is,
more or less from behind. We shall presently find out that tacking,
(which is sailing against the wind), is a very modern invention; and
that, within three centuries of its invention, steamers began to oust
sailing craft, as these, in their turn, had ousted rowboats and canoes.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST FAR WEST

(The last 5000 years B.C.)

This chapter begins with a big surprise. But it ends with a bigger one
still. When you look first at the title and then at the date, you
wonder how on earth the two can go together. But when you remember
what you have read in Chapter I you will see that the countries at the
Asiatic end of the Mediterranean, though now called the Near East, were
then the Far West, because emigrants from the older lands of Asia had
gone no farther than this twelve thousand years ago. Then, as you read
the present chapter, you will see emigrants and colonies moving farther
and farther west along the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic shores of
Europe, until, at last, two thousand years before Columbus, the new Far
West consisted of those very shores of Spain and Portugal, France and
the British Isles, from which the whole New Western World of North and
South America was to be settled later on. The Atlantic shores of
Europe, and not the Mediterranean shores of Asia and of Egypt, are
called here "The First Far West" because the first really Western
people grew up in Europe and became quite different from all the
Eastern peoples. The Second Far West, two thousand years later, was
America itself.

_Westward Ho!_ is the very good name of a book about adventures in
America when this Second Far West was just beginning. "Go West!" was
the advice given to adventurous people in America during the nineteenth
century. "The Last West and Best West" is what Canadians now call
their own North-West. And it certainly is the very last West of all;
for over there, across the Pacific, are the lands of southern Asia from
which the first emigrants began moving West so many thousand years ago.
Thus the circuit of the World and its migrations is now complete; and
we can at last look round and learn the whole story, from Farthest East
to Farthest West.

Most of it is an old, old story from the common points of view; and it
has been told over and over again by many different people and in many
different ways. But from one point of view, and that a most important
point, it is newer now than ever. Look a