[673] Wilson’s Prehist. Man, ii. 98; Amer. Asso. Adv. Science, Proc., 1856, p. 214; Séance annuelle de la Soc. des Antiq. du Nord, May 14, 1859; H. W. Haynes in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan., 1888, p. 56. The Monhegan inscription, as examined by the late C. W. Tuttle and J. Wingate Thornton, was held to be natural markings (Mag. Amer. Hist., ii. 308; Pulpit of the Revolution, 410). Charles Rau cites a striking instance of the way in which the lively imagination of Finn Magnusen has misled him in interpreting weather cracks on a rock in Sweden (Mag. Amer. Hist., ii. 83).
[674] N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., 1854, p. 185.
[675] Antiquitates Americanæ, 335, 371, 401; Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct., 1868, p. 13; W. J. Miller’s Wampanoag Indians.
[676] Cf. list of inscribed rocks in the Proceedings (vol. ii.) of the Davenport Acad. of Natural Sciences.
[677] The stone with its inscription early attracted attention, but Danforth’s drawing of 1680 is the earliest known. Cotton Mather, in a dedicatory epistle to Sir Henry Ashurst, prefixed to his Wonderful Works of God commemorated (Boston, 1690), gave a cut of a part of the inscription; and he communicated an account with a drawing of the inscription to the Royal Society in 1712, which appears in their Philosophical Transactions. Dr. Isaac Greenwood sent another draft to the Society of Antiquaries in London in 1730, and their Transactions in 1732 has this of Greenwood. In 1768 Professor Stephen Sewall of Cambridge made a copy of the natural size, which was sent in 1774 by Professor James Winthrop to the Royal Society. Dr. Stiles says that Sewall sent it to Gebelin, of the French Academy, whose members judged them to be Punic characters. Stiles himself, in 1783, in an election sermon delivered at Hartford, spoke of “the visit by the Phœnicians, who charged the Dighton Rock and other rocks in Narragansett Bay with Punic inscriptions remaining to this day, which last I myself have repeatedly seen and taken off at large.” Cf. Thornton’s Pulpit of the Revolution, p. 410. The Archæologia (London, viii. for 1786) gave various drawings, with a paper by the Rev. Michael Lort and some notes by Charles Vallancey, in which the opinion was expressed that the inscription was the work of a people from Siberia, driven south by hordes of Tartars. Professor Winthrop in 1788 filled the marks, as he understood them, with printer’s ink, and in this way took an actual impression of the inscription. His copy was engraved in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (vol. ii. for 1793). It was this copy by Winthrop which Washington in 1789 saw at Cambridge, when he pronounced the inscription as similar to those made by the Indians, which he had been accustomed to see in the western country during his life as a surveyor. Cf. Belknap Papers, Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., ii. 76, 77, 81; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., x. 114. In 1789 there was also presented to the Academy a copy made by Joseph Gooding under the direction of Francis Baylies (Belknap Papers, ii. 160). In the third volume of the Academy’s Memoirs there are papers on the inscription by John Davis and Edward A. Kendall; Davis (1807) thinking it a representation of an Indian deer hunt, and Kendall later, in his Travels (vol. ii. 1809), assigns it to the Indians. This description is copied in Barber’s Historical Collections of Mass. (p. 117). In 1812 a drawing was made by Job Gardner, and in 1825 there was further discussion in the Mémoires de la Société de Géographie de Paris, and in the Hist. of New York by Yates and Moulton. In 1831 there was a cut in Ira Hill’s Antiquities of America explained (Hagerstown, Md.) This was in effect the history of the interest in the rock up to the appearance of Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanæ, in which for the first time the inscription was represented as being the work of the Northmen. This belief is now shared by few, if any, temperate students. The exuberant Anderson thinks that the rock removes all doubt of the Northmen discovery (America not discovered by Columbus, pp. 21, 23, 83). The credulous Gravier has not a doubt. Cf. his Notice sur le roc de Dighton et le séjour des Scandinaves en Amérique au commencement du XIe siècle (Nancy, 1875), reprinted from the Compte Rendu, Congrès des Américanistes, i. 166, giving Rafn’s drawing. The Rev. J. P. Bodfish accepts its evidence in the Proc. Second Pub. Meeting U. S. Cath. Hist. Soc. (N. Y., 1886).
[678] Pre-Columbian Discovery of America, p. lvii. The Brinley Catalogue, iii. 5378, gives Dammartin’s Explification de la Pierre de Taunston (Paris? 1840-50) as finding in the inscription an astronomical theme by some nation foreign to America. Buckingham Smith believed it to be a Roman Catholic invocation, around which the Indians later put their symbols (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Apr. 29, 1863, p. 32). For discussions more or less extensive see Laing’s Heimskringla, i. 175; Haven in Smithsonian Contributions, 1856, viii. 133, in a paper on the “Archæology of the United States;” Charles Rau in Mag. Amer. Hist., Feb., 1878; Apr., 1879; and in Amer. Antiquarian, i. 38; Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, ii. 97; J. R. Bartlett in Rhode Island Hist. Soc. Proc., 1872-73, p. 70; Haven and others in Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct., 1864, and Oct., 1867; H. H. Bancroft’s Native Races, v. 74; Drake’s N. E. Coast; North American Rev., 1874; Amer. Biblical Repository, July, 1839; Historical Mag., Dec., 1859, and March, 1869; Lelewel’s Moyen Age, iii.; H. W. Williams’s transl. of Humboldt’s Travels, i. 157, etc.
[679] Schoolcraft wavered in his opinion. (Cf. Haven, 133.) He showed Gooding’s drawing to an Algonkin chief, who found in it a record of a battle of the Indians, except that some figures near the centre did not belong to it, and these Schoolcraft thought might be runic, as De Costa has later suggested; but in 1853 Schoolcraft made no reservation in pronouncing it entirely Indian (Indian Tribes, i. 112; iv. 120; pl. 14). Wilson (Prehist. Man, ii., ch. 19) is severe on Schoolcraft. On the general character of Indian rock inscriptions,—some of which in the delineations accompanying these accounts closely resemble the Dighton Rock,—see Mallery in the Bureau of Ethnology, Fourth Report, p. 19; Lieut. A. M. Wheeler’s Report on Indian tribes in Pacific Rail Road Reports, ii.; J. G. Bruff on those of Green River in the Sierra Nevada, in Smithsonian Rept. (1872); American Antiquarian, iv. 259; vi. 119; Western Reserve Hist. Soc. Tracts, nos. 42, 44, 52, 53, 56; T. Ewbank’s No. Amer. Rock Writing (Morrisania, 1866); Brinton’s Myths of the New World, p. 10; Tylor’s Early Hist. Mankind; Dr. Richard Andree’s Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche (Stuttgard, 1878). It is Mallery’s opinion that no “considerable information of value in an historical point of view will be obtained directly from the interpretations of the Pictographs in North America.”
[680] Palfrey, i. p. 57; Higginson’s Larger Hist., 44; Gay’s Pop. Hist., i. 59, 60; Laing’s Heimskringla, i. 183; Charles T. Brooks’s Controversy touching the old stone mill in Newport (Newport, 1851); Peterson’s Rhode Island; Drake’s New England Coast; Schoolcraft’s Indian Tribes, iv. 120; Bishop’s Amer. Manufactures, i. 118; C. S. Pierce in Science, iv. 512, who endeavored by measurement to get at what was the unit of measure used,—an effort not very successful. Cf. references in Poole’s Index, p. 913.
Gaffarel accepts the Rafn view in his Etudes sur la rapports, etc., 282, as does Gravier in his Normands sur la route, p. 168; and De Costa (Pre-Columbian Disc., p. lviii) intimates that “all is in a measure doubtful.” R. G. Hatfield (Scribner’s Monthly, Mar., 1879) in an illustrated paper undertook to show by comparison with Scandinavian building that what is now standing is but the central part of a Vinland baptistery, and that the projection which supported the radiating roof timbers is still to be seen. This paper was answered by George C. Mason (Mag. Amer. Hist., iii. 541, Sept., 1879, with other remarks in the Amer. Architect, Oct. 4, 1879), who rehearsed the views of the local antiquaries as to its connection with Gov. Arnold. Cf. Reminiscences of Newport, by Geo. C. Mason, 1884.
[681] Hist. Mag., Apr., 1862, p. 123; N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., 1865, p. 372; Abner Morse’s Traces of the Ancient Northmen in America (Aug., 1861), with a Supplement (Boston, 1887).