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Books: As the Voyagers Saw It

4 minute read
TIME

THE EYES OF DISCOVERY (439 pp.)—John Bakeless—Lippincott ($5).

“It was midnight of October 11-12 and the whole course of world history was going to change forever in just two hours more. Nobody quite realized that. But every man in the fleet, from the Admiral to the smallest page boy, was tensely alert . . . ‘Tierra! Tierra!’ bawled [the lookout on the Pinta] . . . The ship’s biggest piece of artillery, a ‘lombard,’ had been standing, loaded and primed, ready to fire a signal the moment there was news . . . ‘Bang!’ went the lombard. North America had been discovered.”

To discover it all over again from the wild surmises of Admiral Columbus to the finds of the venturesome bands of Spanish, Dutch, French and English explorers who came in his wake, Biographer John (Daniel Boone) Bakeless has worked his way through their written reports and borrowed from the best of them. His 300-year-long adventure story will give latter-day residents of the continent a green image of the days when the forests stretched nearly unbroken to the Mississippi and Manhattan’s Broadway was only a tree-walled Indian trail.

Inhabited Garden. The New World smelled good from the beginning. Columbus noted that “there came so fair and sweet a smell of flowers or trees from the land, that it was the sweetest thing in the world.” Almost a century later, Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists, aboard ship off the southeast coast, inhaled “so strong a smel, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden abounding in all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured, that the land could not be farre distant.”

Once ashore, the voyagers were soon far too busy to lose themselves in the drowse of flowers. From Florida to the Great Lakes, mosquitoes almost ate them alive (“How cruelly they persecuted us,” cried Champlain). In the brushless eastern forests, mammoth trees, standing almost trunk to trunk, rose to heights of 80 feet before branching, and gave one man “a particularly unpleasant, anxious feeling, which is excited irrestibly by the continuing shadow and the confined outlook.” Rattlesnakes made the white men turn still whiter with fear. “As for the Buff [alo],” wrote 17th Century Great Lakes Explorer Pierre Radisson, “it is a furious animal.”

Just as furious, Explorer Radisson learned, were the Indians. Captured and adopted by the Mohawks at 16, he escaped, but was soon recaptured. “That day they pluckt 4 nailes out of my fingers, and made me sing, though I had no mind att that time . . . They tyed me to a poast … A woman came there with her [four-year-old] boy, indeed him to cutt off one of my fingers with a flint stoan . . . This [boy] begins to worke, but … he had not the strength . . . Heare comes severall old people, one of which . . . houlding in his mouth a pewter pipe burning, tooke my thumb and putt it on the burning tobacco, and so smoaked 3 pipes one after another.” Many an early explorer died of the Indian’s “grim, sardonic” sense of humor. “The Sioux,” writes Author Bakeless, “. . . amused themselves by cutting off the heads and wrapping them in the beaver skins for which the Frenchmen had been so eager . . . Fifty years later, dead Americans were sometimes found with their mouths filled with earth — because they always wanted land!”

Ahead of the Billboards. Manhattan was noisy even then; one of the early visitors found the birds so numerous that “men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise, and the chattering.” Through the American forest, squirrels kept up an equally ear-splitting chatter. Quieter, but still astonishing, were the possums, skunks and grizzlies that Europeans had never seen before.

Shifting from the southeast (De Soto) to the southwest (Coronado), to Canada (Cartier and Champlain), to Virginia and on through the years to the opening of the northwest (Lewis and Clark), Author Bakeless keeps his Eyes of Discovery turned away from the explorers themselves and fixed firmly on what they saw. Through their eyes, a modern North American can get a fascinating view of what the land was like before the first highway went through and the first billboard went up.

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