The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
The topographical details which have to be relied upon in any attempt to
identify the precise locality are little less vague than those of the
astronomical data from which the editor of the _Antiquitates Americanæ_
assumed to compute his assigned latitude. The voyagers, after their
first wintering, pursued their course southward; and again approaching
the shore, made their way up a river, to a lake from whence it flowed.
The land was wooded, with wild “wheat” in the low meadows, and on the
high banks grape-bearing vines. The aspect of this strange land was
tempting to voyagers from the north, so they erected booths, and
wintered there. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence southward to Rhode
Island, the coast is indented with many an estuary, up any of which the
old voyagers may have found their way into lake or expanded basin, with
overhanging forest trees, meadow flats, and other features sufficiently
corresponding to all that we learn from the old Saga of the temporary
settlement of Thorfinn and his fellow-voyagers. Fresh claimants
accordingly enter the lists to contend for the honours that pertain to
the landing-place of those first Pilgrim Fathers. New Englanders above
all not unnaturally cherish the pleasant fancy that they had for their
precursors the hardy Vikings, who, resenting the oppression of King
Harold the fair-haired, sailed into the unknown west to find a free home
for themselves. The fancy had a double claim on the gifted musician Ole
Bull. Himself a wanderer from the Scandinavian fatherland, he started
the proposition which was to give an air of indisputable reality to the
old legend; and which culminated in the erection, on Boston Common, in
1888, of a fine statue of Leif Ericson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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