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]

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.