﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 45 



made to look like that. It is fairly drawn in Bacon's Narragansett 

 Bay, Miller's Wampanoags of Rhode Island, and Higginson's Larger 

 History of America ; and a duplicate of a copy made by Mr. Bacon in 

 1900 shows the other characters as published ; but some of them are 

 gone from the stone and all the others have been damaged. Only the 

 boat remains unhurt, though shallow. Early settlers are said to have 

 been acquainted with this rock when it was in the field above the low 

 cliff or bank, near the base of which it now lies. It was lost sight of 

 about the middle of the nineteenth century, but afterward found 

 again, having most likely slipped down into the reach of the tide. 

 Prof. Diman, when an undergraduate, is said to have mentioned it in 

 the " Bristol Phoenix " about 1846, between the time of its loss and its 

 rediscovery. Its characters have a more alphabetic look than those 

 of the Dighton rock and may mean either something or nothing. 

 It must not be forgotten that Indians often depict objects on rocks 

 in idleness, just as any of us may carve a bit of wood or scrawl 

 careless figures and characters on a newspaper margin. Such work is 

 sometimes done as an exhibition of skill before others ; and characters 

 not obviously pictorial may be conventionalized outlines or random 

 grooves and scratches, not necessarily even records of any fact, still 

 less symbolic. Of course it is not intended to deny that pictorial 

 records, such as the " winter counts," have been macle and preserved 

 by Indians, nor that symbolic figures are used in the ritual of their 

 priests ; but there can be no doubt that the tendency to find something 

 esoteric or at least very meaningful in every chance bit of native rock- 

 scratching has been a delusion and a snare. 



The proximity of the boulder to Mount Hope seems to mark this 

 queer relic as almost certainly Wampanoag work ; and the same may 

 be said with less confidence of a chain of deeply incised recesses and 

 channels in the landward face of another boulder found by Mr. 

 David Hutcheson * just off shore at high tide (bare at low tide) in a 

 small cove of Portsmouth Bay, Aquidneck, across the fields from the 

 railway station. Several other inscriptions, plainly Indian work, are 

 figured at the end of the Antiquitates Americans as formerly existent 

 at this point and at Tiverton on the other side of the strait known as 

 Sakonnet River. They seem to have since disappeared and call for no 

 especial description. 



No doubt the Wampanoags, Narragansets, or their more eastern 

 neighbors of like stock, are responsible for the Dighton Rock cur- 



1 Charles Rau's monograph on cup stones illustrates Algonquian specimens 

 of similarly connected pattern, the nearest being at Niantic in western Con- 

 necticut. 

 4 



