42 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



on the Ohio, and worked through the Indian country and the 

 mountains, as related by Bishop Meade. 1 Nothing in the story of the 

 Zeno-informant is more incredible than Ingram's 2 extravagances 

 about the city of Norumbega, followed by other writers and perhaps 

 developed from some real though temporary Penobscot Indian town. 

 Yet the first part of the former offers us a civilized or nearly civilized 

 Newfoundland nation, the middle is too general and easily invented 

 to be quite convincing ; and the southern part, nearer the end, is a 

 meager and faint reflection of Spanish observations in Mexico. 



Lucas, however, must be wrong in ascribing the whole story to 

 the latter source, for the Estotiland and Drogio portions have no 

 Spanish earmarks and are placed too far north. On the other hand, 

 Kohl in the Discovery of Maine is equally inadequate, finding only, 

 as he thinks, the reflection of the general American knowledge of 

 Greenland Norsemen ; for these could have had no such illusions 

 about their neighbor, Markland, then known for several centuries ; 

 and, on the other hand, they may be supposed quite ignorant of semi- 

 civilized teocallis, temples, and human sacrifices. About all that 

 could be obtained in Greenland for this little Zeno exposition of 

 fourteenth century America was the existence of a timbered New- 

 foundland, its protrusion into the ocean, the fact that it was inhabited, 

 the great cape below it, the sea between and behind, some notion of 

 a lower coast peopled by savages, and some lingering tradition of a 

 warmer and more fertile region lower still, and effectively guarded 

 in like manner. 



A faint shadow of corroboration may be found in Cormack's 8 

 account of the surprising works of industry of the Beothuk in 1828 

 and what Cartwright 4 has to tell us more than half a century earlier. 

 There was surely something of the Norse indomitableness about a 

 people who, after centuries of encompassment and continual hostility, 

 could still refuse submission or even amicable relations, choosing 

 destruction instead, and who inspired a terror that outlived them in 

 their Micmac enemies and successors. When we read of their thirty 

 miles and more of deer-fences in use when they were confined to a 

 small area in the northwest of the island ; of their stone causeways, 



1 Wm. Meade: The Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia, vol. 



i, P- 34- 



2 M. Lescarbot: Nova Francia. Erondelle's transl., p. 47. Also Champlain's 

 Voyages, p. 46. Orig. Narr. Early Amer. Hist. 



3 W. E. Cormack: Journey in Search of the Red Indians in Newfoundland; 

 Edinb. Philos. Journ., vol. 6, 1829, p. 327. 



4 Capt. Cartwright and his Journal; republished 1911; before cited. 



