48 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 5Q 



Other structure-relics of the Charles River neighborhood, con- 

 fidently identified by Horsford as marking the house-sites of Leif and 

 Thorfinn, " a Norse path," * duly photographed and published, and 

 some stone walls and foundations credited with unfamiliar character 

 are at least white man's work. An attempt has been made by the Hors- 

 fords and some of their adherents to fasten these works on Norse 

 white men, through a series of excavations on abandoned Icelandic 

 homesites made by a Scandinavian scholar (which are in themselves 

 very interesting) , but nothing has been established in that way affect- 

 ing the question. Many simple homes have been erected, abandoned, 

 and forgotten in all the older parts of our country, for Anglo-Saxon 

 America is no longer new; and such remains do not usually differ 

 decisively among related peoples. 



The very land where this is written (in the hill country above the 

 city of Washington) bears such traces of the past in different places 

 and of different periods. It would be almost as easy to work out a 

 more southern Leif s-booth and Norumbega above the Potomac wild 

 rice and amid plentiful wild grape-vines, in accord with a ''rune- 

 stone " 2 found at the Great Falls ten or twelve miles up stream, if 

 we may believe a sensational announcement in a newspaper of Wash- 

 ington city (1867). It was no doubt a wild fiction, but honored by 

 a serious Danish refutation and a note by Dr. De Costa, correcting 

 some errors and substituting others. 



Finally, the Superintendent of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey 

 writes that the oldest chart of Boston Harbor accessible to him, 

 made for the British government in the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century, shows in the channel leading to the Back Bay a ruling depth 

 of two fathoms. The flats of that bay have no depth-figures, but 

 were not necessarily quite bare at low tide, for those of Dorchester 

 similarly shown have a four-foot depth marked on them. He infers 

 that there could have been only a " few feet "of depth on the Back 

 Bay flats except when the tide came in. By " few " we must under- 

 stand no doubt something like the four feet of Dorchester flats. 

 It would have required a light draft " fleet " to make itself comfort- 

 able there in General Washington's time. At the date of Champlain's 

 voyage (1660) 8 there was naturally no bay worth considering. He 

 explored the neighborhood and almost certainly anchored in Boston 



'Horsford: The Landfall of Leif (frontispiece). Also Cornelia Horsford : 

 Vinland and Its Ruins. (Appendix by Gudmundson and Erlendson.) 



2 F. Boggild : Runic Inscription at the Great Falls of the Potomac. Historical 

 Magazine, March 1869. 



3 Voyages of Champlain. Original Narratives of Early American History, 

 p. 67. 



