The next to discuss the question, and in an affirmative spirit, was Charles Hippolyte de Paravey, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne (Feb., 1844), whose paper was published separately as L’Amérique sous le nom de pays de Fou-Sang, est elle citée dès le 5^e siècle de notre ère, dans les grandes annales de la Chine, etc. Discussion ou dissertation abrégée, où l’affirmative est prouvée (Paris, 1844); and in 1847 he published Nouvelles preuves que le pays du Fousang est l’Amérique.[558]

The controversy as between De Guignes and Klaproth was shared, in 1862, by Gustave d’Eichthal, taking the Frenchman’s side, in the Revue Archéologique (vol. ii.), and finally in his Etudes sur les origines Bouddhiques de la civilisation Américaine (Paris, 1865).[559]

In 1870, E. Bretschneider, in his “Fusang, or who discovered America?” in the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal (Foochow, Oct., 1870), contended that the whole story was the fabrication of a lying priest.[560]

In 1875 there was new activity in discussing the question. Two French writers of considerable repute in such studies attracted attention: the one, Lucien Adam, in the Congrès des Américanistes at Nancy (Compte Rendu, i. 145); and the other, Léon de Rosny, entered the discussions at the same session (Ibid. i. p. 131).[561]

The most conspicuous study for the English reader was Charles Godfrey Leland’s Fusang, or The discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist priests in the fifth century (London, 1875).[562]

The Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denis published in the Actes de la Soc. d’Ethnographie (1869), vol. vi., and later in the Comptes Rendus of the French Academy of Inscriptions, a Mémoire sur le pays connu des anciens Chinois sous le nom de Fousang, et sur quelques documents inédits pour servir à l’identifier, which was afterwards published separately in Paris, 1876, in which he assented to the American theory. The student of the subject need hardly go, however, beyond E. P. Vining’s An inglorious Columbus: or, Evidence that Hwui Shăn and a party of Buddhist monks from Afghanistan discovered America in the fifth century a.d. (New York, 1885), since the compiler has made it a repository of all the essential contributions to the question from De Guignes down. He gives the geographical reasons for believing Fusang to be Mexico (ch. 20), comparing the original description of Fusang with the early accounts of aboriginal Mexico, and rehearsing the traditions, as is claimed, of the Buddhists still found by the Spaniards pervading the memories of the natives, and at last (ch. 37) summarizing all the grounds of his belief.[563]

The consideration of the Polynesian route as a possible avenue for peopling America involves the relations of the Malays to the inhabitants of the Oceanic Islands and the capacity of early man to traverse long distances by water.[564]

E. B. Tylor has pointed out the Asiatic relations of the Polynesians in the Journal of the Anthropological Inst., xi. 401. Pickering, in the ethnological chart accompanying the reports of the Wilkes Expedition, makes the original people of Chili and Peru to be Malay, and he connects the Californians with the Polynesians.[565]

The earliest elaboration of this theory was in John Dunmore Lang’s View of the origin and migrations of the Polynesian nations, demonstrating their ancient discovery and progressive settlement of the continent of America (London, 1834; 2d ed., Sydney, 1877). /Francis A. Allen has advanced similar views at the meetings of the Congrès des Américanistes at Luxembourg and at Copenhagen.[566]

The Mongol theory of the occupation of Peru, which John Ranking so enthusiastically pressed in his Historical researches on the conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco, in the thirteenth century, by the Mongols, accompanied with elephants; and the local agreement of history and tradition, with the remains of elephants and mastodontes found in the new world [etc.] (London, 1827), implies that in the thirteenth century the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan sent a fleet against Japan, which, being scattered in a storm, finally in part reached the coasts of Peru, where the son of Kublai Khan became the first Inca.[567] The book hardly takes rank as a sensible contribution to ethnology, and Prescott says of it that it embodies “many curious details of Oriental history and manners in support of a whimsical theory.”[568]

B. Ireland the Great, or White Man’s Land.—The claims of the Irish to have preceded the Norse in Iceland, and to have discovered America, rest on an Icelandic saga, which represents that in the tenth century Are Marson, driven off his course by a gale, found a land which became known as Huitramannaland, or white man’s land, or otherwise as Irland it Mikla.[569] This region was supposed by the colonists of Vinland to lie farther south, which Rafn[570] interprets as being along the Carolina coast,[571] and others have put it elsewhere, as Beauvois in Canada above the Great Lakes; and still others see no more in it than the pressing of some storm-driven vessel to the Azores[572] or some other Atlantic island. The story is also coupled, from another source, with the romance of Bjarni Asbrandson, who sailed away from Iceland and from a woman he loved, because the husband and relatives of the woman made it desirable that he should. Thirty years later, the crew of another ship, wrecked on a distant coast,[573] found that the people who took them prisoners spoke Irish,[574] and that their chieftain was this same renegade, who let them go apparently for the purpose of conveying some token by which he would be remembered to the Thurid of his dreams. Of course all theorists who have to deal with these supposed early discoveries by Europeans connect, each with his own pet scheme, the prevailing legendary belief among the American Indians that white men at an early period made their appearance on the coasts all the way from Central America to Labrador.[575] Whether these strange comers be St. Patrick,[576] St. Brandan even, or some other Hibernian hero, with his followers, is easily to be adduced, if the disposing mind is inclined.

There have been of late years two considerable attempts to establish the historical verity of some of these alleged Irish visits.[577]

C. The Norse in Iceland.—The chief original source for the Norse settlement of Iceland is the famous Landnamabók,[578] which is a record by various writers, at different times, of the partitioning and ownership of lands during the earliest years of occupation.[579] This and other contemporary manuscripts, including the Heimskringla of Snorre Sturleson and the great body of Icelandic sagas, either at first hand or as filtered through the leading writers on Icelandic history, constitute the material out of which is made up the history of Iceland, in the days when it was sending its adventurous spirits to Greenland and probably to the American main.[580]

Respecting the body of the sagas, Laing (Heimskringla, i. 23) says: “It does not appear that any saga manuscript now existing has been written before the fourteenth century, however old the saga itself may be. It is known that in the twelfth century, Are Frode, Sæmund and others began to take the sagas out of the traditionary state and fix them in writing; but none of the original skins appear to have come down to our time, but only some of the numerous copies of them.” Laing (p. 24) also instances numerous sagas known to have existed, but they are not now recognized;[581] and he gives us (p. 30) the substance of what is known respecting the writers and transcribers of this early saga literature. It is held that by the beginning of the thirteenth century the sagas of the discoveries and settlements had all been put in writing, and thus the history, as it exists, of mediæval Iceland is, as Burton says (Ultima Thule, i. 237), more complete than that of any European country.[582]

Among the secondary writers, using either at first or second hand the early MS. sources, the following may be mentioned:—

One of the earliest brought to the attention of the English public was A Compendious Hist. of the Goths, Swedes and Vandals, and other northern powers (London, 1650 and 1658), translated in an abridged form from the Latin of Olaus Magnus, which had been for more than a hundred years the leading comprehensive authority on the northern nations. The Svearikes Historia (Stockholm, 1746-62) of Olof von Dalin and the similar work of Sven Lagerbring (1769-1788), covering the early history of the north, are of interest for the comparative study of the north, rather than as elucidating the history of Iceland in particular.[583] More direct aid will be got from Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (London edition, 1847) and from Wheaton’s Northmen. More special is the Histoire de l’Island of Xavier Marmier; and the German historian F. C. Dahlman also touches Iceland with particular attention in his Geschichte von Dänemark bis zur Reformation, mit Inbegriff von Norwegen und Island (Hamburg, 1840-43).

A history of more importance than any other yet published, and of the widest scope, was that of Sweden by E. J. Geijer (continued by F. F. Carlson), which for the early period (down to 1654) is accessible in English in a translation by J. H. Turner (London, 1845).[584]

Prominent among the later school of northern historians, all touching the Icelandic annals more or less, have been Peter Andreas Munch in his Det Norske Folks Historie (Christiania, 1852-63);[585] N. M. Petersen in his Danmarks Historie i Hedenold (Copenhagen, 1854-55); K. Keyser in his Norges Historie (Christiania, 1866-67); J. E. Sars in his Udsigt over den Norske Historie (Christiania, 1873-77); but all are surpassed by Konrad Maurer’s Island von seiner ersten Entdeckung bis zum Untergange des Freistaates,—a.d. 800-1262 (Munich, 1874), published as commemorating the thousandth anniversary of the settlement of Iceland, and it has the repute of being the best book on early Icelandic history.[586]

The change from Paganism to Christianity necessarily enters into all the histories covering the tenth and eleventh centuries; but it has special treatment in C. Merivale’s Conversion of the Northern Nations (Boyle lectures,—London, 1866).[587]

There is a considerable body of the later literature upon Iceland, retrospective in character, and affording the results of study more or less patient as to the life in the early Norse days in Iceland.[588]

G.W. Dasent’s introduction to his Story of Burnt Njal (Edinburgh, 1861)[589] and his Norsemen in Iceland (Oxford Essays, 1858) give what Max Müller (Chips from a German Workshop, ii. 191) calls “a vigorous and lively sketch of primitive northern life;” and are well supplemented by Sabine Baring-Gould’s Iceland, its scenes and sagas (London, 1863 and later), and Richard F. Burton’s Ultima Thule, with an historical introduction (London, 1875).[590]

D. Greenland and its Ruins.—The sagas still serve us for the colonization of Greenland, and of particular use is that of Eric the Red.[591] The earliest to use these sources in the historic spirit was Torfæus in his Historia Gronlandiæ Antiquæ (1715).[592] The natural successor of Torfæus and the book upon which later writers mostly depend is David Crantz’s Historie von Grönland, enthaltend die Beschreibung des Landes und der Einwohner, insbesonders die Geschichten der dortigen Mission. Nebst Fortsetzung (Barby, 1765-70, 3 vols.). An English translation appeared in London in 1767, and again, though in an abridged form with some changes, in 1820.[593]

Crantz says of his own historic aims, referring to Torfæus and to the accounts given by the Eskimos of the east coast, that he has tried to investigate “where the savage inhabitants came from, and how the ancient Norwegian inhabitants came to be so totally extirpated,” while at the same time he looks upon the history of the Moravian missions as his chiefest theme.

The principal source for the identification of the ruins of Greenland is the work compiled by Rafn and Finn Magnusen, Grönlands Historiske Mindesmærker,[594] with original texts and Danish versions. Useful summaries and observations will be found in the paper by K. Steenstrup on “Old Scandinavian ruins in South Greenland” in the Compte Rendu, Congrès des Américanistes (Copenhagen, 1883, p. 108), and in one on “Les Voyages des Danois au Greenland” in the same (p. 196). Steenstrup’s paper is accompanied by photographs and cuts, and a map marking the site of the ruins. The latest account of them is by Lieut. Holm in the Meddelelser om Grönland (Copenhagen, 1883), vol. vi. Other views and plans showing the arrangement of their dwellings and the curious circular ruins,[595] which seems to have usually been near their churches, are shown in the Baron Nordenskjöld’s Den andra dicksonska expeditionen till Grönland, dess inre isöken och dess ostkust, utförd år 1883 (Stockholm, 1885), the result of the ripest study and closest contact.

We need also to scan the narratives of Hans Egede and Graah. Parry found in 1824, on an island on the Baltic coast, a runic stone, commemorating the occupancy of the spot in 1135 (Antiquitates Americanæ; Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, 248); and in 1830 and 1831 other runes were found on old gravestones (Rink’s Danish Greenland, app. v.; Laing’s Heimskringla, i. 151). These last are in the Museum at Copenhagen. Most of these imperishable relics have been found in the district of Julianeshaab.[596]

E. The Vinland Voyages.—What Leif and Karlsefne knew they experienced, and what the sagas tell us they underwent, must have just the difference between a crisp narrative of personal adventure and the oft-repeated and embellished story of a fireside narrator, since the traditions of the Norse voyages were not put in the shape of records till about two centuries had elapsed, and we have no earlier manuscript of such a record than one made nearly two hundred years later still. It is indeed claimed that the transmission by tradition in those days was a different matter in respect to constancy and exactness from what it has been known to be in later times; but the assumption lacks proof and militates against well-known and inevitable processes of the human mind.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]