293 



The same land was visited afterwards by Gudleif Gudlagson, an 

 Icelandic trader with Ireland ; who, in a voyage from Dublin to 

 Iceland, was driven by a tempest to a far western land, where he 

 was taken prisoner by the natives, but delivered by their chief, 

 who turned out to be an Icelander. He was dismissed with presents, 

 but forbidden to return. The natives were white, and seemed of 

 European extraction, with a dialect like that of Ireland ; and the 

 American archaeologists, with considerable reason, have considered 

 that their whereabout was on some part of the new world, between 

 the Chesapeake and Florida. 



These early voyages seem to us very surprising ; but they do not 

 seem at all foreign to the habits and enterprise of the bold Icelanders 

 of those ages ; who not only traded to every part of the west of 

 Europe, but to the Mediterranean, and explored Boffins Bay, as 

 high as Lancaster Sound. We have now a certain proof, that they 

 were at least as high in it as at 72° 55'; for in 1825, a memorial 

 stone with a Runic inscription, and the date of 1131, was found on 

 the island of Kingiktersoak. 



Several Runic inscriptions are said to have been found in America ; 

 but the most remarkable of these is the mass of greywacke on the 

 shores of the river at Dighton, in the township of Berkley, in Mas- 

 sachusetts, not far from the supposed site of the settlement of Thor- 

 finn Karlsefne. This has been lately carefully figured and engraved 

 in the Antiquitates Americance of the Royal Soicety of Northern 

 Antiquaries of Copenhagen, and repeated in Jacob AaVs translation 

 of the Chronicles of Snorre Sturleson. Dr Elton, who has examined 

 the original, assures us, that this engraving is a faithful transcript. 

 On this rock, antiquaries read, amid figures supposed to repi'esent 

 Thorfinn, his wife and child, and his companions, the letters — (^rfin 

 and cxxxi, the number of his companions. 



Dr Elton next adverted to the voyage of the Welsh Prince, Modoc, 

 son of the greatest of the princes of North Wales Owen Gwenedd, 

 about the year 1170. This voyage, though doubted by many, is 

 fully believed in by Dr Elton, and it is noticed by Hakluyt, Purchas, 

 Broughton, &c. Dr Elton quotes the singular story given by the 

 Rev. Morgan Jones, chaplain to the British commander of the forces 

 of Virginia in 1669. Jones was taken prisoner by the Tusscarora 

 Indians, who intended to torture him in their usual way, when he 

 began to lament his cruel fate in Welsh, which was understood by 



