﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 7 



2.-THE OLD WORLD PRELUDE 



Humboldt 1 implied, and Fiske ' and others have since explicitly 

 suggested, that there may have been many pre-Columbian voyages 

 to America of which no record has been discovered. On the Pacific 

 coast indications of such voyages survive in the presence of the 

 cocoa palm, which is found in America as well as in Asia and on 

 islands all the way across, and which antedates the period of the 

 earliest recorded visitors to the New World, though never planted by 

 unassisted nature, so far as we know ; 3 in local legends of the landing 

 of sea-tribes on the South American coast ; * in the evident Mongolian 

 features of certain minor northwestern littoral tribes, 5 and some 

 peculiarities of the language of others, apparently Polynesian ; 8 

 in the architecture and sculpture of ancient Mayan cities, for example, 

 the Chinese or Cambodian-like figures of Copan/ and in the extra- 

 ordinary similarity of the whole series of the signs of the Zodiac 

 in Greece and Babylon, Mexico and Peru. 3 



The eastern gates also have their indirect evidences of approach in 

 a variety of forms which are mutually confirmatory and of unde- 

 niable cumulative importance, though not yet amounting to full proof. 

 Thus, in Humboldt's Examen Critique, 9 we find a few instances, at 

 widely separated periods, of strange men and boats arriving, appar- 

 ently from the west, on the outlying European islands. He never 

 visited these places, and close investigation of these tales at so late a 

 time was impossible ; but he seems to have given them some credit. 

 No doubt they lend a slight degree of support to the sailor story in 

 the Zeno narrative, the Phenician legend of Diodorus quoted in Dr. 



1 Examen Critique, vol. 5; in considering the Voyage of Madoc. 



2 The Discovery of America, vol. 1, pp. 181-185. 



3 O. F. Cook in Amer. Anthrop., 1909, p. 486. 



4 Justin Winsor: Narr. and Crit. Hist, of America, vol. 1, p. 82, note. 



5 H. H. Bancroft: Races of the Pacific States, vol. 1, p. 225. Cf. W. H. 

 Dall : Tribes of the Extreme Northwest, p. 237. 



6 C. Hill-Tout: Oceanic Origin of, etc. Trans. Royal Soc. Can., Sec. 2, vol.4 

 C1898). 



7 Thomas and McGee : Pre-historic North America, p. 256 (vol. 19 Lee's 

 Hist, of America). Also Stephens: Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, 

 (see Catherwood's views), and The American Egypt, by Arnold and Frost, 

 pp. 213 and 269. 



8 S. Hagar : Origin American Aborigines. Astronomy, read Dec. 27, 191 1. in 

 symposium of Amer. Ass'n Adv. Sci., Amer. Anthrop. 



9 Vol. 2, p. 259. Cf. James Wallace : A Description of the Isles of Orkney, 

 PP. 33, 34- 



