the saga, for fear that they could be used to detract from Columbus’ fame. Rafn and his immediate sympathizers did not fail to make the most of the supposition that Columbus had in some way profited by his Iceland experience. Laing thinks Columbus must have heard of the voyages, and De Costa (Columbus and the Geographers of the North) thinks that the bruit of the Northmen voyages extended sufficiently over Europe to render it unlikely that it escaped the ears of Columbus. Cf. further an appendix in Irving’s Columbus, and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, Bohn’s ed., 267, in refutation of the conclusions of Finn Magnusen in the Nordisk Tidsskrift. It has been left for the unwise and overtopped advocates of a later day, like Goodrich and Marie A. Brown, to go beyond reason in an indiscriminate denunciation of the Genoese. The latter writer, in her Icelandic Discoverers of America (Boston, 1888), rambles over the subject in a jejune way, and easily falls into errors, while she pursues her main purpose of exposing what she fancies to be a deep-laid scheme of the Pope and the Catholic Church to conceal the merits of the Northmen and to capture the sympathies of Americans in honoring the memory of Columbus in 1892. It is simply a reactionary craze from the overdone raptures of the school of Roselly de Lorgues and the other advocates of the canonization of Columbus, in Catholic Europe.