In spite of this, Beamish still confidently quotes1 from Paul Marana, saying that "there is a region in America, inhabited by a people whom they call Tuscarards and Doegs, whose language is the same as is spoken by the British or Welsh, from whom the former are thought to descend;" and, again, that "the British-Welsh language is so prevalent in Mexico that the very towns, bridges, beasts, birds, rivers, hills, etc., are called by Welsh names."

Bancroft continues again: "A certain Lieutenant Roberts states that, in 1801, he met an Indian chief at Washington who spoke Welsh as fluently as if he had been born and brought up in the vicinity of Snowdon." The chief said the Welsh was the language of his nation, the Asguaws, who lived eight hundred miles northwest of Philadelphia. He knew nothing of Wales, but stated that his people had a tradition telling that their ancestors came to America from a distant country, which lay far to the East across the great waters. Among other questions Mr. Roberts asked him how it was that his nation had preserved their original language so perfect? He answered, that they had a law which forbade any to teach their children another tongue until they were twelve years old.3

Another officer, one Captain Davies, relates that, while stationed at a trading-post among the Illinois Indians, he was surprised to find that several Welshmen who belonged to his company would converse readily with the aborigines in Welsh. This is one of the items of Dr. W. D. Pughe and Williams, who, some sixty years ago, collected upward of one hundred different accounts of the Welsh Indians, sometimes called the Padoucas or White Indians.

1 Discovery, p. 216.

3 Chamber's Journal, vol. vi. p.

Turkish Spy, vol. viii. p. 159. 411.

It is reported by travellers in the West that on the Red River, very far to the Southwest, a tribe of Indians, has been found whose manners in several respects resemble the Welsh. They call themselves the McCedus tribe, who, having the Mc or Mac attached to their name, would seem to be of a European origin of the Celtic description.

It is well authenticated that, upward of fifty years ago, Indians came to Kaskaskia, Illinois, who spoke the Welsh dialect, and were perfectly understood by two Welshmen, who conversed with them.'

Warden tells a story of a Welshman named Griffith who was taken prisoner by the Shawnee tribe about the year 1764. Two years afterwards he and five Shawnees, with whom he was travelling about the sources of the Missouri, fell into the hands of a white tribe, who were about to massacre them, when Griffith spoke to them in Welsh, explaining the object of their journey. Upon this they consented to spare him and his companions. He could learn nothing of the history of these white natives, except that their ancestors had come to the Missouri from a far distant country. Griffith returned to the Shawnee nation, but subsequently escaped and succeeded in reaching Virginia.

Lord Monboddo, a Scotchman who wrote in the seventeenth century, quotes already several instances to show that the language of the native Highlanders was spoken in America. In one of the English expeditions to discover the North Pole, he relates, there were an Esquimau and a Scotchman who, after a few days' practice, were able to converse together readily. He also states that the Celtic language was spoken by many of the tribes of Florida, and that he was well

1 Priest, p. 230.

acquainted with a gentleman from the Highlands of Scotland, who was in Florida several years in a public capacity, and who stated that many of the tribes with whom he had become acquainted had in their language the greatest affinity with the Celtic. We read further: "But what is still more remarkable, in their war-song he discovered not only the sentiments but several lines, the very same words, as used in Ossian's celebrated majestic poem of the wars of his ancestors, who flourished about thirteen hundred years ago. The Indian names of several of the streams, brooks, mountains, and rocks of Florida are also the same which are given to similar objects in the Highlands of Scotland."1

These testimonies may suffice to show on what manner of foundation rests the theory according to which the American aborigines had their origin in Scotland or Wales. It is simply impossible that the language, once spoken on our continent by the Gaelic Papas, should have endured so long in so many different regions. If we have found strong indications of the early presence of the Irish on the western hemisphere, it is not in consequence of their language or of any trait of their national character; but thanks to the permanency of the self-same religion, which they so firmly imprinted in the hearts of the natives that its vestiges were unmistakable still in the middle of the sixteenth century. No well-defined traces of European languages, manners or institutions have been discovered in all America, if we except those which testify, together with written history, to the occupation of ancient Vinland by the Greenland colonists. The Northmen of Greenland had upheld, as long as their condition at home permitted them, the settlements which in their youthful buoyancy they had

1 Cf. Priest, p. 230.

commenced on our shores, developed in their palmy days, and strengthened with the comforts of holy religion to such a degree as to allow them the high ministrations of their own bishop. Nor did they suffer their distant countrymen to disappear among the neighboring aborigines until they themselves, weakened from various causes, were compelled to retreat before the assaults of savage American natives, as will become more apparent from the sequel of their history.

CHAPTER XVI.

DIOCESE OF GARDAR.

THE Greenland State, as we have seen, grew up from its very beginning, in numbers, power, and wealth, with wonderful rapidity. It enjoyed all the advantages of an independent government together with those of a paternal assistance and protection of the mother-country; like a son who, after establishing a new home where he rules, profits by the lasting good-will of his parents. The kings of Norway in the eleventh century had neither the right nor the intention of calling Iceland and Greenland provinces of their royal domain, but they exercised a benign and grateful influence over the distant republics founded by their relatives and countrymen.

1

King Olaf Tryggvason did not disdain to enter a swimming-match with Kjartan the Icelander, who held him down beneath the waves so long that the bystanders wondered whether either of the champions would ever reappear on the surface; but Tryggvason, also, through his envoys, Gissur the White and Hjalti Skeggeson, procured the official conversion of Iceland; and from him Leif Ericsson accepted the mission of preaching the Christian faith in his Greenland home."

Of St. Olaf we read that, in the year 1016, he called the wisest men of his kingdom to Drontheim, and ordered them to explain before him the laws which Hacon, the first Christian king of Norway, had made; and

1 Laing, Heimskringla, Bd. ii. S. 450.

* Supra, pp. 127, 181, 182.

A.D. 935-950.