Note 12 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

At all events, whatever conclusions may be reached as to the time when and the place where the tradition originated, it is manifest that “it could have been propagated in the New World only by Christians and as it was in existence before the arrival of the Spaniards, we must attribute its propagation to other Europeans, to those, for example, whose crosses the indigenes of Tennessee and Georgia had exhumed from their ancient burial places, or to those whom the inhabitants of Haiti had known either de visu or by hearsay.”12