The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
Professor Eben Norton Horsford, of Cambridge, undertook the search, and was able to identify to his entire satisfaction the site of Leif’s, or Karlsefne’s booths, in his own neighbourhood on the Charles river. First appeared in 1889 The Problem of the Northmen; and in the following year, in choicest typography, and amplitude of attractive illustrations, The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, at Watertown on the River Charles. There the ephemeral booths of the old winterers in Vinland had left enduring traces after a lapse of more than eight centuries. The discoverer, resolved to arrest “Time’s decaying fingers,” which had thus far been laid with such unwonted gentleness on the pioneer relics, has marked the spot with a memorial tower, and an elaborately inscribed tablet, one clause of which runs thus: “River, The Charles, discovered by Leif Erikson 1000 a.d. Explored by Thorwald, Leif’s Brother, 1003 a.d. Colonised by Thorfinn Karlsefni 1007 a.d. First Bishop Erik Gnupson 1121 a.d.”
The entire evidence has been readduced with minutest critical accuracy in The Finding of Wineland the Good: the History of the Icelandic Discovery of America, by the late gifted Arthur Middleton Reeves. His verdict is thus briefly stated: “There is no suggestion in Icelandic records of a permanent occupation of the county; and after the exploration at the beginning of the eleventh century, it is not known that Wineland was ever again visited by Icelanders, although it would appear that a voyage thither was attempted in the year 1121, but with what result is not known.”[6] In the Codex Frisianus is an apt heading which might, better than a more lengthy inscription, have given expression to the pleasant fancy that the footprints of Leif Ericson’s followers had been recovered on the banks of the Charles river, “Fundit Vinland Gotha”—Vineland the Good found! Maps old and new illustrate the topography of the newly-assigned site; and among the rest, one which specially aims at reproducing the most definite feature of the old narrative is thus titled:—“River flowing through a lake into the sea; Vinland of the Northmen; site of Leif’s houses.” To his own satisfaction, at least, it is manifest that the author has identified the site.
But a great deal more than Leif’s booths is involved. It is the discovery of the ancient city of Norumbega, of which also the inscribed tablet makes due record; including the statement, set forth more fully in the printed text, that the name is only an Indian transmutation of “Norbega, the ancient form of Norvega, Norway, to which Vinland was subject!” The name, though probably unfamiliar to most modern readers, was once as well known as that of Utopia, or El Dorado. One of Sir John Hawkins’ fellow-voyagers claimed to have seen the city of Norumbega still standing in 1568: a gorgeous Indian town outvying the capital of Montezuma, and resplendent in pearls and gold. Hakluyt proposed its recolonisation; Sir Humphrey Gilbert went in search of it; and it figures both as a city and a country on maps familiar to older generations than the founders of New England. Above all, Milton has given it a place in the Tenth Book of his Paradise Lost. When the Divine Creator is represented as readapting this world to a fallen race—
Some say he bid his Angels turn askance
The poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun’s axle … … …
. … . Now from the north
Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore,
Bursting their brazen dungeon, arm’d with ice,
And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw,
Boreas …
which seems to imply very Icelandic and Arctic associations of the Miltonic muse. But the gentle New England poet, Whittier, who had sung of his Christian knight in vain quest of the marvellous city, thus writes in sober prose to its modern discoverer: “I had supposed that the famed city of Norumbega was on the Penobscot when I wrote my poem some years ago; but I am glad to think of it as on the Charles, in our own Massachusetts.” This work of rearing anew on the banks of the river Charles the metropolis of Vinland the Good may be best entrusted to the poets of New England.
All praise is due to the enthusiastic editors of the Antiquitates Americanæ for their reproduction of the original records on which the history and the legends of Vinland rest. They found only too willing recipients of the theories and assumptions with which they supplemented the genuine narrative; nor has the uncritical spirit of credulous deduction wholly ceased. In the untimely death of Professor Munch, the historian of Norway, the University of Christiana lost a ripe and acutely critical scholar in the very flower of his years. But in Dr. Gustav Storm a successor has been found not unworthy to fill his place, and represent the younger generation of Northern antiquaries, who have now taken in hand, in a more critical spirit, yet with no less enthusiasm, the work so well begun by Rafn, Finn Magnusen, and Sveinbiorn Egilsson. In the same year in which Leif Ericson’s statue was set up in Boston, and all the old enthusiasm for the identification of the lost Vinland was revived, there appeared in the Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord a series of Studies on the Vineland Voyages, from the pen of Professor Storm, embodying a critical analysis of the evidence relating to the Vinland voyages, which is treated still more fully in his Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, Vinlands Geografi og Ethnographi. The whole is now available, along with valuable additions, including photographic facsimiles illustrative of the original MSS., in Reeves’ Finding of Wineland the Good.[7] The evidence has to be gleaned from two independent series of narratives: the one the Icelandic Sagas and other embodiments of the Vinland tradition; the other the more amplified, but less reliable narratives of Norwegian chroniclers. The earliest Icelandic accounts are derived directly or indirectly from Ari froði, more particularly referred to on a later page, whose date as an author is given as about 1120; thereby marking the transmission of the narrative to a younger generation before it was committed to writing. Ari froði, i.e. the learned, derived the story from his paternal uncle Thorkell Gellisson of Helgufell, who lived in the latter half of the eleventh century; and so was a contemporary of Adam of Bremen, who, when resident at the Danish Court, about the year 1070, obtained the information relating to the Northern regions which he embodied in his Descriptio insularum aquilonis. Ari’s uncle, Thorkell, is said to have spoken, when in Greenland, with a man who, in the year 985, had accompanied Erik the Red on his expedition from Iceland; so that the authority is good, if the narrative were sufficiently ample; but unfortunately, though Ari’s notes of what he learned from his uncle are still extant in the Libellus Islandorum, they are exceedingly meagre. The Vinland explorations had no such importance for the men of that age as they possess for us, and are accordingly dealt with as a very secondary matter. Professor Gustav Storm, in his Studies on the Vineland Voyages, notes that Thorkell seems to have told his nephew most about the colonisation of Greenland. In Professor Storm’s Studies, and in the exhaustive Finding of Wineland the Good, by Arthur Middleton Reeves, the entire bearings of the evidence, and the relative value of the various ancient authorities, are discussed with minute care; and lead alike to the inevitable conclusion that any assignment of a site for the lost Vinland, either on Rhode Island, or on any part of the New England coast, is untenable. The deductions of Professor Rafn from the same evidence were accepted as a final verdict, until the too eager confirmation of his Rhode Island correspondents brought them into discredit. Now when we undertake an unbiassed review of them, it is manifest that too much weight has been attached to his estimate of distances measured by the vague standard of a day’s sail of a rude galley dependent on wind and tide. This Professor Rafn assumed as equivalent to twenty-four geographical miles. But very slight consideration suffices to show that, with an indefinite starting-point, and only a vague indication of the direction of sailing, with the unknown influences of wind and tide, any such arbitrary deduction of a definite measurement from the log of the old Northmen is not only valueless, but misleading.
A reconsideration of the evidence furnished by the references to the fauna and flora of the different points touched at, shows that others of Professor Rafn’s deductions are equally open to correction. Helluland, a barren region, of large stone slabs, with no other trace of life than the Arctic fox, presented the same aspect as Labrador still offers to the eye of the voyager. But there is no need to traverse the entire Canadian and New England coasts before a region can be found answering to the descriptions of a forest-clad country, of numerous deer, or even of the vine, as noted by the old explorers from Greenland. To the eye of the Greenlander, the Markland, or forest-clad land, lay within sight