[634] This book is for the sagas the basis of the most useful book on the subject, Edmund Farwell Slafter’s Voyages of the Northmen to America. Including extracts from Icelandic Sagas relating to Western voyages by Northmen in the 10th and 11th centuries in an English translation by Nathaniel Ludlow Beamish; with a synopsis of the historical evidence and the opinion of professor Rafn as to the places visited by the Scandinavians on the coast of America. With an introduction (Boston, 1877), published by the Prince Society. Slafter’s opinion is that the narratives are “true in their general outlines and important features.”
[635] Island, Huitramannaland, Grönland und Vinland (Heidelberg, 1842).
[636] Die Entdeckung von Amerika durch die Isländer im zehnten und eilften Jahrhundert (Braunschweig, 1844). Cf. E. G. Squier’s Discovery of America by the Northmen, a critical review of the works of Hermes, Rafn and Beamish (1849).
[637] Cf. his paper in the Quebec Lit. and Hist. Soc. Trans., 1865.
[638] Beauvois also made at a later period other contributions to the subject: Les derniers vestiges du Christianisme prêchés du Xe au XIVe siècles dans le Markland et le Grande-Irlande, les porte-croix de la Gaspésie at de l’Arcadie (Paris, 1877) which appeared originally in the Annales de philosophie Chrétiennes, Apr., 1877; and Les Colonies européennes du Markland at de l’Escociland au XIVe siècle et les vestiges qui en subsistèrent jusqu’aux XVIe et XVIIe siècle (Luxembourg, 1878), being taken from the Compte Rendu of the Luxembourg meeting of the Congrès des Américanistes.
[639] Prehistoric Man, 3d ed., ii. 83, 85. Cf. also his Historic Footprints in America, extracted from the Canadian Journal, Sept., 1864.
[640] Joseph Williamson, in the Hist. Mag., Jan., 1869 (x. 30), sought to connect with the Northmen certain ancient remains along the coast of Maine.
[641] He was rather caustically taken to account by Henry Cabot Lodge, in the No. Am. Review, vol. cxix. Cf. Michel Hardy’s Les Scandinaves dans l’Amérique du Nord (Dieppe, 1874). An April hoax which appeared in a Washington paper in 1867, about some runes discovered on the Potomac, had been promptly exposed in this country (Hist. Mag., Mar. and Aug., 1869), but it had been accepted as true in the Annuaire de la Société Américaine in 1873, and Gaffarel (Etudes sur les Rapports de l’Amérique avant Columbus, Paris, 1869, p. 251) and Gravier (p. 139) was drawn into the snare. (Cf. Whittlesey’s Archæol. frauds in the Western Reserve Hist. Soc. Tracts, no. 9, and H. W. Haynes in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan., 1888, p. 59.) In a later monograph, Les Normands sur la route des Indes (Rouen, 1880), Gravier, while still accepting the old exploded geographical theories, undertook further to prove that the bruits of the Norse discoveries instigated the seamen of Normandy to similar ventures, and that they visited America in ante-Columbian days.
[642] There is an authorized German version, Die erste Entdeckung von Amerika, by Mathilde Mann (Hamburg, 1888).
[643] American in Iceland (Boston, 1876).