Note 641 — Chapter II
Reading edition
He was rather caustically taken to account by Henry Cabot Lodge, in the No. Am. Review, vol. cxix. Cf. Michel Hardy’s Les Scandinaves dans l’Amérique du Nord (Dieppe, 1874). An April hoax which appeared in a Washington paper in 1867, about some runes discovered on the Potomac, had been promptly exposed in this country (Hist. Mag., Mar. and Aug., 1869), but it had been accepted as true in the Annuaire de la Société Américaine in 1873, and Gaffarel (Etudes sur les Rapports de l’Amérique avant Columbus, Paris, 1869, p. 251) and Gravier (p. 139) was drawn into the snare. (Cf. Whittlesey’s Archæol. frauds in the Western Reserve Hist. Soc. Tracts, no. 9, and H. W. Haynes in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan., 1888, p. 59.) In a later monograph, Les Normands sur la route des Indes (Rouen, 1880), Gravier, while still accepting the old exploded geographical theories, undertook further to prove that the bruits of the Norse discoveries instigated the seamen of Normandy to similar ventures, and that they visited America in ante-Columbian days.