THORVALD IN NEW ENGLAND.

43

of the house, and not disposed just then for maritime adventures. Thorvald accepted the offer, and with a crew of thirty men sailed for the new country.

The booths which his brother had put up were still standing, and he went into winter quarters, his men fishing for their support; the waters, as Leif had found two years before, abounding with salmon and other fish. In the spring, Thorvald sent some of his men in the ship's long-boat to explore to the westward. They spent the summer in this pleasant excursion, coasting along the shores of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island, the whole length of the Sound, penetrating, probably, to New York, and finding there another lake through which a river flowed to the sea. They landed on many islands; they

beached their boat many times on the broad, wide, shallow sands, down to the edge of which grew the green grass and the great trees which made this pleasant land seem a very garden to these wanderers from a country all rocks, and ice-mountains, and fields of snow. But once

only did they see any sign of human habitation, and that was a cornshed built of wood.

The next spring (1004), Thorvald started for a more extended trip, as he went in his ship. Standing first eastward, he then sailed northward along the sea-coast of Cape Cod, where a heavy storm caught him off a ness (cape), and drove his ship ashore, perhaps at Race Point. Here they remained a long time to repair damages, putting in a new keel; the old one they set up in the sand, and the place they called Kjalarness (Keel-ness or Kellcape), in commemoration of the disaster. Then they cruised along the opposite shore of what is now

America. If they did not die out, destroyed by pestilence or famine; if they were not exterminated by the Indians, but were, at last,

Carved Pipes.

driven away by a savage foe against whose furious onslaughts they could contend no longer even behind their earthen ramparts, their refuge was probably, if not necessarily, farther south or southwest. In New Mexico they may have made their last defence in the massive stone fortresses, which the bitter experience of the past had taught them to substitute for the earthworks they had been compelled to abandon. Thence extending southward they may, in successive ages, have found leisure, in the perpetual summer of the tropics where nature yielded a subsistence almost unsolicited, for the creation of that architecture whose ruins are as remarkable as those of any of the

pre-historic races of other continents. The sculpture in the stone of those beautiful temples may be only the outgrowth of that germ of Their sculp art shown in the carvings on the pipes which the Mound ture. Builders left on their buried altars. In these pipes a striking fidelity to nature is shown in the delineation of animals. It is reason

able to suppose that they were equally faithful in portraying their own features in their representations of the human head and face; and the similarity between these and the sculptures upon the ancient temples of Central America and Mexico is seen at a glance.

There also it may be that they discovered how to fuse and combine the metals, making a harder and better bronze than the Europeans had ever seen; learned to execute work in gold and silver which the most skilled European did not

SKULLS EXHUMED FROM MOUNDS.

Cloth from Mounds.

33

pretend to excel; to manufacture woven stuffs of fine texture, the rude beginnings whereof are found in the fragments of coarse cloth; in objects of use and ornament wrought in metals, left among the other relics in the earlier northern homes of their race. In the art of that southern people there was nothing imitative; the works of the Mound Builders stand as distinctly original and independent of any foreign influence. Any similarity in either that can be traced to anything else is in the apparent growth of the first rude culture of the northern race into the higher civilization of that of the south. It certainly is not a violent supposition, that the people who disappeared at one period from one part of the continent, leaving behind them certain unmistakable marks of progress, had reappeared again at another time, in another place where the same marks were found in larger development.

There can hardly be a doubt that there is yet something to be learned of the character of this singular people. Some recent explorers believe that they find new traces of their mode of worship and of their religious faith, and others that new facts are coming to light from a study of their skulls. Hitherto but little has been learned from this last source, so great is the difficulty of recovering any complete crania from deposits where the decay of all perishable things is so thorough. Till quite recently the number of authentic skulls, that is, of those free from all suspicion of being of later and Skulls ex

mounds.

intrusive burial in the mounds, was less than half a dozen. humed from Their shape and capacity show no uncommon type. But those lately recovered from different places in Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa indicate, like the Neanderthall skull found in a cave in Prussia, and the Dorreby skull of the Stone Age of Denmark, a very low order of intellect.1 General H. G. Thomas, U. S. A., has exhumed from some mounds in Dakota Territory a number of skulls of the lowest type, "unlike," he says, "that of any human being to-day alive on this continent," but "like those of the great Gibbon monkey." It is easier to believe that the mounds are the burialplaces of more than one extinct race than that their builders were not far from idiots.

Future explorations may shed more light upon this inquiry. Man is older on other continents than was till quite recently supposed. If

1 See Foster's Pre-historic Races of the United States, chap. vii., for collation of the evidence on these crania.

Sixth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, by F. B. Hayden, p. 656.

older elsewhere he may, by parity of reasoning, be older here. We are permitted to go behind the Indians in looking for the earliest inhabitants of North America, wherever they may have come from or whenever they may have lived. In such an inquiry, relieved of some of the limitations which have hitherto obstructed it, we may find in the relics of an early and rude culture much to dispel the obscurity and mystery which till within four centuries have shrouded the New World in darkness.

Discovery of Greenland.

CHAPTER III.

EARLY VOYAGES. · DISCOVERY OF ICELAND. - GREENLAND COLONIZED BY ERIC THE RED. BJARNI HERJULFSON DISCOVERS AMERICA. SONS OF ERIC THE RED. LEIF'S VOYAGE TO VINLAND THE GOOD. - EXPEDITION OF THORVALD.-HIS DEATH. - COLONY OF THORFINN KARLSEFNE. - FIGHT WITH SKRÆLLINGS. SUPPOSED IRISH SETTLEMENTS IN AMERICA. - COLONY OF FREYDIS. THE MASSACRE. GLOOMY WINTER AT VINLAND. - ROUND TOWER AT NEWPORT. - DIGHTON ROCK. -THE ICELANDIC SAGAS.

Pre-Colum

WERE these great Western continents, stretching almost from pole to pole, unknown till 1492 to the nations who had made the world's history? The pride of human knowledge has for nearly four centuries resented such an imputation. If facts were wanting, ingenious suppositions of more or less probability were made to take the place of facts. Even before Flavio Gioia introduced the use of the magnetic needle into maritime Europe some unlucky vessel may have been driven across the Atlantic and stranded upon strange bian Naviga shores; or some Phoenician navigator who understood "nightsailing" may have boldly turned his ship's head to the West, after passing the Pillars of Hercules, in search of new fields of adventure and of traffic; or some of the fearless navigators who steered into the Sea of Darkness in search of Antilia, or the Island of the Seven Bishops, may have landed for a night upon coasts which some supernatural power was supposed to guard from the intrusion of man. Or

tion.