In old times, I may add, such vagaries were usually saddled upon the Phœnicians, until since Rafn's time the Northmen have taken their place as the pack-horses for all sorts of antiquarian "conjecture."[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 259: See Palfrey's History of New England, vol. i. pp. 57-59; Mason's Reminiscences of Newport, pp. 392-407. Laing (Heimskringla, pp. 182-185) thinks the Yankees must have intended to fool Professor Rafn and the Royal Society of Antiquaries at Copenhagen; "Those sly rogues of Americans," says he, "dearly love a quiet hoax;" and he can almost hear them chuckling over their joke in their club-room at Newport. I am afraid these Yankees were less rogues and more fools than Mr. Laing makes out.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 260: Laing, Heimskringla, vol. i. p. 181.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 261: "Their höfdhu medh sèr allskonar fènadh, thvíat their ætlödhu at byggja landit, ef their mætti that," i. e., "illi omne pecudum genus secum habuerunt, nam terram, si liceret, coloniis frequentare cogitarunt." Rafn, p. 57.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 262: Major, Prince Henry the Navigator, p. 241.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 263: Irving's Life of Columbus, New York, 1828, vol. i. p. 293.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 264: Histoire chronologique de la Nouvelle France, pp. 40, 58; this work, written in 1689 by the Recollet friar Sixte le Tac, has at length been published (Paris, 1888) with notes and other original documents by Eugène Réveillaud. See, also, Læt, Novus Orbis, 39.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 265: John Smith, Generall Historie, 247.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 266: Darwin, Animals and Plants under Domestication, London, 1868, vol. i pp. 27, 77, 84.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 267: The views of Professor Horsford as to the geographical situation of Vinland and its supposed colonization by Northmen are set forth in his four monographs, Discovery of America by Northmen—address at the unveiling of the statue of Leif Eriksen, etc., Boston, 1888; The Problem of the Northmen, Cambridge, 1889; The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, Boston, 1890; The Defences of Norumbega, Boston, 1891. Among Professor Horsford's conclusions the two principal are: 1. that the "river flowing through a lake into the sea" (Rafn, p. 147) is Charles river, and that Leif's booths were erected near the site of the present Cambridge hospital; 2. that "Norumbega"—a word loosely applied by some early explorers to some region or regions somewhere between the New Jersey coast and the Bay of Fundy—was the Indian utterance of "Norbega" or "Norway;" and that certain stone walls and dams at and near Watertown are vestiges of an ancient "city of Norumbega," which was founded and peopled by Northmen and carried on a more or less extensive trade with Europe for more than three centuries.