HISTORICAL FOOTPRINTS IN AMERICA. 291 



forced into the service of favourite theories ; and many ingenious and 

 extravagant antiquarian romances, adapted to the popular taste by 

 this means, have been vs^elcomed as invaluable contributions to history : 

 though in reality as insubstantial as the dreams of Merlin or the le- 

 gends of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Nevertheless one class of monumental 

 indices of intercourse betvpeen the eastern and western hemispheres, long 

 prior to the fifteenth century, is of an indisputable kind. The Royal 

 society of Northern Antiquaries of Copenhagen has placed the evi- 

 dence of this before the world, in' the most accessible form in the 

 GrSnlands Historiske Mindesmcerker, and the Antiquitates Amei'icana, 

 she Scriptores Septentrionales rerum ante-Columbiarum in America. 

 The latter was issued from the Copenhagen press in 1837 ; and to this 

 a supplement subsequently appeared, to the contents of which special 

 reference will be made in discussing some of the supposed traces of 

 the ante-Columbian colonisation of America. To those works, along 

 with the correspondence and researches to which their preparation gave 

 rise, is chiefly due the revived interest in the recovery of ancient 

 traces of intercourse between the eastern and western hemisphere, 

 which continued for some years to engross a large amount of interest 

 among all classes in the United States. 



From the literary memorials of the old Northmen thus restored 

 to light, sufiicient evidence has been disclosed to render highly credi- 

 ble, not only the discovery and colonisation of Greenland, by Eric the 

 Red, a Norwegian colonist of Iceland, — apparently in the year 985, — 

 but also the exploration of more southern lands, some of which must 

 have formed part of the American continent. Of the authenticity of 

 the manuscripts from whence those narratives are derived there is not 

 the slightest room for question ; and the accounts which some of them 

 furnish are so simple, natural and devoid of anything extravagant or 

 improbable, that the internal evidence of genuineness is worthy of 

 great consideration. The exuberant fancy which revels in the mytho- 

 logy and songs of the Northmen, would have constructed a very dif- 

 ferent tale had it been employed in the invention of a southern conti- 

 nent for the dreams of Icelandic and Greenland rovers. Some of the 

 latter Sagas do, indeed, present so much resemblance in their tales oif 

 discovery, to those of older date, as to look like mere varied repetitions 

 of the original narrative with a change of actors, such as might result 

 from different versions of one account, transmitted for a time by oral 

 tradition before being committed to writing. But, notwithstanding 



