Part 22

The stupendous event which took place at Yorktown on the 19th day of October, 1781, at 4 o’clock p. m., and its influence on the history of the human race, all the world knows. Morgan was at home at that time on a bed of sickness. He wrote Washington under date of September 20, lamenting that his condition prevented him from serving in the field. It was a letter full of personal and patriotic utterances—so much so that Washington felt impelled to answer it in kind. His answer is dated “Headquarters, before York, 5th October, 1781.” “Surrounded as I am,” he wrote, “with a great variety of concerns on the present occasion, I can yet find time to answer your letter of the 20th ultimo, which I have received with much satisfaction; not only as it is filled with such warm expressions of desire for my success on the present expedition, but as it breathes the spirit and ardor of a veteran soldier, who, though impaired in the service of his country, yet retains the sentiments of a soldier in the firmest degree.

“Be assured that I most sincerely lament your present situation, and esteem it a peculiar loss to the United States that you are, at this time, unable to render your services in the field. I most sincerely thank you for the kind expressions of your good wishes, and earnestly hope that you may soon be restored to that share of health which you may desire, and with which you may again be useful to your country in the same eminent degree as has already distinguished your conduct.”

Within two weeks’ time from the date of that cordial letter, Cornwallis surrendered his army, the war of the Revolution had been fought to a finish and the military life of Daniel Morgan was ended.

To his estate in Clarke County, Virginia, which he proudly called “Saratoga,” he now retired; and there he spent his declining days. For two years, in obedience to the call of his people, he served them in the Congress of the nation; but, as he had been most warlike in time of war, in time of peace he preferred the quiet shades of private life. On the sixth day of July in the year 1802, in about the sixty-seventh year of his age, he passed out at Winchester, in Virginia, and there lies his dust in an humble grave.

Mr. President, the dust of Daniel Morgan is noble dust. Saving alone those of the commander-in-chief, his services to his struggling country are the most remarkable in the annals of the war. From the valley of the Hockhocking in 1774, he pledged himself to the services of his brethren of Boston and marched his riflemen six hundred miles to their relief. Into the hardships of the Canadian Campaign he led the van; and three times before Quebec he guided his men to the fire-fringed heights with the courage of a demi-god. To him belongs the chief glory of Burgoyne’s surrender; and at the Cowpens he won what Bancroft affirms was “the most astonishing victory of the war.” His life was a succession of sacrifices for his country. Measure his services as you may—in number, in value, or in brilliancy—they are not surpassed by those of any officer of the Revolution, saving always the unapproachable Washington. In fifty contests with the enemy he participated—eight of them being general engagements—and in those in which he was charged with the responsibility of command, he was either successful or achieved results which were equivalent thereto. His patriotism was proof against British allurements when he was a ragged prisoner of war; and his sense of honor repelled the temptations of a superior brother-officer in the hour of victorious exultation. Into every danger where wartime duty called him, he “fought a good fight”; in spite of every wile of the seducer, “he kept the faith”; into the quietude of private life he carried the praises of the whole army and the plaudits of the civil representatives of his country. But he did not escape calumny. He paid the inevitable penalty which success entails, and paid it with the smile of scorn and the noble silence of conscious rectitude. The American people, as yet, have no Madeleine, no Valhalla, no Westminster, wherein repose the ashes of their mighty dead. But when that national mausoleum comes, as come it ought and come it will, to it in some future generation the dust of Daniel Morgan will be tenderly borne and in honor inurned beneath its vaulted halls. Meantime, he sleeps yonder at Winchester amidst the lovely hills of Old Virginia, and, “in honored rest,” sleeps well well—

“His truth and valor wearing.”

No marble pile marks his resting place. He needs none! Congresses may, his countrymen never will, forget his devotion to the Republic. On the portals of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the stranger who would behold the monument of its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, is admonished in stately Latin to “look around him.” _Si quaeris monumentum, circumspici!_ Ye who would behold the monument of Daniel Morgan, lift your eyes to the towering dome of your country’s Capitol and consider all that it represents! Read the Bill of Rights incorporated in the charters of your commonwealths, and reflect upon the inalienable prerogatives it preserves to eighty millions of freemen! Study the constitution itself and realize with Gladstone that it is “the most wonderful work ever struck off in a given time by the brain and purpose of man!” Ponder those blessings of liberty which, in their full flower and fruition, every American enjoys tonight! And when ye have done this, remember that Daniel Morgan was of the fathers by whose blood and spirit they were established. Sublimer than effigies of brass, more enduring than granite shafts, are these memorials of the men of the old heroic days. Upon the rights of mankind are they founded, and they will remain even unto the last day of recorded time. And when Time shall be no longer—when, in the ultimate convulsion of nature, the archangel-trumpeter shall sound his summons for the living and the dead to render final accounting of their stewardship—before the Judge of the Nations in the group of immortals who blazed the way for the glory of the American Republic, will stand the tall Irish chieftain of the Virginia Riflemen, “with a countenance like the lightning and in raiment as white as snow.”

ST. BRENDAN, AMERICA’S FIRST DISCOVERER. HOW A LEARNED AND ADVENTUROUS IRISHMAN AND SIXTY MONKS OUTSTRIPPED COLUMBUS BY NEARLY TEN CENTURIES IN HIS QUEST OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE—A GRAPHIC AND CONVINCING TREATISE.

BY THOMAS S. LONERGAN, NEW YORK CITY.

During all historic time, the Irish have been noted for their love of adventure and travel, and had commercial intercourse with the leading ports of Europe and Asia for centuries before and after St. Patrick’s time, which is proof that they had sailing vessels of no mean order. The conversion of the Irish people to Christianity, in the fifth century, is unique in the annals of Christendom, because it was accomplished by one man and without the shedding of a single drop of human blood—but the discovery of America by Irish monks in the middle of the sixth century is still a mooted question, notwithstanding the historical researches of Irish, French, German and American scholars, which prove that St. Brendan was the first discoverer of this western hemisphere. His expedition was essentially a religious undertaking, as well as the fulfillment of a well-known prophecy.

St. Brendan was born in the year 484, at a place now called Tralee, in the County of Kerry, Ireland. He was the son of Finnlogha, of the race of Ciar, son of Fergus. He was educated by his relative, the Bishop of Erc, who was head of a local monastery at Kerry. When a child, young Brendan was placed in charge of St. Ita, at Killeedy, in the County of Limerick, where he remained for five years, after which he returned to Bishop Erc’s monastery, and began his ecclesiastical studies with marked ability. He was sent from there to St. Jarlath’s College of Tuan for the purpose of studying the laws and rules of the saints of Ireland, with the injunction to return to Bishop Erc for holy orders, and in due course of time he was ordained.

[Illustration:

THOMAS S. LONERGAN, ESQ.,

Of New York City.

Member of the Society, Litterateur and Lecturer. ]

St. Brendan belonged to what is known as the second order of Irish Saints. Shortly after his ordination, a passionate desire took possession of him to go forth on expeditions for the discovery of strange lands and the salvation of souls. At his ordination the words of St. Luke produced a profound impression on his mind, which subsequently formed his determination to forsake his native country and to embark on a voyage to a mysterious land, far from human ken and beyond a mighty ocean.

It is certain that Irishmen, in ancient days, found their way to the Hebrides, the Shetland and Faroe Islands, and even to Iceland. St. Brendan is said to have visited the Western and Northern Islands, and Brittany in France between 530 and 540. When he returned home the passion to discover the Land of Promise, as foretold in St. Patrick’s prophecy, was stronger than ever. He went to St. Ita, his old nurse, for counsel, and she advised him to build a ship of wood, and she told him that he would find the distant land beyond the great ocean. He immediately set out for Galway in Connacht, and gathered several of his faithful monks about him, and they there and then began to build a large wooden ship. We are told that they built a peculiar mast in the middle of the ship, and secured all the other rigging for such a craft. They put aboard various kinds of herbs, seeds and provisions. They sailed from Galway along the Irish Coast to the Bay of Kerry.

In 545, according to the Irish annals and the Latin manuscripts, St. Brendan and sixty Irish monks, sailed from the Bay of Kerry, which still bears his name, and after an adventurous voyage of forty days, they reached the shores of what is now Virginia or Carolina, and are said to have remained in this western hemisphere for seven years, exploring and preaching the Gospel of Christ to the natives, especially along the shores of the Ohio River. Most probably they trod the soil of New England. The reports of what they saw and endured are simply marvellous. They found a fertile land, thickly wooded and full of birds and flowers, strange animals and strange human beings.

There is every reason to believe that before the close of that eventful century the story of St. Brendan’s voyages and discovery was well known in every part of Europe. There are still extant thirteen Latin manuscripts in the National Library of Paris which have come down from the tenth century, and contain elaborate accounts of St. Brendan’s discovery of America. The Bodlien Library of Oxford and the Nuremburg Library of Germany contain several of the Brendan MSS. There are also versions of the discovery in Gaelic, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

In the year 1892, the late General Daniel Butterfield, the noted American soldier and scholar, photographed one of the original Latin manuscripts of Brendan in the Bibleothèque Nationale of Paris, which he translated on his arrival in this country, and he subsequently prepared a learned lecture on the subject, which he delivered before the New York Gaelic Society. The translation, has been vouched for by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore as being almost literal.

The manuscript begins with a sketch of St. Brendan’s career and of the confession made to him by Father Barindus, which was instrumental in firing the imagination of the great abbot to make a voyage in search of the Land of Promise, which was America. St. Brendan laid his full statement of the confession before the seven wisest counsellors of his community, which concluded in the following words, as translated:

“My Beloved Fellow Warriors: I now ask of you counsel and help, inasmuch as my thoughts and my heart are bent on one desire, if it be the will of God. That land whereof Father Barindus has spoken, is the land of promise of the saints. I have yet set my heart upon. What say you? What counsel do you give me? Their answer was, ‘Abbot, your will is ours; have we not left our parents, have we not forsaken our inheritance, have we not delivered ourselves up unto you? Therefore with you we are ready to go unto life or death.’”

They considered the story or confession a revelation to enable them to reach the land, of which Patrick’s prophecy had foretold. When once upon the highlands of Munster, and looking out upon the Atlantic Ocean, St. Patrick said that a man of renown should arise in those lands and go out upon the sea and find the promised land. That prophecy has been a household word with the people in the Kerry region for more than fourteen centuries, and was well known for several years before St. Brendan was born. The traditions of the Brendanian voyages, like Banquo’s ghost, will never down, because they are embodied in the literature of many European nations.

The following passage appears in Otway’s Sketches, published in Dublin in 1845.

“Brendan, having prosecuted his inquiries with all diligence, returned to his native Kerry, and from a bay sheltered by a lofty mountain, that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land and directing his course towards the Southwest, in order to meet the summer solstice, or what we call the ‘tropic’ after a long and rough voyage, came to summer seas where he was carried without sail or oar for many a long day. This, it is presumed, was the great Gulf Stream and which brought his vessel to shore, somewhere about the Virginia Capes, or where the American coast tends eastward and forms the New England States. There landing, he and his companions marched far into the interior and came to a large river, flowing East and West, which was evidently the Ohio River. After some years’ exploration, the holy adventurer was about to cross the river when he was accosted by a person of noble presence (but whether a real or imaginary man does not appear), who told him that he had gone far enough in that direction and that further discoveries were reserved for other men who would in due time come and Christianize all that pleasant land. The above, when tested by common sense, clearly shows that Brendan landed on a continent and went a good way into the interior.”

It is now supposed that St. Brendan and his companions soon returned to Ireland. Some writers state that he made a second voyage to this country, but there is no proof for that statement.

In the sagas of Scandinavia, America is called Irland Mikla, or “Great Ireland.” The Scandinavian records contain an account of three voyages made to America after the time of St. Brendan and before the arrival of Columbus. Voraginius, the Provincial of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in the thirteenth century, devotes much space in his “Golden Legend” to St. Brendan’s Land. Wynkyn de Worde, the first English printer, wrote a life of St. Brendan, which was published in 1483, just nine years before Columbus sailed from Palos. Several Italians, who wrote in the fifteenth century, had much to say about St. Brendan’s discovery, and it is to be presumed that the mind of Columbus was well stored with the traditions of America’s first discoverer, which had come down through the Middle Ages.

Here are a few sentences spoken by St. Brendan on the banks of what is now supposed to be the Ohio River:

“Behold the land which you have longed for so long a time.

“The reason you saw it not sooner was that God desired to show you the secrets of the ocean.

“Return, therefore, to the land of thy nativity, carrying with you of the fruits and gems of all that your ship will carry, for the days of your journey are near to a close, and you shall sleep with your fathers. But after the lapse of many years this land shall be made known to your descendants, when Christianity shall overcome Pagan persecution. Now, this river which you see divides the land, as it now appears to you rich in fruits, so shall it always appear without any shadow of night, for its light is Christ.”

If the foregoing is not positive proof, it is at least pretty good circumstantial evidence of St. Brendan’s discovery of this western hemisphere.

Nearly all writers on Columbus bear witness to the traditional value of the voyage of St. Brendan in guiding and inspiring Lief Erickson in the tenth century, and Columbus in the fifteenth, to the discovery of the New World.

The legend of St. Brendan is treated in the general histories of American discovery. In Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America,” volume I, page 48, there is a list of some of the different texts of the legend. Payne’s “History of America” gives a brief summary of the legend. He says: “No story was more popular in the end of the fifteenth century. The critic who does not absolutely reject it, as the Bollandists have done, may take his choice of original versions of it in eight different languages: and St. Brandan occupies ten dense pages in William Caxton’s version of the Golden Legend.” An English version of the legend was published by the Percy Society in 1844 under the title, “St. Brandan, a mediæval legend of the sea, in English prose and verse (London, 1844).”

Gaffarel’s “Histoire de la dècouverte de l’Amerique,” volume I, contains a chapter entitled “Les Irlandais en Amerique avant Colomb,” in which he gives an extended account of the story of St. Brendan, with references to authorities.

[Illustration:

HON. THOMAS B. FITZPATRICK,

Of Boston, Mass.

Vice-President-General of the Society. ]

De Roo, in his “History of America Before Columbus,” published in 1900, says: “The story of St. Brendan was one of the most remarkable and widely spread of the middle ages. The number of its ancient copies, carefully preserved to the present day, its various translations and its learned commentaries, published of late, sufficiently testify to the living interest which the ‘Navigatio’ of St. Brendan excited. There is scarcely a MSS. Collection in Europe, of any account, where it cannot be found.” There is a copy of the “Navigatio” in the Vatican Library since the Ninth Century. De Roo gives full credence to the St. Brendan narrative.

Learned writers like Moosmuller of Germany, Gravier of France, Palfry and De Costa of America, not to speak of Irish scholars, have written much on St. Brendan and prehistoric America. Cardinal Moran of Australia has recently written a very able work on St. Brendan. O’Donoghue’s Brendaniana and Webb’s Compendium of Irish Biography make mighty interesting reading.

There are several ancient maps in the European Libraries which mention St. Brendan’s Land or “Great Ireland” and those maps are being closely examined by historical students interested in pre-Columbian discoveries.

Columbus himself, while he was endeavoring to fit out his first expedition, wrote these words: “The land of St. Brendan is the land of the Blessed, towards the West, which no one can reach except by the power of God.”

It is not too much to claim that the Irish chapter in American history began with St. Brendan. It is to be hoped and expected that the future historians of this Western Hemisphere will recognize Brendan, the Irish monk and famous navigator, as America’s first discoverer and give credit to whom credit is due.

There is still extant in the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, an ancient MS. containing the prayer of St. Brendan for the safety of himself and his companions in his trans-Atlantic voyage.

“Judging by the ancient documents,” says the learned Dane, Professor Rafn, “we can have no doubt that Great Ireland was settled long before the year 1000 by a Christian Colony from Ireland.” What Rafn calls Great Ireland, we now call the United States of America. Rafn also claims that a people speaking the Irish language were found in Florida as far back as the eighth century.

The latest book on this subject is by Mrs. Marion Mulhall, the wife of the famous statistician, entitled “Explorers in the New World Before Columbus,” recently published by Longmans, Green & Co. Every student of pre-Columbian discoveries ought to read that splendid work, which deals with a mighty interesting theme in the field of historical research.

In the sixteenth century, traces of Gaelic speech and a knowledge of the poems of Ossian were discovered among the Indians of Florida. Ossian was an Irish poet who flourished two centuries before St. Brendan was born. Both Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon considered him the greatest poet that ever lived.

In the light of modern historical research, it is absurd to claim that Columbus was the first discoverer of America. I am fully satisfied that Lief Erickson and his Norsemen from the islands of the Baltic discovered this Continent 500 years before Columbus; and I am as fully convinced that St. Brendan and his Irish Monks landed on the shores of this country about the middle of the sixth century. Owing to the fact that no permanent settlement or lasting results came from these discoveries, therefore they do not take a jot or tittle from the achievement of Christopher Columbus, whose name and fame are bound to live forever in the annals of the human race.

The Oxford University press has just published a number of Irish manuscripts in the English language which have been in the Bodlien Library for centuries. Some of those Gaelic manuscripts also refer to the Brendanian voyages and discoveries.

The early Portuguese explorers believed in the existence of the El Dorado, the undiscovered country of St. Brendan. The strongest proof of this is that when the Crown of Portugal was ceded to the Castilians, the treaty included St. Brendan’s land as a certain future discovery.

The high religious reputation and singular fame of St. Brendan gave considerable value to his manuscripts, from which sprang up an unique literature, that planted in the brain of Columbus a desire to find the long lost Land of Promise, which he eventually discovered in the year 1492, a year forever memorable in the history of civilization.

Why is it that nearly all the original Brendan manuscripts are in the Latin tongue? Chambers in his “Cyclopedia of English Literature” gives an excellent explanation: “The first unquestionably real author of distinction is St. Columbanus, a native of Ireland, who contributed greatly to the advance of Christianity in Western Europe and died in 615. He wrote religious treatises and Latin poetry. As yet no educated writer composed in his vernacular tongue. It was generally despised by the literary class, and Latin was held to be the only language fit for regular composition.”