If we would discover how a watercourse is formed, from the very first bog-streams up in the mountain, we must follow a multitude of tiny rills, receiving one fresh stream after another from every side, running together into burns, which grow and grow and form little rivers, till we come to the end of the wooded hillside and are suddenly face to face with the great river in the valley below.
A similar task confronts him who endeavours to explore the first trickling rivulets of human knowledge; he must trace all the minute, uncertain, often elusive beginnings, follow the diversity of tributaries from all parts of the earth, and show how the mass of knowledge increases constantly from age to age, sometimes reposing in long stretches of dead water, half choked with peat and rushes, at other times plunging onward in foaming rapids. And then he too is rewarded; the stream grows broader and broader, until he stands beside the navigable river.
But a simile never covers the whole case. The latter task is rendered not only wider, but incomparably more difficult, by the fact that the brooks and rivers whose course is to be followed are even more intricate and scarcely ever flow in an open stream. True knowledge is so seldom undiluted; as a rule it is suffused with myths and dogmatic conceptions, often to such a degree that it becomes entirely lost, and something new seems to have arisen in its place.
For one thing, man's power of grasping reality varies greatly; in primitive man it is clouded to a degree which we modern human beings can hardly understand. He is as yet incapable of distinguishing between idea and reality, between belief and knowledge, between what he has seen and experienced and the explanation he has provided for his experience.
But even with those who have long outgrown the primitive point of view imagination steps in, supplying detail and explanation wherever our information fails us and our knowledge falls short; it spreads its haze over the first uncertain outlines of perception, and the distant contours are sometimes wholly lost in the mists of legend.
This is a universal experience in the history of intellectual life. In the domain to which this work is devoted, it makes itself felt with perhaps more than its usual force.
The inquiry embraces long periods. In all times and countries we have seen the known world lose itself in the fogs of cloudland--never uniformly, it is true, but in constantly changing proportions. Here and there we have a glimpse, now and again a vision over wider regions; and then the driving mists once more shut out our view. Therefore all that human courage and desire of knowledge have wrested in the course of long ages from this cloudland remains vague, uncertain, full of riddles. But for this very reason it is all the more alluring.
We saw that to the eyes of the oldest civilisation in history and down through the whole of antiquity, the North lay for the most part concealed in the twilight of legend and myth; here and there genuine information finds its way into literature, but is again effaced. At the beginning of the Middle Ages the dark curtain thickens.
Again there is a glimmer of light, first from the intermingling of nations at the time of the migrations, then from new trading voyages and intercourse, until the great change is brought about by the Norsemen, who with their remarkable power of expansion overran western and southern Europe and penetrated the vast unknown solitudes in the North, found their way to the White Sea, discovered the wide Polar Sea and its shores, colonised the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, and were the first discoverers of the Atlantic Ocean and of North America.
As early as in the writings of King Alfred and Adam of Bremen the Norsemen's initiatory knowledge of this new northern world made its way into European literature.
No doubt the mists closed again, much of the knowledge gained was forgotten even by the Norsemen themselves, and in the latter part of the Middle Ages it is mostly mythical echoes of this knowledge that are to be traced in the literature of Europe and that have left their mark on its maps. None the less were the discoveries of the Norsemen the great dividing line. For the first time explorers had set out with conscious purpose from the known world, over the surrounding seas, and had found lands on the other side. By their voyages they taught the sailors of Europe the possibility of traversing the ocean. When this first step had been taken the further development came about of itself.
It was in the Norsemen's school that the sailors of England had their earliest training, especially through the traffic with Iceland; and even the distant Portuguese, the great discoverers of the age of transition, received impulses from them.
Through all that is uncertain, and often apparently fortuitous and chequered, we can discern a line, leading towards the new age, that of the great discoveries, when we emerge from the dusk of the Middle Ages into fuller daylight. Of the new voyages we have, as a rule, accounts at first hand, less and less shrouded in mediaevalism and mist. From this time the real history of polar exploration begins.
Cabot had then rediscovered the mainland of North America, Corte-Real had reached Newfoundland, the Portuguese and the English were pushing northward to Greenland and the ice. And this brings in the great transformation of ideas about the Northern World.
It is true that as yet we have not passed the northern limits of our forefathers' voyages; and that views of the arctic regions are still obscure and vague. While some imagine a continent at the pole, others are for a wreath of islands around it with dangerous currents between them, and others again reckon upon an open polar sea. There is obscurity enough.
But new problems are beginning to shape themselves.
When it became apparent to the seamen of Europe that the new countries of the West were not Asia, but part of a new continent, the idea suggested itself of seeking a way round the north--as also round the south--of this continent, in order to reach the coveted sources of wealth, India and China: the problem of the North-West Passage was presented--a continuation on a grand scale of the routes opened up by the Norsemen towards the north-west.
But equally present was the thought that perhaps there was another and shorter way round the north of the old world; and the problem of the North-East Passage arose. The working out of this problem was simply a continuation of the north-eastern voyages of the Norwegians to the White Sea.
In this way were born the two great illusions, which for centuries held the minds of explorers spellbound. They could never be of value as trade-routes, these difficult passages through the ice. They were to be no more than visions, but visions of greater worth than real knowledge; they lured discoverers farther and farther into the unknown world of ice; foot by foot, step by step, it was explored; man's comprehension of the earth became extended and corrected; and the sea-power and imperial dominion of England drew its vigour from these dreams.
What a vast amount of labour lies sunk in man's knowledge of the earth, especially in those remote ages when development proceeded at such an immeasurably slower pace, and when man's resources were so infinitely poorer. By the most manifold and various ways the will and intelligence of man achieve their object. The attraction of long voyages must often enough have been the hope of finding riches and favoured lands, but deeper still lay the imperious desire of getting to know our own earth. To riches men have seldom attained, to the Fortunate Isles never; but through all we have won knowledge.
The great Alexander, the conquering king, held sway over the greater part of the world of his day; the bright young lord of the world remained the ideal for a thousand years, the hero above all others. But human thought, restless and knowing no bounds, found even his limits too narrow. He grew and grew to superhuman dimensions, became the son of a god, the child of fortune, who in popular belief held sway from the Pillars of Hercules, the earth's western boundary, to the trees of the sun and moon at the world's end in the east; to whom nothing seemed impossible; who descended to the bottom of the sea in a glass bell to explore the secrets of the ocean; who, borne by tamed eagles, tried to reach heaven, and who was fabled by Mohammedans and Christians to have even attempted to scale the walls of Paradise itself--there to be checked for the first time: "Thus far and no farther." No man that is born of woman may attain to the land of heart's desire.
The myth of Alexander is an image of the human spirit itself, seeking without intermission, never confined by any bounds, eternally striving towards height after height, deep after deep, ever onward, onward, onward....
The world of the spirit knows neither space nor time.
FINIS
LIST OF THE MORE IMPORTANT WORKS REFERRED TO
1876 ADAM of Bremen: Adami Gesta Hamburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum ex recensione Lappenbergii. Editio altera. "Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum."
Hannoverae, 1876.
1862 ADAM of Bremen: Om Menigheden i Norden o. s. v. Overs. af P. W.
Christensen. Copenhagen, 1862.
1893 ADAMS von Bremen Hamburgische Kirchengeschichte. ubers. von J. C. W.
Laurent. 2. Aufl. Leipzig, 1893.
1839 AELIANUS (Claudius): Varia. "Vermischte Nachrichten," Werke, Bd. I, ubers. von Ephorus Dr. Wunderlich. "Griech. Prosaiker in neuen Uebers.,"
hgb. v. Tafel, Osiander, und Schwab, Bd. 182. Stuttgart, 1839.
1894 AHLENIUS (Karl): Pytheas' Thuleresa, "Sprkvetenskapliga Sallsk. i Upsala Forhandl.," I, 1882-94, pp. 101-124, in "Upsala Universitets rsskrift," 1894.
1900 AHLENIUS (K.): Die alteste geographische Kenntnis von Skandinavien.
"Eranos," III, 1898-1899. Upsala, 1900.
1859 ALFRED, King: Anglo-Saxon Version of Orosius. Ed. by JOSEPH BOSWORTH, London, 1859. As to Ottar, see also HENRY SWEET: An Anglo-Saxon Reader, Oxford, 1884; R. RASK in "Skandinaviske Litteraturselskabs Skrifter," XI, Copenhagen, 1815, with Danish transl. and notes; G. PORTHAN: "Kgl.
Vitterh. Hist. o. Antique Acad. Handl." VI, Stockholm, 1800, with Swedish transl. and notes.
1845 d'AVEZAC (M. P.): Les Iles fantastiques de l'ocean occidental au moyen-age. Paris, 1845.
1887 AVIENUS (Rufus Festus): Rufi Festi Avieni Carmina. Ed. Alfred Holder, Innsbruck, 1887.
BATuTA (Ibn): Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, Texte arabe et traduction par DEFReMERY et SANGUINETTI.
1902 BAUMGARTNER (A.): Island und die Faroer. 3 Aufl. Freiburg, 1902.
1876 BAUMSTARK (Anton), See TACITUS.
1880 BAUMSTARK (A.): Ausfuhrliche Erlauterung des besondern volkerschaftlichen Theiles der Germania des Tacitus. Leipzig, 1880.
1904 1905 BEAUVOIS (Eug.): "Journal de la Societe des Americanistes de Paris," 1904, No. 2; 1905, No. 2.
1897 1906 BEAZLEY (C. Raymond): The Dawn of Modern Geography, I, 1897; II, 1901; III, 1906, London.
1898 BEAZLEY (C. R.): John and Sebastian Cabot. London, 1898.
1902 BeRARD (Victor): Les Pheniciens et l'Odyssee. I, 1902; II, 1903.
Paris.
1880 BERGER (Hugo): Die geographischen Fragmente des Eratosthenes.
Leipzig, 1880.
1887-93 BERGER (H.): Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Griechen. I, 1887; II, 1889; III, 1891; IV, 1893. Leipzig.