﻿50 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



On the Maine sea-coast even the kitchen-midden-like oyster-shell- 

 heaps are turned to account as Norse vestiges. " There are three 

 distinct strata," the lowest representing cannibalistic savagery, the 

 second, ordinary Indian occupancy. A railway folder says of the 

 highest : " Prof. Putnam claims this to be of Norse origin " ; but 

 it also says that the Norse colonies in Greenland " about the 8th 

 century supported 20 bishops " and that " the Phenicians are the 

 legendary ancestors of these Irish Druids." Rock inscriptions on 

 Monhegan Island and elsewhere are attributed to Phenicians or 

 Norsemen, according to taste and individual sense of probability. 

 The Monhegan inscription, 1 discovered in the fifties of the nineteenth 

 century, has been " interpreted " as giving the age of a certain 

 chieftain, and one Canadian theorist even identified it as the work of 

 Turanians not long over from Japan, who left similar messages 

 in Michigan on the way. A " rune-stone " has also been found at 

 Ellsworth and a double-edged dagger, " the exact likeness of one in 

 Du Chaillu's Viking Age," in a cellar near Castine. Pemaquid 2 

 discloses pavements and house foundations, and similar vestiges 

 as well as Algonquian inscriptions are scattered up and down the 

 coast and along the rivers. They may be mysterious enough to be 

 Icelandic, but no positive proof takes any of these relics back of the 

 early Breton visitors or the first French and English attempts at col- 

 onization. 



In the Algonquian myths of Maine and the British provinces, 

 Leland 3 believes that he distinguishes echoes of the Eddas, proving 

 Norse intercourse, but these do not impress every ear. Moreover 

 Leif came as a missionary royally commissioned to spread the 

 Christian faith ; and Thorfinn and Gudrid, with most of their fol- 

 lowers, were in the first flush of conversion. After her return to 

 Iceland Gudrid was considered nearly as a saint. Besides, these stories 

 have a distinctly aboriginal air. One really cannot discern the 

 contrast which Leland insists on between their quality and construc- 

 tion and those of the Iroquois and Ojibway wonder tales. Of course 

 there are some plots and mythical explanations which grow the world 

 over out of certain human complications or insistent natural 

 phenomena. It is not surprising that a Passamaquoddy Indian and 

 an early Norseman should hit on similar impersonations of cold and 



1 Said to be copied in Memoires dela Societe Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, 

 May 14 1859. 



2 J. H. Cartland: Ten Years at Pemaquid, pp. 94-103, 



3 C. G. Leland: The Algonquin Legends of New England ; also his The Edda 

 Among the Algonquin Indians. Atlan tonthly, Aug. 1889, p. 223. 



