A party of early explorers in
Virginia carried a letter of introduction with them from
the King of England to the Khan of Tartary: they expected
to find him at the head waters of the Chickahominy.
Jacques Cartier, nearly half a century after Columbus,
was expecting that the Gulf of St Lawrence would open
out into a passage leading to China. But after the
discovery of the North Pacific ocean and Bering Strait
the idea that America was part of Asia, that the natives
were 'Indians' in the old sense, was seen to be absurd.
It was clear that America was, in a large sense, an
island, an island cut off from every other continent. It
then became necessary to find some explanation for the
seemingly isolated position of a portion of mankind
separated from their fellows by boundless oceans.
The earlier theories were certainly naive enough. Since
no known human agency could have transported the Indians
across the Atlantic or the Pacific, their presence in
America was accounted for by certain of the old writers
as a particular work of the devil. Thus Cotton Mather,
the famous Puritan clergyman of early New England,
maintained in all seriousness that the devil had inveigled
the Indians to America to get them 'beyond the tinkle of
the gospel bells.
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