﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK I49 



in it. One cannot be sure that the memory of any wild animal would 

 soothe them adequately. 



But they seem to have offered no buffalo robe for sale, such as 

 the scouts of De Soto bought in the Carolina mountains, and in view 

 of the limitations of period and range above stated, we are no doubt 

 safe in acquitting the Hop Skrellings of any acquaintance with any- 

 kind of cattle ; and moose would not help the case at all. 



Indians in general had few metals ; but gold ornaments were 

 scattered through the south as far as the outer Bahamas, where 

 Columbus found them, and copper in like manner through the north- 

 east, being shown to Gosnold 1 on Cape Cod in 1620, besides some 

 earlier entries. The few survivors of the Roanoke massacre, accord- 

 ing to Powhatan (see Strachey), were employed as slaves in beating 

 it out for a chief. Some of it may have been mined in the mountains, 

 but the chief source of supply regularly worked seems to have been 

 the shores of the upper lakes, as the chief source of gold supply was 

 probably central Mexico. But the transfer of such articles or 

 materials, whether by barter or through migration, must depend on 

 intervening peoples, and the conditions of one century are not neces- 

 sarily those of another even among uncivilized men. 



The earthwork builders of Ohio might, if they chose, absorb and 

 hold most of the southeastern flow of copper until they were driven 

 from their strongholds ; whether they were Sioux, Cherokee, Mandan, 

 Appalachian, or of the remoter southwest ; whether a temporary 

 league of the Algonquians and the Iroquois overcame them, or they 

 fell under the attack of hunting Dakota ; and whether they went west- 

 ward beyond the Mississippi, or into the mountains as Cherokee, or 

 were scattered among many tribes — all debatable hypotheses which 

 have been advanced, but need not be rediscussed here ; and we do 

 not know when the working began of the meager supplies afterward 

 obtained, as we are told, in Virginia and New Jersey. In this view 

 of the case, copper would not probably reach New England from any 

 quarter by Thorfinn's time. Whatever the reason, the seaboard 

 tribes about Hop do not then seem to have possessed it. But this 

 does not at all imply any lack of such adornments at that place a few 

 centuries later. 



As already noticed, these people apparently wore no garments 

 worth mentioning, very likely only Nauset grass aprons or a dimin- 

 utive form of breech-clout. They can not then have been Eskimo. 



3 Brereton's Briefe Relation, before cited. Old South Leaflets ; and The Bibli- 

 ographer, 1902, p. 23- 



