Note 9 — Chapter II · Professor Wyman.—Indian Antiquities.—Concord.—Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.—Margaret Fuller.—Note upon a visit to Mr. Longfellow.—Saturday Club.—Dinner at Harvard University.—Shell Mounds at Concord and Damariscotta.—Note upon the Ancient Inscription upon the Dighton Rock.

In the summer of 1870 I went to the village of Dighton to look at the inscribed stone in the river near that place.

Upon my arrival there it was high water and the rock was covered. The next day, when the tide was low, I hired a boat, pulled down the stream and stopped by its side, which was then fully exposed, and examined it with care. It was a boulder formed of hard close grained granite.

As the inscription was originally supposed by Danish and other antiquarians to have had some relation with the history of the arrival of the Northmen upon that coast, I traced the figures and rude characters with particular attention.

I have seen rolls of birch bark scratched in the same manner by Chippewas, for the purpose of giving information of the movements of their hunting parties, and I think that the figures on the Dighton stone were meant to represent similar events. As, however, the inscriptions are deeply cut, and as it must have taken some considerable time to execute them, it may be granted that the Indians wished to leave, near the mouth of the river, a permanent record which would be intelligible to others.

At many parts of this seaboard the New England tribes, as at Damariscotta visited the tidal waters to obtain food.