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]
NORSE AMERICA.
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).