﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 47 



The " defences of Norumbega m about the base of this " tower " 

 resolve themselves into a few roughly aligned rocks and a lower 

 dyke of rifle-pit pattern following the curve of the hill, wherein 

 a few dozen Indians or as many English colonists might have held off 

 an enemy behind palisades. That they could have anything to do 

 with the " city " and " quays " six miles below them is by no means 

 clear. They seem a curiously futile protection, the place being acces- 

 sible on so many other sides. Why must an enemy be supposed to 

 follow the river? And why should the little fort be situated so far 

 from base ? 



At Watertown (the Norumbega of Horsford) there are indeed the 

 disordered stones of what may have been an effective rough dam 

 before the present wooden one was constructed. The shores also 

 exhibit embankments of sand, in which Horsford thought he dis- 

 cerned wharves, quays, and divers other appurtenances of a com- 

 mercial waterside. One may safely say that they are man-made and 

 not recent, but beyond this there is no safe road. The dam, according 

 to the investigator, was to facilitate the floating of mausur wood for 

 collection and export. Searching farther, he thought he found like 

 vestiges in the Merrimack and other rivers of eastern Massachusetts ; 

 whence he inferred a thriving industry and a large Norse population, 

 widely spread. It cannot be pretended that he has adequately 

 accounted for its disappearance, with the whole inevitable retinue of 

 domestic animals. This and like facts might surely have been given 

 a better explanation, easy to find ; for the Indians themselves were 

 accustomed to dam and dyke streams, often of considerable size, as a 

 part of their wier-construction, which was an important matter with 

 them, since fisheries, especially in spring, were their most reliable 

 source of abundant food supply along the Atlantic. It is of record that 

 the Indians taught somewhat of that art to the early Virginian 

 colonists, and their skill and industry in this line excited surprise. 

 The few surviving Nanticoke of Delaware, in fact, have told me that 

 an old dam and a ruined fish-trap of their ancestors yet remain visible 

 on Indian River, and I have been shown a mound (as of the same 

 origin) which would compare favorably for size with those I have 

 inspected in Minnesota. The New England dams discovered by Prof. 

 Horsford were probably also Algonquian and for fishing purposes, 

 with no implication of white visitors or early lumbering. It is not 

 very remarkable that their remains should be found above Boston 

 on the Charles River as well as below Lewes, near Rehoboth Bav. 



Horsford: The Defences of Norumbega, pp. 10, 31. 



