INSCRIPTION ON DIGHTON ROCK.
Note.—The opposite plate is reduced from one in the Antiq. Americanæ. They show the difficulty, even before later weathering, of different persons in discerning the same things on the rock, and in discriminating between fissures and incisions. Col. Garrick Mallery (4th Rept. Bureau of Ethnology, p. 250) asserts that the inscription has been “so manipulated that it is difficult now to determine the original details.” The drawings represented are enumerated in the text. Later ones are numerous. Rafn also gives that of Dr. Baylies and Mr. Gooding in 1790, and that made for the Rhode Island Hist. Society in 1830. The last has perhaps been more commonly copied than the others. Photographs of late years are common; but almost invariably the photographer has chalked what he deems to be the design,—in this they do not agree, of course,—in order to make his picture clearer. I think Schoolcraft in making his daguerreotype was the first to do this. The most careful drawing made of late years is that by Professor Seager of the Naval Academy, under the direction of Commodore Blake; and there is in the Cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society a MS. essay on the rock, written at Blake’s request by Chaplain Chas. R. Hale of the U. S. Navy. Haven disputes Blake’s statement that a change in the river’s bed more nearly submerges the rock at high tide than was formerly the case. Cf. Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct., 1864, p. 41, where a history of the rock is given; and in Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, ii. 93.
The most famous of all these alleged memorials[676] is the Dighton Rock, lying in the tide on the side of Taunton River, in the town of Berkeley, in Massachusetts.[677] Dr. De Costa thinks it possible that the central portion may be runic. This part is what has been interpreted to mean that Thorfinn with 151 men took possession of the country, and it is said to be this portion of the inscription which modern Indians discard when giving their interpretations.[678] That it is the work of the Indian of historic times seems now to be the opinion common to the best trained archæologists.[679]
Rafn was also the first to proclaim the stone tower now standing at Newport, R. I., as a work of the Northmen; but the recent antiquaries without any exception worth considering, believe that the investigations have shown that it was erected by Governor Arnold of Rhode Island as a windmill, sometime between 1670 and 1680; and Palfrey in his New England is thought to have put this view beyond doubt in showing the close correspondence in design of the tower to a mill at Chesterton, in England.[680]
Certain hearthstones which were discovered over twenty-five years ago under a peat bed on Cape Cod were held at the time to be a Norse relic.[681] In 1831 there was exhumed in Fall River, Mass., a skeleton, which had with it what seemed to be an ornamental belt made of metal tubes, formed by rolling fragments of flat brass and an oblong plate of the same metal,—not of bronze, as is usually said,—with some arrow-heads, cut evidently from the same material. The other concomitants of the burial indicated an Indian of the days since the English contact. The skeleton attracted notice in this country by being connected with the Norsemen in Longfellow’s ballad, The Skeleton in Armor, and Dr. Webb sent such an account of it to the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries that it was looked upon as another and distinct proof of the identification of Vinland. Later antiquaries have dismissed all beliefs of that nature.[682]
There is not a single item of all the evidence thus advanced from time to time which can be said to connect by archæological traces the presence of the Northmen on the soil of North America south of Davis’ Straits. Arguments of this kind have been abandoned except by a few enthusiastic advocates.
That the Northmen voyaging to Vinland encountered natives, and that they were called Skraelings, may be taken as a sufficiently broad statement in the sagas to be classed with those concomitants of the voyages which it is reasonable to accept. Sir William Dawson (Fossil Men, 49) finds it easy to believe that these natives were our red Indians; and Gallatin saw no reason to dissociate the Eskimos with other American tribes.[683] That they were Eskimos seems to be the more commonly accepted view.[684]
That the climate of the Atlantic coast of the United States and the British provinces was such as was favorable to the present Arctic dwellers is held to be shown by such evidences as tusks of the walrus found in phosphate beds in South Carolina. Rude implements found in the interglacial Jersey drift have been held by C. C. Abbott to have been associated with a people of the Eskimo stock, and some have noted that palæolithic implements found in Pennsylvania closely resemble the work of the modern Eskimos (Amer. Antiquarian, i. 10).[685] Dall remarks upon implements of Innuit origin being found four hundred miles south of the present range of the Eskimos of the northwest coast (Contributions to Amer. Ethnology, i. p. 98). Charlevoix says that Eskimos were occasionally seen in Newfoundland in the beginning of the last century; and ethnologists recognize to-day the same stock in the Eskimos of Labrador and Greenland.