﻿I36 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



floi running in from the sea. This strait or channel is practically a 

 lower reach of the main river which flows down into the lake. There 

 is also a tributary river or more than one which might be disregarded. 

 Some of the maps seem to indicate that there would probably be a 

 shoal or bar in the strait or river between bay and sea. All this is in 

 accord with the words of the saga, concerning the American Hop 

 which they visited and named. 



Some additional facts are mentioned. Indians rounded a cape in 

 approaching " from the south." There were hills nearby and crags 

 a little way up the river. There was a point or cape at the entrance 

 to the bay. There were flats or hollows for the wild rice, as already 

 noticed. It will be seen that there are many requirements. We 

 simply cannot find anything to fit them even plausibly south or west 

 of Narragansett Bay. Is there anything like Hop between it and 

 Cape Ann? Or rather was there any such Hop there in 1004? 



Professor Horsford thought he found an eligible Hop in the Back 

 Bay of Boston Harbor ; also the delightful anchorage of Verrazano, 

 where a fleet might be safe when storms do blow. But in Verrazano's 

 time there was no such bay ; far less in Thorfinn's. 



As previously stated, the Superintendent of the U. S. Coast and 

 Geodetic Survey informs me that the oldest chart to which he has 

 access gives two fathoms for the ruling depth of the channel leading 

 into the Back Bay and shows its flats without depth marks. Yet 

 they may not have been wholly bare at low water, for they show on 

 the chart like those of Dorchester, which are marked for four feet. 

 This chart was drawn for the British government in the latter part 

 of the eighteenth century. Obviously a fleet would have been sorely 

 put to it for room in 1800; how then in 1523, allowing for the sub- 

 sidence of the coast? In Thorfinn's time if not in Verrazano's, there 

 can have been no more than a river winding through meadows all 

 the way down to the harbor. This vanishing of the Back Bay Hop 

 makes any comment on the lack of elevations and crags beside the 

 river seem rather superfluous. 



Dr. Rafn 1 was so absurdly wrong as to so many things — in 

 spite of the real service he rendered — that they will reflect in some 

 minds injuriously on one point, as to which he may happen to be right. 

 That is, the identification of Mount Hope Bay, Rhode Island, with 

 Thorfinn's Hop. It is a beautiful sheet, the depth of which in some 

 parts is a guaranty against its entire absence then. 



Taunton River flows into it at the upper end or side. From the 

 lower end or opposite side two channels extend to the sea. One is 



1 Antiquitates Americanae. 



