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 Xe 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.