296 HISTORICAL FOOTPRINTS IN AMERICA. 



port.* However it originated, certain it is that the so-called runic 

 characters on the Dighton rock have vanished as completely as the 

 faith in their marvellous historical revelations. 



The literate evidence which the Antiquitates AmericancB furnishes 

 in proof of the discovery of America by Nortjimen of the Tenth Cen- 

 tury, rests on authority wholly independent of any real or fancied con- 

 firmation, derived from Greenland or New England* inscriptions. The 

 stimulus thereby furnished to antiquarian research was therefore no 

 less strong than thoroughly legitimate. The members of the Rhode 

 Island Historical Society accordingly renewed their search for traces 

 of ante-Columbian art ; and their attention was at once directed 

 to a substantial piece of masonry which had occupied a promi- 

 nent site at Newport, Rhode Island, beyond the memory of 

 the oldest inhabitant. As a genuine American ruin of former 

 generations the old Round Tower on Newport common forms an ex- 

 ceedingly striking feature ; and the historical and literary associa- 

 tions ascribed to it, as well as the critical warfare which has raged 

 around its site, and ransacked the mysteries of its very foundations, 

 have added not a little to its genuine interest. When the antiquaries 

 of Copenhagen were in search of relics of the long-lost Vinland, care- 

 ful drawings of the old Tower were despatched to them, and welcomed 

 as supplying all that they desired. Engravings reproduced from their, 

 illustrate the Supplement to the Antiquitates Americance, and the 

 authentication of the old ruin as an architectural monument of the 

 arts of Vinland and its Norse colonists of the eleventh and twelfth 

 centuries is thus unhesitatingly set forth by Professor Rafn and his 

 brother antiquaries of Copenhagen : — " There is no mistaking in this 



* The Controversy touching the Old Stone Mill in the Town of Newport, Rhode 

 Island. Newport. Charles E. Hammet, jr. 1851. p. 52. "The version of 

 the inscription published in that work [the Antiquitates Americante], and distri- 

 buted throughout Europe and America, was altered so as to make it appear to 

 have been the work of the Scandinavians, by altering the characters, and adding 

 in the body of the inscription, the characters ORINX which is said to be ths. 

 name of one of their early navigators," 



The tracings on the rock read as OR, appear in an engraving so early as I'lSO ; 

 the remainder, which serve to complete the name — not of Orinx as stated above, 

 but of Thorfin, with a concise record of his fifty-one followers,^appear for the first 

 time in the copy made, and sent to Copenhagen in 1830. No one will believe, for a , 

 moment, that the members of the R. I. Historical Society had any hand in a fraudu- 

 lent transcript, beyond their transmission of the drawing, executed either by some 

 very credulous or designing copyist, of the rude and ill-defiaed Indian devices. 



