Note.—The above map is a fac-simile of one of C. C. Rafn’s maps. Cf. the maps in Smith, Beamish, Gravier, Slafter, Preble’s Amer. Flag, etc.
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.
DIGHTON ROCK.[667]
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]
