Chapter II: Pre-Columbian Explorations (2)

In regard to the credibility of the sagas, the northern writers recognize the change which came over the oral traditionary chronicles when the romancing spirit was introduced from the more southern countries, at a time while the copies of the sagas which we now have were making, after having been for so long a time orally handed down; but they are not so successful in making plain what influence this imported spirit had on particular sagas, which we are asked to receive as historical records. They seem sometimes to forget that it is not necessary to have culture, heroes, and impossible occurrences to constitute a myth. A blending of history and myth prompts Horn to say “that some of the sagas were doubtless originally based on facts, but the telling and re-telling have changed them into pure myths.” The unsympathetic stranger sees this in stories that the patriotic Scandinavians are over-anxious to make appear as genuine chronicles.[597] It is certainly unfortunate that the period of recording the older sagas coincides mainly with the age of this southern romancing influence.[598] It is a somewhat anomalous condition when long-transmitted oral stories are assigned to history, and certain other written ones of the age of the recorded sagas are relegated to myth. If we would believe some of the northern writers, what appears to be difference in kind of embellishment was in reality the sign that separated history from fable.[599] Of the interpreters of this olden lore, Torfæus has been long looked upon as a characteristic exemplar, and Horn[600] says of his works that they are “perceptibly lacking in criticism. Torfæus was upon the whole incapable of distinguishing between myth and history.”[601]

After a cut in Nordenskjöld’s _Exped. till Grönland_, p. 371, following the _Meddel. om Grönland_, vi. 98.]

Erasmus Rask, in writing to Wheaton in

1831,[602] enumerates eight of the early manuscripts which mention Vinland and the voyages; but Rafn, in 1837, counted eighteen such manuscripts.[603] We know little or nothing about the recorders or date of any of these copies, excepting the _Heimskringla_,[604] nor how long they had existed orally. Some of them were doubtless put into writing soon after the time when such recording was introduced, and this date is sometimes put as early as A.D. 1120, and sometimes as late as the middle or even end of that century. Meanwhile, Adam of Bremen, in the latter part of the eleventh century (A.D. 1073), prepared his _Historia Ecclesiastica_, an account of the spread of Christianity in the north, in which he says he was told by the Danish king that his subjects had found a country to the west, called Winland.[605] A reference is also supposed to be made in the _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Ordericus Vitalis, written about the middle (say A.D. 1140) of the twelfth century. But it was not until somewhere between A.D. 1385 and 1400 that the oldest Icelandic manuscript which exists, touching the voyages, was compiled,—the so-called _Codex Flatoyensis_,[606] though how much earlier copies of it were made is not known. It is in this manuscript that we find the saga of Olaf Tryggvesson,[607] wherein the voyages of Leif Ericson are described, and it is only by a comparison of circumstances detailed here and in other sagas that the year A.D. 1000 has been approximately determined as the date.[608] In this same codex we find the saga of Eric the Red, one of the chief narratives depended upon by the advocates of the Norse discovery, and in Rask’s judgment it “appears to be somewhat fabulous, written long after the event, and taken from tradition.”[609]

_Environs of_ Julianehaab THE ÖSTER BYGD _or_ Eastern Settlement

Reference: _Norse ruins or traces of them_

NOTE.—The above is a reproduction of a corner map in the map of _Danish Greenland_ given in Rink’s book of that name. The sea in the southwest corner of the cut is not shaded; but shading is given to the interior ice field on the northern and northeastern part of the map. Rink gives a similar map of the Westerbygd.]

The other principal saga is that of Thorfinn Karlsefne, which with some differences and with the same lack of authenticity, goes over the ground covered by that of Eric the Red.[610]

Of all the early manuscripts, the well-known _Heimskringla_ of Snorro Sturleson (b. 1178; d. 1241), purporting to be a history of the Norse kings down to A.D. 1177, is the most entitled to be received as an historical record, and all that it says is in these words: “Leif also found Vinland the Good.”[611]

Saxo Grammaticus (d. about 1208) in his _Historia Danica_ begins with myths, and evidently follows the sagas, but does not refer to them except in his preface.[612]

HISTORIA VINLANDIÆ ANTIQVÆ. seu Partis Americæ Septentrionalis, ubi Nominis ratio recensetur, situs terræ ex dierumbrumalium spatio expenditur, soli fertilitas & incolarum barbaries, peregrinorum temporarius incolatus & gesta, vicinarum terrarum nomina & facies ex Antiqvitibus Islandicis in lucem producta exponuntur per THORMODUM TORFÆUM Rerum Norvegicarum Historiographum Regium.

HAVNIÆ, Ex Typographéo Regiæ Majest, & Universit, 1705. Impensis Authoris. ]

For about five hundred years after this the stories attracted little or no attention.[613] We have seen that Peringskiöld produced these sagas in 1697. Montanus in his _Nieuwe en onbekende Weereld_ (Amsterdam, 1671), and Campanius, in 1702, in his _Kort Beskrifning om Provincien Nya Swerige uti America_ (Stockholm),[614] gave some details. The account which did most, however, to revive an interest in the subject was that of Torfæus in his _Historia Vinlandiæ Antiquæ_ (Copenhagen, 1705), but he was quite content to place the scene of his narrative in America, without attempting to identify localities.[615] The voyages were, a few years later, the subject of a dissertation at the University of Upsala in Sweden.[616] J. P. Cassell, of Bremen, discusses the Adam of Bremen story in another Latin essay, still later.[617]

About 1750, Pieter Kalm, a Swede, brought the matter to the attention of Dr. Franklin, as the latter remembered twenty-five years later, when he wrote to Samuel Mather that “the circumstances gave the account a great appearance of authenticity.”[618] In 1755, Paul Henri Mallet (1730-1807), in his _Histoire de Dannemarc_, determines the localities to be Labrador and Newfoundland.[619]

In 1769, Gerhard Schöning, in his _Norges Riges Historie_, established the scene in America. Robertson, in 1777, briefly mentions the voyages in his _Hist. of America_ (note xvii.), and, referring to the accounts given by Peringskiöld, calls them rude and confused, and says that it is impossible to identify the landfalls, though he thinks Newfoundland may have been the scene of Vinland. This is also the belief of J. R. Forster in his _Geschichte der Entdeckungen im Norden_ (Frankfurt, 1784).[620] M. C. Sprengel, in his _Geschichte der Europäer in Nordamerika_ (Leipzig, 1782), thinks they went as far south as Carolina. Pontoppidan’s _History of Norway_ was mainly followed by Dr. Jeremy Belknap in his _American Biography_ (Boston, 1794), who recognizes “circumstances to confirm and none to disprove the relations.” In 1793, Muñoz, in his _Historia del Nuevo Mundo_, put Vinland in Greenland. In 1796 there was a brief account in Fritsch’s _Disputatio historico-geographica in qua quæritur utrum veteres Americam noverint necne_. H. Stenström published at Lund, in 1801, a short dissertation, _De America Norvegis ante tempora Columbi adita_. Boucher de la Richarderie, in his _Bibliothèque Universelle des Voyages_ (Paris, 1808), gives a short account, and cites some of the authorities. Some of the earlier American histories of this century, like Williamson’s _North Carolina_, took advantage of the recitals of Torfæus and Mallet. Ebenezer Henderson’s _Residence in Iceland_ (1814-15)[621] presented the evidence anew. Barrow, in his _Voyages to the Arctic Regions_ (London, 1818), places Vinland in Labrador or Newfoundland; but J. W. Moulton, in his _History of the State of New York_ (N. Y., 1824), brings that State within the region supposed to have been visited.

A writer more likely to cause a determinate opinion in the public mind came in Washington Irving, who in his _Columbus_ (London, 1828) dismissed the accounts as untrustworthy; though later, under the influence of Wheaton and Rafn, he was inclined to consider them of possible importance; and finally in his condensed edition he thinks the facts “established to the conviction of most minds.”[622] Hugh Murray, in his _Discoveries and Travels in North America_ (London, 1829), regards the sagas as an authority; but he doubts the assigning of Vinland to America. In 1830, W. D. Cooley, in his _History of Maritime and Inland Discovery_,[623] thought it impossible to shake the authenticity of the sagas.

While Henry Wheaton was the minister of the United States at Copenhagen, and having access to the collections of that city, he prepared his _History of the Northmen_, which was published in London and Philadelphia in 1831.[624] The high character of the man gave unusual force to his opinions, and his epitome of the sagas in his second chapter contributed much to increase the interest in the Northmen story. He was the first who much impressed the New England antiquaries with the view that Vinland should be looked for in New England; and a French version by Paul Guillot, issued in Paris in 1844, is stated to have been “revue et augmentée par l’auteur, avec cartes, inscriptions, et alphabet runique.”[625] The opinions of Wheaton, however, had no effect upon the leading historian of the United States, nor have any subsequent developments caused any change in the opinion of Bancroft, first advanced in 1834, in the opening volume of his _United States_, where he dismissed the sagas as “mythological in form and obscure in meaning; ancient yet not contemporary.” He adds that “the intrepid mariners who colonized Greenland could easily have extended their voyage to Labrador; but no clear historical evidence establishes the natural probability that they accomplished the passage.”[626] All this is omitted by Bancroft in his last revised edition; but a paragraph in his original third volume (1840), to the intent that, though “Scandinavians may have reached the shores of Labrador, the soil of the United States has not one vestige of their presence,” is allowed to remain,[627] and is true now as when first written.

The chief apostle of the Norseman belief, however, is Carl Christian Rafn, whose work was accomplished under the auspices of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen.[628]

Rafn was born in 1795, and died at Copenhagen in 1864.[629] At the University, as well as later as an officer of its library, he had bent his attention to the early Norse manuscripts and literature,[630] so that in 1825 he was the natural founder of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries; and much of the value of its long series of publications is due to his active and unflagging interest.[631] The summit of his American interest, however, was reached in the great folio _Antiquitates Americanæ_,[632] in which he for the first time put the mass of original Norse documents before the student, and with a larger accumulation of proofs than had ever been adduced before, he commented on the narratives and came to conclusions respecting traces of their occupancy to which few will adhere to-day.

The effect of Rafn’s volume, however, was marked, and we see it in the numerous presentations of the subject which followed; and every writer since has been greatly indebted to him.

Alexander von Humboldt in his _Examen Critique_ (Paris, 1837) gave a synopsis of the sagas, and believed the scene of the discoveries to be between Newfoundland and New York; and in his _Cosmos_ (1844) he reiterated his views, holding to “the undoubted first discovery by the Northmen as far south as 41° 30’.”[633]

Opposite is a section of Rafn’s map in the _Antiquitates Americanæ_, giving his identification of the Norse localities. This and the other map by Rafn is reproduced in his _Cabinet d’Antiquités Américaines_ (Copenhagen, 1858). The map in the atlas of St. Martin’s _Hist. de la Géographie_ does not track them below Newfoundland. The map in J. T. Smith’s _Northmen in New England_ (Boston, 1839) shows eleven voyages to America from Scandinavia, A.D. 861-1285. Cf. map in Wilhelmi’s _Island_, etc. (Heidelberg, 1842).]

Two books which for a while were the popular treatises on the subject were the immediate outcome of Rafn’s book. The first of these was _The Northmen in New England_, giving the stories in the form of a dialogue, by Joshua Toulmin Smith (Boston, 1839), which in a second edition (London, 1842) was called _The Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century_.

The other book was largely an English version of parts of Rafn’s book, translating the chief sagas, and reproducing the maps: Nathaniel Ludlow Beamish’s _Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century_ (London, 1841).[634] Two German books owed almost as much to Rafn, those of K. Wilhelmi[635] and K. H. Hermes.[636] Prescott, at this time publishing the third volume of his _Mexico_ (1843), accords to Rafn the credit of taking the matter out of the category of doubt, but he hesitates to accept the Dane’s identifications of localities; but R. H. Major, in considering the question in the introduction to his _Select letters of Columbus_ (1847), finds little hesitation in accepting the views of Rafn, and thinks “no room is left for disputing the main fact of discovery.”

When Hildreth, in 1849, published his _United States_, he ranged himself, with his distrusts, by the side of Bancroft but J. Elliot Cabot, in making a capital summary of the evidence in the _Mass. Quarterly Review_ (vol. ii.), accords with the believers, but places the locality visited about Labrador and Newfoundland. Haven in his _Archæology of the United States_ (Washington, 1856) regards the discovery as well attested, and that the region was most likely that of Narragansett Bay. C. W. Elliott in his _New England History_ (N. Y., 1857) holds the story to be “in some degree mythical.” Palfrey in his _Hist. of New England_ (Boston, 1858) goes no farther than to consider the Norse voyage as in “nowise unlikely,” and Oscar F. Peschel in his _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_ (Stuttgart, 1858) is on the affirmative side. Paul K. Sinding goes over the story with assent in his _History of Scandinavia_,—a book not much changed in his _Scandinavian Races_ (N. Y., 1878).[637] Eugène Beauvois did little more than translate from Rafn in his _Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique,—fragments de Sagas Islandaises traduits pour la première fois en français_ (Paris, 1859)—an extract from the _Revue Orientale et Américaine_ (vol. ii.).[638]

Professor Daniel Wilson, of Toronto, has discussed the subject at different times, and with these conclusions: “With all reasonable doubts as to the accuracy of details, there is the strongest probability in favor of the authenticity of the American Vinland.... The data are the mere vague allusions of a traveller’s tale, and it is indeed the most unsatisfactory feature of the sagas that the later the voyages the more confused and inconsistent their narratives become in every point of detail.”[639]

Dr. B. F. De Costa’s first book on the subject was his _Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen, illustrated by Translations from the Icelandic Sagas, edited with notes and a general introduction_ (Albany, 1868). It is a convenient gathering of the essential parts of the sagas; but the introduction rather opposes than disproves some of the “feeble paragraphs, pointed with a sneer,” which he charges upon leading opponents of the faith. Professor J. L. Diman, in the _North American Review_ (July, 1869), made De Costa’s book the occasion of an essay setting forth the grounds of a disbelief in the historical value of the sagas. De Costa replied in _Notes on a Review_, etc. (Charlestown, 1869). In the same year, Dr. Kohl, following the identifications of Rafn, rehearsed the narratives in his _Discovery of Maine_ (Portland, 1869), and tracked Karlsefne through the gulf of Maine. De Costa took issue with him on this latter point in his Northmen in Maine (Albany, 1870).[640] In the introduction to his _Sailing Directions of Henry Hudson_, De Costa argues that these mariners’ guides are the same used by the Northmen, and in his _Columbus and the Geographers of the North_ (Hartford, 1872,—cf. _Amer. Church Review_, xxiv. 418) he recapitulates the sagas once more with reference to the knowledge which he supposes Columbus to have had of them. Paul Gaffarel, in his _Etudes sur les rapports de l’Amérique et de l’ancien Continent avant Colomb_ (Paris, 1869), entered more particularly into the evidence of the commerce of Vinland and its relations to Europe.

Gabriel Gravier, another French author, was rather too credulous in his _Découverte de l’Amérique par les normands au X^e Siècle_ (Paris, 1874), when he assumed with as much confidence as Rafn ever did everything that the most ardent advocate had sought to prove.[641]

There were two American writers soon to follow, hardly less intemperate. These were Aaron Goodrich, in _A History of the Character and Achievements of the so-called Christopher Columbus_ (N. Y., 1874), who took the full complement of Rafn’s belief with no hesitancy; and Rasmus B. Anderson in his _America not discovered by Columbus_ (Chicago, 1874; improved, 1877; again with Watson’s bibliography, 1883),[642] in which even the Skeleton in Armor is made to play a part. Excluding such vagaries, the book is not without use as displaying the excessive views entertained in some quarters on the subject. The author is, we believe, a Scandinavian, and shows the tendency of his race to a facility rather than felicity in accepting evidence on this subject.

The narratives were first detailed among our leading general histories when the _Popular History of the United States_ of Bryant and Gay appeared in 1876. The claims were presented decidedly, and in the main in the directions indicated by Rafn; but the wildest pretensions of that antiquary were considerately dismissed.

During the last score years the subject has been often made prominent by travellers like Kneeland[643] and Hayes,[644] who have recapitulated the evidence; by lecturers like Charles Kingsley;[645] by monographists like Moosmüller;[646] by the minor historians like Higginson,[647] who has none of the fervor of the inspired identifiers of localities, and Weise,[648] who is inclined to believe the sea-rovers did not even pass Davis’s Straits; and by contributors to the successive sessions of the Congrès des Américanistes[649] and to other learned societies.[650]

The question was brought to a practical issue in Massachusetts by a proposition raised—at first in Wisconsin—by the well-known musician Ole Bull, to erect in Boston a statue to Leif Ericson.[651] The project, though ultimately carried out, was long delayed, and was discouraged by members of the Massachusetts Historical Society on the ground that no satisfactory evidence existed to show that any spot in New England had been reached by the Northmen.[652] The sense of the society was finally expressed in the report of their committee, Henry W. Haynes and Abner C. Goodell, Jr., in language which seems to be the result of the best historical criticism; for it is not a question of the fact of discovery, but to decide how far we can place reliance on the details of the sagas. There is likely to remain a difference of opinion on this point. The committee say: “There is the same sort of reason for believing in the existence of Leif Ericson that there is for believing in the existence of Agamemnon,—they are both traditions accepted by later writers; but there is no more reason for regarding as true the details related about his discoveries than there is for accepting as historic truth the narratives contained in the Homeric poems. It is antecedently probable that the Northmen discovered America in the early part of the eleventh century; and this discovery is confirmed by the same sort of historical tradition, not strong enough to be called evidence, upon which our belief in many of the accepted facts of history rests.”[653]

In running down the history of the literature of the subject, the present aim has been simply to pick out such contributions as have been in some way significant, and reference must be made to the bibliographies for a more perfect record.[654]

Irrespective of the natural probability of the Northmen visits to the American main, other evidence has been often adduced to support the sagas. This proof has been linguistic, ethnological, physical, geographical, and monumental.

Nothing could be slenderer than the alleged correspondences of languages, and we can see in Horsford’s _Discovery of America by Northmen_ to what a fanciful extent a confident enthusiasm can carry it.[655]

The ethnological traces are only less shadowy. Hugo Grotius[656] contended that the people of Central America were of Scandinavian descent. Brasseur found remnants of Norse civilization in the same region.[657] Viollet le Duc[658] discovers great resemblances in the northern religious ceremonials to those described in the _Popul Vuh_. A general resemblance did not escape the notice of Humboldt. Gravier[659] is certain that the Aztec civilization is Norse.[660] Chas. Godfrey Leland claims that the old Norse spirit pervades the myths and legends of the Algonkins, and that it is impossible not to admit that there must have been at one time “extensive intercourse between the Northmen and the Algonkins;” and in proof he points out resemblances between the Eddas and the Algonkin mythology.[661] It is even stated that the Micmacs have a tradition of a people called Chenooks, who in ships visited their coast in the tenth century.

The physical and geographical evidences are held to exist in the correspondences of the coast line to the descriptions of the sagas, including the phenomena of the tides[662] and the length of the summer day.[663] Laing and others, who make no question of the main fact, readily recognize the too great generality and contradictions of the descriptions to be relied upon.[664]

George Bancroft, in showing his distrust, has said that the advocates of identification can no farther agree than to place Vinland anywhere from Greenland to Africa.[665]

A MAP OF VINLAND from accounts contained in Old Northern M.S.S. by CHARLES C. RAFN

NOTE.—The above map is a fac-simile of one of C. C. Rafn’s maps. Cf. the maps in Smith, Beamish, Gravier, Slafter, Preble’s _Amer. Flag_, etc. ]

The earliest to go so far as to establish to a certainty[666] the sites of the sagas was Rafn, who placed them on the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, wherein nearly all those have followed him who have thought it worth while to be thus particular as to headland and bay.

]

In applying the saga names they have, however, by no means agreed, for Krossanes is with some Point Alderton, at the entrance of Boston Harbor, and with others the Gurnet Head; the island where honey dew was found is Nantucket with Rafn, and with De Costa an insular region, Nauset, now under water near the elbow of Cape Cod;[668] the Vinland of Rafn is in Narragansett Bay, that of Dr. A. C. Hamlin is at Merry Meeting Bay on the coast of Maine,[669] and that of Horsford is north of Cape Cod,[670]—not to mention other disagreements of other disputants.

We get something more tangible, if not more decisive, when we come to the monumental evidences. DeWitt Clinton and Samuel L. Mitchell found little difficulty at one time in making many people believe that the earthworks of Onondaga were Scandinavian. A pretended runic inscription on a stone said to have been found in the Grave Creek mound was sedulously ascribed to the Northmen.[671] What some have called a runic inscription exists on a rock near Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, which is interpreted “Hako’s son addressed the men,” and is supposed to commemorate the expedition of Thorfinn in A.D. 1007.[672] A rock on the little islet of Menana, close to Monhegan, on the coast of Maine, and usually referred to as the Monhegan Rock, bears certain weather marks, and there have been those to call them runes.[673] A similar claim is made for a rock in the Merrimac Valley.[674] Rafn describes such rocks as situated in Tiverton and Portsmouth Grove, R. I., but the markings were Indian, and when Dr. S. A. Green visited the region in 1868 some of them had disappeared.[675]

NOTE.—The opposite plate is reduced from one in the _Antiq. Americanæ_. They show the difficulty, even before later weathering, of different persons in discerning the same things on the rock, and in discriminating between fissures and incisions. Col. Garrick Mallery (_4th Rept. Bureau of Ethnology_, p. 250) asserts that the inscription has been “so manipulated that it is difficult now to determine the original details.” The drawings represented are enumerated in the text. Later ones are numerous. Rafn also gives that of Dr. Baylies and Mr. Gooding in 1790, and that made for the Rhode Island Hist. Society in 1830. The last has perhaps been more commonly copied than the others. Photographs of late years are common; but almost invariably the photographer has chalked what he deems to be the design,—in this they do not agree, of course,—in order to make his picture clearer. I think Schoolcraft in making his daguerreotype was the first to do this. The most careful drawing made of late years is that by Professor Seager of the Naval Academy, under the direction of Commodore Blake; and there is in the Cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society a MS. essay on the rock, written at Blake’s request by Chaplain Chas. R. Hale of the U. S. Navy. Haven disputes Blake’s statement that a change in the river’s bed more nearly submerges the rock at high tide than was formerly the case. Cf. _Am. Antiq. Soc._ Proc., Oct., 1864, p. 41, where a history of the rock is given; and in Wilson’s _Prehistoric Man_, ii. 93.]

The most famous of all these alleged memorials[676] is the Dighton Rock, lying in the tide on the side of Taunton River, in the town of Berkeley, in Massachusetts.[677] Dr. De Costa thinks it possible that the central portion may be runic. This part is what has been interpreted to mean that Thorfinn with 151 men took possession of the country, and it is said to be this portion of the inscription which modern Indians discard when giving their interpretations.[678] That it is the work of the Indian of historic times seems now to be the opinion common to the best trained archæologists.[679]

Rafn was also the first to proclaim the stone tower now standing at Newport, R. I., as a work of the Northmen; but the recent antiquaries without any exception worth considering, believe that the investigations have shown that it was erected by Governor Arnold of Rhode Island as a windmill, sometime between 1670 and 1680; and Palfrey in his _New England_ is thought to have put this view beyond doubt in showing the close correspondence in design of the tower to a mill at Chesterton, in England.[680]

Certain hearthstones which were discovered over twenty-five years ago under a peat bed on Cape Cod were held at the time to be a Norse relic.[681] In 1831 there was exhumed in Fall River, Mass., a skeleton, which had with it what seemed to be an ornamental belt made of metal tubes, formed by rolling fragments of flat brass and an oblong plate of the same metal,—not of bronze, as is usually said,—with some arrow-heads, cut evidently from the same material. The other concomitants of the burial indicated an Indian of the days since the English contact. The skeleton attracted notice in this country by being connected with the Norsemen in Longfellow’s ballad, _The Skeleton in Armor_, and Dr. Webb sent such an account of it to the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries that it was looked upon as another and distinct proof of the identification of Vinland. Later antiquaries have dismissed all beliefs of that nature.[682]

There is not a single item of all the evidence thus advanced from time to time which can be said to connect by archæological traces the presence of the Northmen on the soil of North America south of Davis’ Straits. Arguments of this kind have been abandoned except by a few enthusiastic advocates.

* * * * *

That the Northmen voyaging to Vinland encountered natives, and that they were called Skraelings, may be taken as a sufficiently broad statement in the sagas to be classed with those concomitants of the voyages which it is reasonable to accept. Sir William Dawson (_Fossil Men_, 49) finds it easy to believe that these natives were our red Indians; and Gallatin saw no reason to dissociate the Eskimos with other American tribes.[683] That they were Eskimos seems to be the more commonly accepted view.[684]

That the climate of the Atlantic coast of the United States and the British provinces was such as was favorable to the present Arctic dwellers is held to be shown by such evidences as tusks of the walrus found in phosphate beds in South Carolina. Rude implements found in the interglacial Jersey drift have been held by C. C. Abbott to have been associated with a people of the Eskimo stock, and some have noted that palæolithic implements found in Pennsylvania closely resemble the work of the modern Eskimos (_Amer. Antiquarian_, i. 10).[685] Dall remarks upon implements of Innuit origin being found four hundred miles south of the present range of the Eskimos of the northwest coast (_Contributions to Amer. Ethnology_, i. p. 98). Charlevoix says that Eskimos were occasionally seen in Newfoundland in the beginning of the last century; and ethnologists recognize to-day the same stock in the Eskimos of Labrador and Greenland.

After a likeness given by Nordenskjöld in his _Exped. till Grönland_, p. 121.]

The best authority on the Eskimos is generally held to be Hinrich Rink, and he contends that they formerly occupied the interior of the continent, and have been pressed north and across Behring’s Straits.[686] W. H. Dall holds similar views.[687] C. R. Markham, who dates their first appearance in Greenland in 1349, contends, on the other hand, that they came from the west (Siberia) along the polar regions (Wrangell Land), and drove out the Norse settlers in Greenland.[688] The most active of the later students of the Eskimos is Dr. Franz Boas, now of New York, who has discussed their tribal boundaries.[689]

=F.= THE LOST GREENLAND COLONIES.—After intercourse with the colonies in Greenland ceased, and definite tradition in Iceland had died out, and when the question of the re-discovery should arise, it was natural that attention should first be turned to that coast of Greenland which lay opposite Iceland as the likelier sites of the lost colonies, and in this way we find all the settlements placed in the maps of the sixteenth century. The Archbishop Erik Walkendorf, of Lund, in the early part of that century had failed to persuade the Danish government to send an expedition. King Frederick II was induced, however, to send one in 1568; but it accomplished nothing; and again in 1579 he put another in command of an Englishman, Jacob Allday, but the ice prevented his landing. A Danish navigator was more successful in 1581; but the coast opposite Iceland yielded as yet no traces of the Norse settlers. Frobisher’s discovery of the west coast seems to have failed of recognition among the Danes; but they with the rest of Europe did not escape noting the importance of the explorations of John Davis in 1585-86, through the straits which bear his name. It now became the belief that the west settlement must be beyond Cape Farewell. In 1605, Christian IV of Denmark sent a new expedition under Godske Lindenow; but there was a Scotchman in command of one of the three ships, and Jacob Hall, who had probably served under Davis, went as the fleet pilot. He guided the vessels through Davis’s Straits. But it was rather the purpose of Lindenow to find a northwest passage than to discover a lost colony; and such was mainly the object which impelled him again in 1606, and inspired Karsten Rikardsen in 1607. Now and for some years to come we have the records of voyages made by the whalers to this region, and we read their narratives in Purchas and in such collections of voyages as those of Harris and Churchill.[690] They yield us, however, little or no help in the problem we are discussing. In 1670 and 1671 Christian V sent expeditions with the express purpose of discovering the lost colonies; but Otto Axelsen, who commanded, never returned from his second voyage, and we have no account of his first.

The mission of the priest Hans Egede gave the first real glimmer of light.[691] He was the earliest to describe the ruins and relics observable on the west coast, but he continued to regard the east settlements as belonging to the east coast, and so placed them on the map. Anderson (Hamburg, 1746) went so far as to place on his map the cathedral of Gardar in a fixed location on the east coast, and his map was variously copied in the following years.

In 1786 an expedition left Copenhagen to explore the east coast for traces of the colonies, but the ice prevented the approach to the coast, and after attempts in that year and in 1787 the effort was abandoned. Heinrich Peter von Eggers, in his _Om Grönlands österbygds sande Beliggenhed_ (1792), and _Ueber die wahre Lage des alten Ostgrönlands_ (Kiel, 1794), a German translation, first advanced the opinion that the eastern colony as well as the western must have been on the west coast, and his views were generally accepted; but Wormskjöld in the _Skandinavisk Litteraturselskab’s Skrifter_, vol. x. (Copenhagen, 1814), still adhered to the earlier opinions, and Saabye still believed it possible to reach the east coast.

[Harvard College Library copy.]]

Some years later (1828-31) W. A. Graah made, by order of the king of Denmark, a thorough examination of the east coast, and in his _Undersögelses Reise til Ostkysten af Grönland_ (Copenhagen, 1832)[692] he was generally thought to establish the great improbability of any traces of a colony ever existing on that coast. Of late years Graah’s conclusions have been questioned, for there have been some sites of buildings discovered on the east side.[693] The Reverend J. Brodbeck, a missionary, described some in _The Moravian Quarterly_, July and Aug., 1882. Nordenskjöld has held that when the east coast is explored from 65° to 69°, there is a chance of discovering the site of an east colony.[694]

R. H. Major, in a paper (_Journal Roy. Geog. Soc._, 1873, p. 184) on the site of the lost colony, questioned Graah’s conclusions, and gave a sketch map, in which he placed its site near Cape Farewell; and he based his geographical data largely upon the chorography of Greenland and the sailing directions of Ivan Bardsen, who was probably an Icelander living in Greenland some time in the fifteenth century.[695]

=G.= MADOC AND THE WELSH.—Respecting the legends of Madoc, there are reports, which Humboldt (_Cosmos_, Bohn, ii. 610) failed to verify, of Welsh bards rehearsing the story before 1492,[696] and of statements in the early Welsh annals. The original printed source is in Humfrey Lloyd’s _History of Cambria, now called Wales, written in the British language_ [by Caradoc] _about 200 years past_ (London, 1584).[697] The book contained corrections and additions by David Powell, and it was in these that the passages of importance were found, and the supposition was that the land visited lay near the Gulf of Mexico. Richard Hakluyt, in his _Principall Navigations_, took the story from Powell, and connected the discovery with Mexico in his edition of 1589, and with the West Indies in that of 1600 (iii. p. 1),—and there was not an entire absence of the suspicion that it was worth while to establish some sort of a British claim to antedate the Spanish one established through Columbus.[698]

The linguistic evidences were not brought into prominence till after one Morgan Jones had fallen among the Tuscaroras[699] in 1660, and found, as he asserted, that they could understand his Welsh. He wrote a statement of his experience in 1685-6, which was not printed till 1740.[700]

During the eighteenth century we find Campanius in his _Nye Swerige_ (1702) repeating the story; Torfæus (_Hist. Vinlandiæ_, 1705) not rejecting it; Carte (_England_, 1747) thinking it probable; while Campbell (_Admirals_, 1742), Lyttleton (_Henry the Second_, 1767), and Robertson (_America_, 1777) thought there was no ground, at least, for connecting the story with America.

It was reported that in 1764 a man, Griffeth, was taken by the Shawnees to a tribe of Indians who spoke Welsh.[701] In 1768, Charles Beatty published his _Journal of a two months’ Tour in America_ (London), in which he repeated information of Indians speaking Welsh in Pennsylvania and beyond the Mississippi, and of the finding of a Welsh Bible among them.

In 1772-73, David Jones wandered among the tribes west of the Ohio, and in 1774, at Burlington, published his _Journal of two visits_, in which he enumerates the correspondence of words which he found in their tongues with his native Welsh.[702]

Without noting other casual mentions, some of which will be found in Paul Barron Watson’s bibliography (in Anderson’s _America not discovered by Columbus_, p. 142), it is enough to say that towards the end of the century the papers of John Williams[703] and George Burder[704] gave more special examination to the subject than had been applied before.

After a cut in _The Mirror of Literature_, etc. (London, 1823), vol. i. p. 177, showing a vessel then recently exhumed in Kent, and supposed to be of the time of Edward I, or the thirteenth century. The vessel was sixty-four feet long.]

The renewed interest in the matter seems to have prompted Southey to the writing of his poem _Madoc_, though he refrained from publishing it for some years. If one may judge from his introductory note, Southey held to the historical basis of the narrative. Meanwhile, reports were published of this and the other tribes being found speaking Welsh.[705] In 1816, Henry Kerr printed at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, his _Travels through the Western interior of the United States, 1808-16, with some account of a tribe whose customs are similar to those of the ancient Welsh_. In 1824, Yates and Moulton (_State of New York_) went over the ground rather fully, but without conviction. Hugh Murray (_Travels in North America_, London, 1829) believes the Welsh went to Spain. In 1834, the different sides of the case were discussed by Farcy and Warden in Dupaix’s _Antiquités Méxicaines_. Some years later the publication of George Catlin[706] probably gave more conviction than had been before felt,[707] arising from his statements of positive linguistic correspondences in the language of the so-called White[708] Mandans[709] on the Missouri River, the similarity of their boats to the old Welsh coracles, and other parallelisms of custom. He believed that Madoc landed at Florida, or perhaps passed up the Mississippi River. His conclusions were a reinforcement of those reached by Williams.[710] The opinion reached by Major in his edition of _Columbus’ Letters_ (London, 1847) that the Welsh discovery was quite possible, while it was by no means probable, is with little doubt the view most generally accepted to-day; while the most that can be made out of the claim is presented with the latest survey in B. F. Bowen’s _America discovered by the Welsh in 1170_ A.D. (Philad., 1876). He gathers up, as helping his proposition, such widely scattered evidences as the Lake Superior copper mines and the Newport tower, both of which he appropriates; and while following the discoverers from New England south and west, he does not hesitate to point out the resemblance of the Ohio Valley mounds[711] to those depicted in Pennant’s _Tour of Wales_; and he even is at no loss for proofs among the relics of the Aztecs.[712]

=H.= THE ZENI AND THEIR MAP.—Something has been said elsewhere (Vol. III. p. 100) of the influence of the Zeni narrative and its map, in confusing Frobisher in his voyages. The map was reproduced in the Ptolemy of 1561, with an account of the adventures of the brothers, but it was so far altered as to dissever Greenland from Norway, of which the Zeni map had made it but an extension.[713]

The story got further currency in Ramusio (1574, vol. ii.), Ortelius (1575), Hakluyt (1600, vol. iii.), Megiser’s _Septentrio Novantiquus_ (1613), Purchas (1625), Pontanus’ _Rerum Danicarum_ (1631), Luke Fox’s _North-West Fox_ (1633), and in De Laet’s Notæ (1644), who, as well as Hornius, _De Originibus Americanis_ (1644), thinks the story suspicious. It was repeated by Montanus in 1671, and by Capel, _Vorstellungen des Norden_, in 1676. Some of the features of the map had likewise become pretty constant in the attendant cartographical records. But from the close of the seventeenth century for about a hundred years, the story was for the most part ignored, and it was not till 1784 that the interest in it was revived by the publications of Forster[714] and Buache,[715] who each expressed their belief in the story.

A more important inquiry in behalf of the narrative took place at Venice in 1808, when Cardinal Zurla republished the map in an essay, and marked out the track of the Zeni on a modern chart.[716]

In 1810, Malte-Brun accorded his belief in the verity of the narrative, and was inclined to believe that the Latin books found in Estotiland were carried there by colonists from Greenland.[717] A reactionary view was taken by Biddle in his _Sebastian Cabot_, in 1831, who believed the publication of 1558 a fraud; but the most effective denial of its authenticity came a few years later in sundry essays by Zahrtmann.[718]

[After a photograph kindly furnished by himself at the editor’s request.—ED.]]

The story got a strong advocate, after nearly forty years of comparative rest, when R. H. Major, of the map department of the British Museum, gave it an English dress and annexed a commentary, all of which was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1873. In this critic’s view, the good parts of the map are of the fourteenth century, gathered on the spot, while the false parts arose from the misapprehensions of the young Zeno, who put together the book of 1558.[719] The method of this later Zeno was in the same year (1873) held by Professor Konrad Maurer to be hardly removed from a fraudulent compilation of other existing material. There has been a marked display of learning, of late years, in some of the discussions.

[From a recent photograph. There is another engraved likeness in the second volume of his _Vega_.]]

Cornelio Desimoni, the archivist of Genoa, has printed two elaborate papers.[720] The Danish archivist Frederik Krarup published (1878) a sceptical paper in the _Geografisk Tidsskrift_ (ii. 145).[721] The most exhaustive examination, however, has come from a practical navigator, the Baron A. E. Nordenskjöld, who in working up the results of his own Arctic explorations was easily led into the intricacies of the Zeno controversy. The results which he reaches are that the Zeni narratives are substantially true; that there was no published material in 1558 which could have furnished so nearly an accurate account of the actual condition of those northern waters; that the map which Zahrtmann saw in the University library at Copenhagen, and which he represented to be an original from which the young Zeno of 1558 made his pretended original, was in reality nothing but the Donis map in the Ptolemy of 1482, while the Zeno map is much more like the map of the north made by Claudius Clavis in 1427, which was discovered by Nordenskjöld in a codex of Ptolemy at Nancy.[722]

* * * * *

Since Nordenskjöld advanced his views there have been two other examinations: the one by Professor Japetus Steenstrup of Copenhagen,[723] and the other by the secretary of the Danish Geographical Society, Professor Ed. Erslef, who offered some new illustrations in his _Nye Oplysninger om Broedrene Zenis Rejser_ (Copenhagen, 1885).[724]

Among those who accept the narratives there is no general agreement in identifying the principal geographical points of the Zeno map. The main dispute is upon Frislanda, the island where the Zeni were wrecked. That it was Iceland has been maintained by Admiral Irminger,[725] and Steenstrup (who finds, however, the text not to agree with the map), while the map accompanying the _Studi biografici e bibliografici sulla storia della geografia in Italia_ (Rome, 1882) traces the route of the Zeni from Iceland to Greenland, under 70° of latitude.

On the other hand, Major has contended for the Faröe islands, arguing that while the engraved Zeno map shows a single large island, it might have been an archipelago in the original, with outlines run together by the obscurities of its dilapidation, and that the Faröes by their preserved names and by their position correspond best with the Frislanda of the Zeni.[726] Major’s views have been adopted by most later writers, perhaps, and a similar identification had earlier been made by Lelewel,[727] Kohl,[728] and others.

The identification of Estotiland involves the question if the returned fisherman of the narrative ever reached America. It is not uncommon for even believers in the story to deny that Estotiland and Drogeo were America. That they were parts of the New World was, however, the apparent belief of Mercator and of many of the cartographers following the publication of 1558, and of such speculators as Hugo Grotius, but there was little common consent in their exact position.[729]

=I.= ALLEGED JEWISH MIGRATION.—The identification of the native Americans with the stock of the lost tribes of Israel very soon became a favorite theory with the early Spanish priests settled in America. Las Casas and Duran adopted it, while Torquemada and Acosta rejected it. André Thevet, of mendacious memory, did not help the theory by espousing it. It was approved in J. F. Lumnius’s _De extremo Dei Judicio et Indorum vocatione, libri iii._ (Venice and Antwerp, 1569);[730] and a century later the belief attracted new attention in the _Origen de los Americanos de Manasseh Ben Israel_, published at Amsterdam in 1650.[731] It was in the same year (1650) that the question received the first public discussion in English in Thomas Thorowgood’s _Jewes in America, or, Probabilities that the Americans are of that Race. With the removall of some contrary reasonings, and earnest desires for effectuall endeavours to make them Christian_ (London, 1650).[732] Thorowgood was answered by Sir Hamon L’Estrange in _Americans no Iewes, or Improbabilities that the Americans are of that race_ (London, 1652). The views of Thorowgood found sympathy with the Apostle Eliot of Massachusetts; and when Thorowgood replied to L’Estrange he joined with it an essay by Eliot, and the joint work was entitled _Iewes in America, or probabilities that those Indians are Judaical, made more probable by some additionals to the former conjectures: an accurate discourse is premised of Mr. John Eliot (who preached the gospel to the natives in their own language) touching their origination, and his Vindication of the planters_ (London, 1660). What seems to have been a sort of supplement, covering, however, in part, the same ground, appeared as _Vindiciæ Judæcorum, or a true account of the Jews, being more accurately illustrated than heretofore_, which includes what is called “The learned conjectures of Rev. Mr. John Eliot” (32 pp.). Some of the leading New England divines, like Mayhew and Mather,[733] espoused the cause with similar faith. Roger Williams also was of the same opinion. William Penn is said to have held like views. The belief may be said to have been general, and had not died out in New England when Samuel Sewall, in 1697, published his _Phænomena quædam Apocalyptica ad aspectum Novi Orbis Configurata_.[734]

After the middle of the last century we begin to find new signs of the belief. Charles Beatty, in his _Journal of a two months’ tour with a view of promoting religion among the frontier inhabitants of Pennsylvania_ (Lond., 1768), finds traces of the lost tribes among the Delawares, and repeats a story of the Indians long ago selling the same sacred book to the whites with which the missionaries in the end aimed to make them acquainted. Gerard de Brahm and Richard Peters, both familiar with the Southern Indians, found grounds for accepting the belief. The most elaborate statement drawn from this region is that of James Adair, who for forty years had been a trader among the Southern Indians.[735] Jonathan Edwards in 1788 pointed out in the Hebrew some analogies to the native speech.[736] Charles Crawford in 1799 undertook the proof.[737] In 1816 Elias Boudinot, a man eminent in his day, contributed further arguments.[738] Ethan Smith based his advocacy largely on the linguistic elements.[739] A few years later an Englishman, Israel Worsley, worked over the material gathered by Boudinot and Smith, and added something.[740] A prominent American Jew, M. M. Noah, published in 1837 an address on the subject which hardly added to the weight of testimony.[741] J. B. Finlay, a mulatto missionary among the Wyandots, was satisfied with the Hebrew traces which he observed in that tribe.[742] Geo. Catlin, working also among the Western Indians, while he could not go to the length of believing in the lost tribes, was struck with the many analogies which he saw.[743] The most elaborate of all expositions of the belief was made by Lord Kingsborough in his _Mexican Antiquities_ (1830-48).[744] Since this book there has been no pressing of the question with any claims to consideration.[745]

=J.= POSSIBLE EARLY AFRICAN MIGRATIONS.—These may have been by adventure or by helpless drifting, with or without the Canaries as a halting-place. The primitive people of the Canaries, the Guanches, are studied in Sabin Berthelot’s _Antiquités Canariennes_ (Paris, 1879) and A. F. de Fontpertuis’ _L’archipel des Canaries, et ses populations primitives_, also in the _Revue de Géographie_, June, 1882, not to mention earlier histories of the Canary Islands (see Vol. II. p. 36). Retzius of Stockholm traces resemblances in the skulls of the Guanches and the Caribs (_Smithsonian Rept._, 1859, p. 266). Le Plongeon finds the sandals of the statue Chac-mool, discovered by him in Yucatan, to resemble those of the Guanches (Salisbury’s _Le Plongeon in Yucatan_, 57).

The African and even Egyptian origin of the Caribs has had some special advocates.[746] Peter Martyr, and Grotius following him, contended for the people of Yucatan being Ethiopian Christians. Stories of blackamoors being found by the early Spaniards are not without corroboration.[747] The correspondence of the African and South American flora has been brought into requisition as confirmatory.[748]

* * * * *

THE CARTOGRAPHY OF GREENLAND.

The oldest map yet discovered to show any part of Greenland, and consequently of America,[749] is one found by Baron Nordenskjöld attached to a Ptolemy Codex in the Stadtbibliothek at Nancy. He presented a colored fac-simile of it in 1883 at the Copenhagen Congrès des Américanistes, in his little brochure _Trois Cartes_. It was also used in illustration of his paper on the Zeni Voyages, published both in Swedish and German. It will be seen by the fac-simile given herewith, and marked with the author’s name, Claudius Clavus, that “Gronlandia Provincia” is an extension of a great arctic region, so as to lie over against the Scandinavian peninsula of Europe, with “Islandia,” or Iceland, midway between the two lands. Up to the time of this discovery by Nordenskjöld, the map generally recognized as the oldest to show Greenland is a Genovese portolano, preserved in the Pitti Palace at Florence, about which there is some doubt as to its date, which is said to be 1417 by Santarem (_Hist. de la Cartog._, iii., p. xix), but Lelewel (_Epilogue_, p. 167) is held to be trustier in giving it as 1447.[750] It shows how little influence the Norse stories of their Greenland colonization exerted at this time on the cartography of the north, that few of the map-makers deemed it worth while to break the usual terminal circle of the world by including anything west or beyond Iceland. It was, further, not easy to convince them that Greenland, when they gave it, lay in the direction which the Sagas indicated. The map of Fra Mauro, for instance, in 1459 cuts off a part of Iceland by its incorrigible terminal circle, as will be seen in a bit of it given herewith, the reader remembering as he looks at it that the bottom of the segment is to the north.[751] We again owe to Nordenskjöld the discovery of another map of the north, _Tabula Regionum Septentrionalium_, which he found in a Codex of Ptolemy in Warsaw a few years since, and which he places about 1467. The accompanying partial sketch is reproduced from a fac-simile kindly furnished by the discoverer. The peninsula of “Gronlandia,” with its indicated glaciers, is placed with tolerable accuracy as the western extremity of an arctic region, which to the north of Europe is separated from the Scandinavian peninsula by a channel from the “Mare Gotticum” (Baltic Sea), which sweeps above Norway into the “Mare Congelatum.” The confused notions arising from an attempt by the compiler of the map to harmonize different drafts is shown by his drawing a second Greenland (“Engronelant”) to his “Norbegia,” or Norway, and placing just under it the “Thile”[752] of the ancients, which he makes a different island from “Islandia,” placed in proper relations to his larger Greenland.

A few years later, or perhaps about the same time, and before 1471, the earliest engraved map which shows Greenland is that of Nicolas Donis, in the Ulm edition of Ptolemy in 1482. It will be seen from the little sketch which is annexed that the same doubling of Greenland is adhered to.[753] With the usual perversion put upon the Norse stories, Iceland is made to lie due west of Greenland, though not shown in the present sketch.