DID COLUMBUS DISCOVER AMERICA?

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 1, 11 December 1911, Page 3

DID COLUMBUS DISCOVER AMERICA?

The millenary of the definite settlement of the Normans in France has been celebrated at Rouen with suitable pageantry and local patriotic demonstrations. Possibly in another century and a half the landing of Duke William ion English soil; will bo com J memorated in a similar manner. And America? Will the Dominion or the States be the site of a third “Norman millenary” in years to come? Absurd as the supposition at first appears, it is quite within the bounds of possibility. The old tradition of the'Norsemen’s Handing on the American coast will be familiar to every reader of Longfellow’s “Skeleton in Armour” and seems to gather strength as the years roll by. The settlement with Leffi, the son of Eric, founded in Vineland (Massachusetts) was, it is claimed, a veritable trading post, like' the “factories” of the English merchants of Elizabethan days. Hululand (Newfoundland), Mar kid.and (Anticosti), and the mainland coast are all supposed to have been known to early Norse navigation. Diligent search in the Vatican archievs indicate that thirty-one bishops in succession held the See of Greenland and Vineland, the last of whom died half a century after Columbus landed in the West Indies. Columbus appears, from his own son’s testimony, to have visited. Iceland ere he sailed for America, and to have had Norman pilots in his caravels.

All this seems to point to Northern Trans-Atlantic traffic; but what may be the keystone of the theory was brought to Rouen by Professor Holland. This was the famous “Runic stone,” found in 1898 by a woodman in the virgin forest of Minnesota, and which bears the date 1362. The inscripion states that in that year eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians landed in West Vineland. The discovery of the stone naturally raised a fierce discussion, which the irate backwoodsman endeavoured to close by the simple expedient of hiding the disputed article. For ton years the block served as a doorstep to'his house, but three years ago a historical society induced him to cede it, and it was lodged in a local museum till it was carried to Rouen for the Millenary Festival,

The particular object of Professor Holland’s visit to France is to search for another “missing link.” During the ISth century La Veranderie, a French explorer, visited the Rocky Mountain district. He found “Indians,” he tolls us, with blue eyes and fair hair, who believed, like the old Scandinavians, in an icy Hades of eternal torment, and a warm and genial heaven for the blest. And in a marsh he discovered a huge rock, in the centre of which was a small stone bearing an inscription he was unable to decipher. He sent it to the Jesuit missionaries in Canada, who were equally incapable of solving the riddle, and finally shipped it to Minsum de Maurepas, who, at that time, administered the French colonies, and in whose family it remained for several generations. Its present whereabouts is uncertain ; but the light which another Runic inscription might throw on this curious question would now interest a hundred millions of TransAtlantic whites, in whoso interest Prolessor Holland seeks to solve the enigma, and it is to be hoped that the enterprising American will succeed in his curious quest.