390 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



Who built Newport Tower ? Here we have four hypotheses : The 

 Norsemen, the English, the Dutch, and the Portuguese. 



The Norse thesis. — ^The idea of ascribing the tower to ante-Colum- 

 bian Norsemen is closely associated with the endeavors to place 

 "Vinland" in New England. In 1839 C. C. Kafn suggested that the 

 builder of the tower was Erik Gnupson Upsi, an Icelander and bishop 

 of Greenland, of whom it is written in 1121 that he set out to find 

 Vinland; F. J. Allen agreed in 1921. Vilhelm Marstrand (in an 

 unpublished work) has a preference for the thirteenth century and 

 names the Norwegian Olaf, also a Greenland bishop, as the presump- 

 tive builder. Hjalmar Holand chooses the fourteenth century and 

 credits the building of the tower to the Norwegian Povl KJnutsson, 

 who, according to a Bergen document of 1354, was to sail to Greenland 

 to rechristen the apostates there. 



The English thesis.— "Uiko, the two that follow, this hypothesis is 

 post- Columbian. If the English built the tower, they must have done 

 so between 1639 (the foundation of Newport) and 1677 (when the 

 tower is mentioned in the w^ill of Governor Arnold) . In that case it 

 may have been built by Arnold, who came to Newport in 1651. 



The Dutch thesis. — If the Dutch built Newport Tower, this must 

 have taken place before the English founded Newport in 1639; in 

 this connection reference may be made to William Wood's map and 

 the Plowden petition, which have created some probability that the 

 tower was there before the town was founded. 



The Portuguese thesis. — The Portuguese, too, frequented the waters 

 around Newport in post- Columbian days. Herbert Pell (Ehode 

 Island History, October 1948) believes the tower was built by Portu- 

 guese under the direction of Miguel Cortereal as a watchtower and 

 beacon for the purpose of keeping a lookout and sending light signals 

 over the sea to aid in Miguel's search for his missing brother. The 

 tower, Pell says, was hastily built by shipwrecked mariners; pillars 

 and arcades were the outcome of considerations of speed and economy. 

 According to Delabarre's interpretation of the Dighton rock inscrip- 

 tion (see his "Dighton Rock," 1928) , Miguel was chief of the Indians, 

 for which reason the tower needed no lookout window onto the land 

 behind on the north. 



To conclude, we may summarize as follows : 



The Norse thesis is upset if Godfrey succeeds in proving his asser- 

 tion that the tower is post-Columbian in time. If not, the old thought 

 is revived that Newport Tower is a remnant of a Nordic medieval round 

 church. To me, however, it seems that the Godfrey excavations in 

 1949 have made a post-Columbian dating extremely plausible. The 

 English thesis is weak if the tower is regarded as a round church (an 

 English Puritan community in the seventeenth century would scarcely 



