The "skeleton in armor," found at Fall River, has no better claim than the rest to a Scandinavian origin. What appeared to be human bones were found in a sand-bank, encased in metallic bands of brass. Its antecedents are wholly unknown. It may possibly have been the relics of some early navigator, cast upon our shore, who was either killed by the natives or died a natural death, and was buried in the armor in which he was clad. Or, what is far more probable, it may have been the remains of one of our early Indians, overlaid even in his grave, according to their custom, with the ornaments of brass, which he had moulded and shaped with his own hands while living.[8] Could the veil be lifted, some such stories as these would doubtless spring up from the lifeless bones. But oblivion has for many generations brooded over these voiceless remains. Their story belongs to the domain of fancy and imagination. Poetry has woven it into an enchanting ballad. Its rhythm and its polished numbers may always please the ear and gratify the taste. But history, the stern and uncompromising arbiter of past events, will, we may be sure, never own the creations of the poet or the dreams of the enthusiast to be her legitimate offspring. Half a century has now elapsed since the sagas have been accessible to the English reader in his own language. No labor has been spared by the most careful, painstaking, and conscientious historians in seeking for remains which can be reasonably identified as the work of the Northmen. None whatever have been found, and we may safely predict that none will be discovered, that can bear any better test of their genuineness than those to which we have just alluded.[9] It is the office and duty of the historian to seek out facts, to distinguish the true from the false, to sift the wheat from the chaff, to preserve the one and to relegate the other to the oblivion to which it belongs. Tested by the canons that the most judicious scholars have adopted in the investigation of all early history, we cannot doubt that the Northmen made four or five voyages to the coast of America in the last part of the tenth and the first part of the eleventh centuries; that they returned to Greenland with cargoes of grapes and timber, the latter a very valuable commodity in the markets both of Greenland and Iceland; that their abode on our shores was temporary; that they were mostly occupied in explorations, and made no preparations for establishing any permanent colony; except their temporary dwellings they erected no structures whatever, either of wood or of stone. We have intimations that other voyages were made to this continent, but no detailed account of them has survived to the present time.