The Mohawk Valley

MP3 Audio CD. The Mohawk Valley

Chapter I

The Mythical City of Norumbega

IT may seem strange to readers of a book that purports to be a history of the Mohawk Valley, that the author should go so wide afield as to connect it with a mysteri- ous country a thousand miles away and whose exact locality is unknown to this day. Undoubtedly the mythical city of Norumbega, together with the equally mythical Northwest Passage to India, was an incentive to early navigators, to visit the shores of the New World and to explore its eastern coast. Mystery and the marvellous is even now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, attractive to the majority of mankind, but how much more so in the sixteenth century, with the imagination quickened by the discoveries of the Spaniards under Cortez and Pizarro and the wonderful treas- ures secured in Mexico and Peru. That the northeast coast of America was visited by Breton (1504) and Basque fishermen, in search of fish for the Catholic countries of Europe, before the discovery and naming of the St. Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534-5, i'^ a matter of history, and that they should have made temporary homes on the shores near their fishing grounds seems natural, and that, in some cases, it became necessary to protect their camps by rude forts, more or less strong, seems reasonable. We are therefore inclined to believe that there may be some truth in the traditionary French (Breton) fort, said to have been located on an island near Albany, many years before the voyages of Henry Hudson. The land, river, and city of Norumbega seems to have been known to nearly all of the early navigators of the Atlantic, and the incentive for many a quest by Verrazano in 1524, Alleforce under Roberval in 1543, Thevet in 1556, and Champlain in 1603-14. And is it a wonder, when such a story as the following was told and believed : An Englishman had left a record of having seen a city bearing the name of Norumbega, a