380 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



On August 16, 1936, Dodd had said to Elliott : 



After the shot of dynamite had gone off I saw something sticking out of the 

 schist ... I pulled at it but the other end was embedded in the rock. In try- 

 ing to get it out I broke it. I pried the piece that was in the rock and it 

 finally came loose. I was surprised to find that it was a sword handle with 

 part of the blade attached. The piece I had broken off was the rest of the 

 blade. I thought maybe it was an Indian's sword and threw the two pieces up 

 on the dump where it lay almost three months. Later on I found an ax near 

 where the sword was found . . . Looking over the ground carefully I came 

 across an oval-shaped brownish depression in the rock about 10 inches long 

 and 5 inches wide, and right across the middle was a strap of metal like a handle. 

 I tried to remove this carefully but it was so badly decomposed that it fell 

 apart, leaving only the handle. 



Generally speaking, these find reports sound trustworthy, even if 

 one can pick out some less important discrepancies between the various 

 statements. Then something happens. Eli Ragotte, in 1938, main- 

 tained that he saw the iron objects at Mr. Dodd's house as long ago 

 as 1928, although, confronted with the relics at Toronto, he had to 

 admit that they were not the same as those he saw at Port Arthur 

 in 1928. 



A more serious attack comes after that. J. M. Hansen, a contractor 

 at Port Arthur, declared in 1938 that the Dodd iron relics, that is 

 to say the Beardmore find, appear from the photographs he has seen 

 "to be pictures of objects very similar to objects" which he received 

 in 1928 from a Norwegian lieutenant, John Bloch, as security for a 

 loan. Bloch had brought the objects with him from Norway. Han- 

 sen had placed the objects in the basement of his house which he had 

 rented to Dodd at Port Arthur. Thus Dodd's allegation that he found' 

 them at Beardmore might merely be pretense. He may have taken 

 them from the basement of the house, for they were missing from 

 there when Hansen looked for them in 1931 ; since then they have been 

 lost. 



This is the crucial point. Did Dodd commit a fraud? Bloch died 

 at Vancouver in 1936. His friends say that he never made any men- 

 tion of being possessed of Norwegian iron weapons of the Viking age, 

 but this Hansen explains by suggesting that Bloch, who wished to see 

 his native land again, was anxious not to disclose that he had illegally 

 taken antiques from Norway to Canada. 



Mr. Hansen has not seen the Beardmore find in the museum at 

 Toronto; he knows of it only from photographs and on that basis 

 he declines to say categorically that its iron objects are the same as 

 those that he received from Bloch ; but he believes they are. It would 

 be helpful if Mr. Hansen could have an opportunity of seeing the 

 Beardmore find, either at Toronto or at Port Arthur. 



