Tales of an Old Sea Port: A General Sketch of the History of Bristol and Rhode Island
9781465655356
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
From the earliest days of the Plymouth Colony the name Mount Hope Lands has been applied to the peninsula in Narragansett Bay of which Bristol, Rhode Island, is the chief town. The history of this town is more crowded with notable incident than that of any other in New England. First and most picturesque is the story of the Norsemen. Around Mount Hope the legends of the Norsemen cluster, shadowy, vague, elusive, and yet altogether fascinating. Only legends they are and must remain. After the lapse of a thousand years of changing climates and of varying shores no man can definitely locate the Vinland of the Vikings. Many have attempted to do so, and, like the late Professor E. N. Horsford, have established their theses to their own satisfaction and the satisfaction of the present dwellers in their Vinland, but they have not succeeded in convincing any one else. One of the latest writers approaching the subject without local prejudice, and judging of the past by the ever changing present, will have it that the physical conditions of the lands around Narragansett Bay in the eleventh century were such as to make it more than probable that the “Hop” of the Norsemen is the Mount Hope of today. In his conclusions all good Bristolians, yea more, all good Rhode Islanders, cheerfully join. Scandinavian writers insist that the name “Mount Hope” is of Norse origin. They assert that it is only an English spelling of the Indian name Montop, or Monthaup, and they are probably correct in their assertion. The Indians had no written language and our Pilgrim ancestors spelled the Indian words as they pleased, sometimes in half a dozen ways upon the same page. They go on to say that the termination “hop” was the name which Thorfinn and his companions gave to this region when they wintered here in 1008, and they bring forward the old Norse sagas to prove it. This is the story as the sagas tell it: In the year of Our Lord 1000 the Norsemen first visited the shores of Vinland. They came from Greenland, a hundred years and more after their countrymen had discovered and colonized Iceland. Their ship was an open boat from fifty to seventy-five feet long, similar to the one dug from the sands at Sandefjord, Norway, in 1880, which is preserved in the museum of the university at Christiania. It was propelled by oars and had a short mast amidships on which was spread a small square sail. Both mast and sail were used only when the wind was fair. They came creeping along from headland to headland, seldom venturing out of sight of land in the unfamiliar seas. The mariner’s compass was then unknown, except perhaps to the Chinese, and the art of propelling a boat against the wind by “tacking” had not been developed, unless possibly by those same Chinese. It would have been impossible to tack in one of the Viking ships. In the first place the sail area was too small and in the second place the steering was all done from one side. A long steering oar was fastened upon a fulcrum about two feet long on the right side of the boat, the steer-board, starboard side. On one tack the oar would have been useless because submerged, on the other equally useless because it could not go deep enough to “grip” the water. To men accustomed to the icy Arctic seas, voyages southward held out no terrors; they were only pleasant summer excursions. Thirty-five men made up the party and their leader was Leif Ericson. His purpose was to explore the coasts which his countryman, Biarni Heriulfson, had seen several years before, when in attempting to cross from Iceland to Greenland adverse winds had driven him to lands lying far to the south, possibly the island of Newfoundland. Leif was sailing in Biarni’s ship which he had bought for the voyage.
