Vinland was also the scene of the famous landing of the Mayflower, bringing its Puritans from England. It was in Cape Cod Bay that she was first moored. After exploring the new country, just as Leif Erikson had done so many generations previously, they chose a place on the west side of the bay and named the little settlement "Plymouth," after the last English port from which they had sailed. Farther north, still in Vinland, they soon founded two other towns, "Salem" and "Boston." Those three settlements have ever since been important centers of energy and intelligence in Massachusetts, as well as memorials of the Norse occupation of Vinland.
On the occasion of a public statue being erected in Boston, Mass., to the memory of Leif Erikson, a committee of the Massachusetts Historical Society formally decided thus: "It is antecedently probable that the Northmen discovered America in the early part of the eleventh century."
Prof. Daniel Wilson, in his learned work Prehistoric Man (ii, 83, 85), thus gives his opinion as to the Norse colony:
With all reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of details, there is the strongest probability in favor of the authenticity of the American Vinland.
The Dighton Stone in the Taunton River, Massachusetts.
Of the Norse colonies in Greenland there are some undoubted remains, one being a stone inscription in runes, proving that it was made before the Reformation, when that mode of writing was forbidden by law. The stone is four miles beyond Upernavik. The inscription, according to Professor Rask, runs thus:
Erling the son of Sigvat, and Enride Oddsoen,
Had cleared the place and raised a mound
On the Friday after Rogation-day;
Rafn, the celebrated Danish archeologist, states as the result of many years' research, that America was repeatedly visited by the Icelanders in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries; that the estuary of the St. Lawrence was their chief station; that they had coasted southward to Carolina, everywhere introducing some Christian civilization among the natives.