804 PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 



here the "Dighton Rock," or "Writing Rock," which was found by the 

 first white colonists beside the Taunton River, on the Berkley side, op- 

 posite the landing-place for sloops at Dighton. This spot does not lie 

 within the country of the Cape Cod Indians, but it is a part of the terri- 

 tory of the Wampanoag tribe, to which they belong. 



Prof. F. W. Putnam, of Harvard College, assures me that it is now 

 the belief of the best scholars that the inscription on this rock is noth- 

 ing but an Indian pictograph, and that the attempt, by the aid of sub- 

 jective drawings of it, to make it serve as testimony of a visit to this 

 country by the Northmen, or Phoenicians, is pure folly in the light of 

 later discoveries of pictographs, closely resembling it, in other parts of 

 the United States. A picture of this rock, with a very good description 

 of it, copied from the second volume of Kendall's Travels, may be found 

 on pages 117, 118, and 1 19 of Barber's Historical Collections. Mr. Ken- 

 dall traveled through the northern parts of the United States in 1807 

 and 1808. He made a careful examination of the Dighton Rock, visit- 

 ing it several times for the purpose. Mr. Kendall writes of another in- 

 scribed rock as follows: "The only sculptures on any rock not on the 

 Writing Rock consist in two or three figures or characters having some 

 similitude to the letters XOO, and which are seen on the corner of a 

 slab of stone lying within a few yards of the Writing Rock." Mr. Ken- 

 dall presents a series of wild conjectures and Indian traditions in re- 

 gard to the origin of the Writing Rock, prevalent among the learned 

 and unlearned of his time, to which list may be added that of Mr. R. 

 B. Anderson in his work entitled "America not discovered by Colum- 

 bus." The latter writer attempts to prove the truth of the old Scandi- 

 navian or Icelandic tales relating to the discovery of America by the 

 Norsemen, 500 years before Columbus set sail, by appealing to the cir- 

 cumstantial evidence of the skeleton in armor discovered at Pall River, 

 the tower at Newport, and the Dighton Writing Rock. In the inter- 

 pretation of the writing on the Dighton Rock, Mr. Anderson discovers 

 some marks which he considers are Roman characters, copied by him 

 as follows: CXXXI. This, he says, rex>resents 151, for the Icelanders 

 reckon 12 decades to the 100. Then he finds a small row-boat between 

 the letters N and M. He makes N stand for Norse, the boat for sea- 

 faring, and the M for men, and proceeding in this way confirms, to his 

 own satisfaction, the truth of the old legends. He closes his fourteenth 

 chapter as follows: "Upon the whole, the Dighton Writing Rock re- 

 moves all doubt concerning the presence of Thorfiun Karlsefue and the 

 Norsemen at Taunton River, in the beginning of the eleventh century." 

 The "skeleton in armor" discovered at Pali River will be described at 

 length in speaking of certain relics once found upon Cape Cod which 

 appear to throw some light upon the probable history of these far-famed 

 remains. So far as I have been able to discover in my researches upon 

 Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket, for evidence of a former 

 Indian population there, all the testimony or evidence to be fouud is of 



