﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 43 



notable food-preserving inventions, and ingenuity in boat-building 

 and husbanding their few resources, it seems possible enough that 

 about the year 1380 there may have been some Newfoundland 

 palisaded town, rather more advanced than the Hochelaga which 

 Cartier found and which was soon obliterated. 



But this Italian literary curiosity of the Zeni is not such a thread of 

 evidence as will bear any serious strain. 



7 ._ARE THERE NORSE RELICS IN AMERICA? 



If Icelanders or Greenlanders reached our Atlantic shore, there 

 will always be a possibility that some trace of their former presence 

 may be found. Whether it amounts to probability must depend on 

 the extent and character of that presence. There is a vast difference 

 between permanent occupancy 1 by thousands of people, erecting 

 stone houses and bridges, churches, and monasteries, in a region 

 like southern Greenland, where for centuries there were no other 

 inhabitants and the forces of nature tended toward preservation, and 

 the hasty visits of exploring parties and wood-cutters, or even brief 

 attempts at colonizing a bit of forest country, subject to invasion by 

 savages, fire, and decay. 



Inscriptions deeply graven might last even until now in dry and 

 protected places. But why should there be inscriptions? Laing 

 reports in his preface to Heimskringla that " few if any runic inscrip- 

 tions of a date prior to the introduction of Christianity are found in 

 Iceland," while Greenland, though then already occupied for 15 

 years, and for centuries afterward, has not yielded one. There is not 

 even a letter, runic or Latin, or a character of any kind, on the stand- 

 ing cathedral walls of Gardar or anywhere within its compass, though 

 repeated excavations have exhausted all the ground. Graah 2 noticed 

 a tablet-like wall-stone with parallel lines on its inner face, which may 

 have been prepared for such use, but the purpose was never carried 

 out. There are perhaps half a dozen Greenland gravestone inscrip- 

 tions of the conventional sort, in one alphabet or the other, beginning 

 with the twelfth century ; and far up Baffin Bay a miniature monument 

 was found about 1824, bearing the names of men who had " cleared 

 land " or performed some other operation there at a date near Whit- 

 suntide in the year 1135, as some read it, though others put the year 

 a century or two later, apparently either as a preemption entry or a 

 record of exploring achievement. Nothing more than this in the way 



1 H. J. Rink: Danish Greenland. 



2 W. A. Graah : Narr. of an Expedition to the East Coast of Greenland, p. 40. 



