total native population of 1,148,000 from the Mississippi
to the Atlantic.

The limited means of support possessed by the natives,
their primitive agriculture, their habitual disinclination
to settled life and industry, their constant wars and
the epidemic diseases which, even as early as the time
of Jacques Cartier, worked havoc among them, must always
have prevented the growth of a numerous population. The
explorer might wander for days in the depths of the
American forest without encountering any trace of human
life. The continent was, in truth, one vast silence,
broken only by the roar of the waterfall or the cry of
the beasts and birds of the forest.



CHAPTER IV

THE LEGEND OF THE NORSEMEN

There are many stories of the coming of white men to the
coasts of America and of their settlements in America
long before the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Even in
the time of the Greeks and Romans there were traditions
and legends of sailors who had gone out into the 'Sea of
Darkness' beyond the Pillars of Hercules--the ancient
name for the Strait of Gibraltar--and far to the west
had found inhabited lands. Aristotle thought that there
must be land out beyond the Atlantic, and Plato tells us