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\huge Eben Norton Horsford \huge and the Legend of Norumbega | Jacob Signorovitch |
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In Weston, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Brandeis University, an unusual structure rises among the trees; a forty foot stone tower, complete with spiral staircase and ramparts, weathered and stained with time, looking distinctly out of place within earshot of I-95. The story of how it came to be there involves Vikings, a baking soda magnate, the discovery of America, and, at the center of it all, the Legend of Norumbega. As one explores the surrounding area, the name appears again and again: a map will tell you the structure's name is Norumbega Tower, and running alongside is Norumbega Road. Further south, one finds a Norumbega Park, and another road called Norumbega Court. This paper will explore how one man in the late nineteenth century, Eben Norton Horsford, combined Norse sagas and a New England El Dorado into a theory for the original discovery of America, what motivated him to do so, and the legacy he left behind.
The Legend of Norumbega originated in the sixteenth century, during the Age of Exploration. To European explorers, it was variously a town, city, or country, somewhere along the coast of New England, inhabited by amiable and civilized natives. First given the name Nurumberg by Giacomo Gastaldi in a 1548 edition of Ptolemy's Geography,[@KirsNor98, 34] the myth can be traced back to a conflation of two separate accounts. The first is that of Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer under King Francis I of France. He was one of the first Europeans to explore the area around Narragansett Bay in 1524[@KirsNor98, 36, 39], and recounted his experiences in a letter to the king. He described a pleasant harbor inhabited by friendly and civil natives.[@KirsNor98, 39] They practiced "more systematic cultivation [of crops] than the other tribes," and were "very like the manner of the ancients [i.e., western antiquity]."[@KirsNor98, 39] In the letter, Verrazzano names the place refugio, "on account of its beauty."[@KirsNor98, 39] Despite Narragansett Bay being quite far from where Norumbega would eventually be described, geographical ambiguity would allow his account to become "at the heart of the Norumbega legend."[@KirsNor98, 39] Specifically, the mention of a "more civilized" tribe of natives would continue to be a core aspect of the legend in all future renditions. The second account, which lends the myth its name and location, is that of Jean Alfonce de Saintonge, a pilot on Jacques Cartier's exploration of the Penobscot Bay area.[@KirsNor98, 41] Sailing up the Penobscot River, which he called the Norenbègue, he described "a city called Norombegue with clever inhabitants [...] The people use many words which sound like Latin and worship the sun, and they are fair people and tall."[@KirsNor98, 41] These two accounts, Varrazzano's refugio and Saintonge's Norombegue, eventually merged into a single myth, canonized by the cartographer Gastaldi, of an advanced Native American city which shared more in common with Europe than its neighbors.[@KirsNor98, 41]
Over the centuries that followed, more accurate maps and exploration revealed Norumbega not as the advanced society it was believed to be but only "a settlement on the outer Penobscot shore."[@KirsNor98, 55] Still, the myth lay dormant, disproven yet still alluring. Enter Eben Norton Horsford, a mid-nineteenth century chemist working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Best known for his invention of modern baking powder,[@JackHors92, 343] Horsford had long harbored an interest in history and archaeology. He collected fossils around his father's farm in Moscow (now Leister), New York where he grew up,[@JackHors92, 340] and became interested in learning the language of the Seneca Indians[@JackHors92, 340] to which his father worked as a missionary.[@JackHors92, 103] Later, he would often visit his wife's family estate on Shelter Island, New York,[@AdamsMemBiog08, 104] where he became interested in the island's history. He even "erected a monument to the Quakers, who found shelter there from Puritan persecution."[@AdamsMemBiog08, 104] This pattern of research and monument building would be repeated several times throughout Horsford's life, culminating in Norumbega Tower. Horsford's most famous accomplishment, and how he was able to fund these projects, would come in 1856 with his invention of a revolutionary new baking powder recipe without a fermentation step.[@JackHors92, 343] He founded the Rumford Chemical Works, named after a position he held at Harvard, which would make him a fortune.[@JackHors92, 343] While in Cambridge, Horsford became fascinated by the possibility of Vikings in New England. This idea had some precedent;[@FlemPicHist95, 1079] in 1841, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote The Skeleton in Armour, a poem interpreting a body discovered in Fall River, Massachusetts1 to be that of a Norse warrior.[@LongBall41, 29-41] But it was with Horsford the idea came to be most associated.[@FlemPicHist95, 1080] In 1887,[@HorsDisc87, 10] Horsford wrote the dedication for a large bronze statue of the Viking Explorer Leif Erickson,[@GuttVal18, 86] commending him for his early discovery of America. On this point, modern scholars agree; archaeological evidence at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland constitutes a "pre-1492 presence of Europeans in the Americas."[@LedgeHorz19, 2] According to Icelandic sagas, it was here Erickson built the settlement of Vinland. Horsford, however, believed Erickson to have sailed far further south after making the continent, all the way down to Cape Cod. He defended his reasoning by referring to the sagas:
I might dwell at some length, if time would permit, upon other interesting features of the relations of the Sagas:
- For example, one of very great significance is that of the extraordinary height of the tide at high water [...] In the bottom of Massachusetts Bay, as you know, the tides rise from ten to twelve feet, while south of Cape Cod peninsula they rise but from three to five feet. [...]
- Of the grapes which the German Tyrker, who was of Leifs crew, discovered, and of which, as a native of a wine country, weary of his ship's rations, he doubtless over-ate, there were then, as now, a plenty on the shores of Massachusetts Bay and along the St. Lawrence. Jacques Cartier speaks of them as early as 1535.
Here, Horsford also mentions that he has read the accounts of Cartier; this may have helped him later make the connection between Vikings and Norumbega. But for now, he was only interested in Erickson. When he published the dedication, titled The Discovery of America by Northmen, his theories drew the ire of contemporary historians. Presumably, many were upset a professor of Chemistry thought himself more knowledgeable in their field than they were. One author, Justin Winsor, found issue with Horsford's theory that Vikings had left a noticeable imprint on Native American language:
Nothing could be slenderer than the alleged correspondences of languages, and we can see in Horsford's Discovery of America by Northmen to what a fanciful extent a confident enthusiasm can carry it.[@WinsNar89, 98-99]
Horsford begins his next book on the Vikings, The Problem of the Northmen, by directly addressing Winsor's comment,[@HorsProb89, 1] demonstrating that he was willing to openly spar with historians to defend his theory. Horsford's belief and confidence that there were Nordic elements present in Native American language may have been informed by his early years with the Seneca in New York. Horsford then continues to present evidence for the location of Leif Erickson's houses: "If anyone interested will walk from the junction of Elmwood Avenue with Mt. Auburn Street [...] he will be at the site of the objects of interest which had once been there, and which I had predicted might there be found."[@HorsProb89, 14] Here Horsford was remarkably confident in his claims, inviting his audience to see the evidence for themselves. He claims there are "inequalities of the surface," which are "the remains of two long log houses, and huts, or cots."[@HorsProb89, 14] He states they are arranged "'some nearer, some farther from the water,' as the sagas say,"[@HorsProb89, 14] again drawing on the sagas as his primary source. Outside of just Horsford, there existed a wider movement around the promotion of Leif Erickson in the late nineteenth century. Newspapers at the time rarely mention Erickson without mentioning his preceding Columbus,2 which may have been part of a widespread anti-Italian and anti-Catholic sentiment. Several other proponents of Vikings in New England also believed "the 'Aryan race,' in particular its 'Teutonic' [i.e., German] branch, was superior to all others."[@FlemPicHist95, 1078] Horsford, however, seems to have only been interested in Erickson and never brings up racial superiority or a disdain for Columbus. In fact, he states that Erickson's prior discovery of America "would dim, by the measure of the faintest Indian-summer haze only, the transcendent glory of the life-work of Columbus."[@HorsDisc90, 16] So, while some of the enthusiasm around Horsford's work may have been motivated by a desire to diminish Columbus as an expression of pro-Nordic anti-Italian sentiment, it seems the man himself was driven by his own curiosity in what he saw as little-researched historical possibility.
It was during one of his visits to Shelter island when "a chance reference let fall by one of his guests" would introduce Horsford to the legend of Norumbega.[@JackHors92, 344] The term seems to have been widely known in New England at the time; both an article from the Worcester Daily Spy in 1875 and one from the Vermont Phoenix in 1894 mention Norumbega in passing, the reader assumed to be familiar. Horsford, having grown up in New York, was only introduced to the myth after his retirement and became energetically intrigued. He read the accounts of Alafonce and Verrazzano, and describes them in one of his books.[@HorsDisc90, 14] In this same book, Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, Horsford mentions the existence of so many maps that prominently display Norumbega that "one could not help thinking that they must have some foundation in truth; the alternative [would have] involved too many conspirators, of different nationalities."[@HorsDisc90, 13] How Horsford made the connection from Norumbega to Leif Erickson is a little less clear, though it was most likely etymological. We have seen already Horsford's early interest in Native American language from his early years with the Seneca in New York, and it seems he thought the name "Norumbega" peculiar. He describes how "many hundreds of years ago the country we call Norway was called Norbegia or Norbega,"[@HorsDisc90, 19] and that in "the Algonquin family of languages, which prevailed throughout New England, could not [...] utter the sound of b without prefixing to it the sound of m."[@HorsDisc90, 18] Thus, he reasons, Norumbega is but a Native American corruption of what the Vikings would have called Norway. Horsford uses physical evidence to support his claim as well. He mentions several instances where the first settlers of Massachusetts found natural dams or weirs, which could be used for fishing (the fish would be stopped and collect before the weir on their way upstream to spawn).[@HorsDisc90, 33-34] He also describes walls and other structures on the floor of Boston Harbor and Back Bay, evidence of "the ancient seaport of Norumbega."[@HorsDisc90, 37] To Horsford, all this evidence proved the existence of a great Viking fort of Norumbega, and necessitated the construction of a monument. We have seen this pattern before; once to the Quakers who found refuge on Shelter Island, and again in Boston to Leif Erickson for discovering America. To justify the monument, he gave four reasons:
- It will commemorate the Discovery of Vinland and Norumbega in the forty-third degree, and the identification of Norumbega with Norway, the come country to which this region was once subject by right of discovery and colonization.
- It will invite criticism, and so sift out any errors of interpretation into which, sharing the usual fortune of the pioneer, I may have been led.
- It will encourage archæological investigation in a fascinating and almost untrodden field, and be certain to contribute in the results of research and exploration, both in the study and the field, to the historical treasure of the Commonwealth.
- It will help, by reason of its mere presence, and by virtue of the veneration with which the Tower will in time come to be regarded, to bring acquiescence in the fruit of investigation, and so allay the blind scepticism, amounting practically to inverted ambition, that would deprive Massachusetts of the glory of holding the Landfall of Leif Erickson, and at the same time the seat of the earliest colony of Europeans in America.[@HorsDisc90, 40]
These convictions say much about the man Horsford was. As already seen from his comments on Columbus, he was not motivated by dislike of the Italians; rather, he sought to bring "the glory" of Erickson's discovery to Massachusetts, his home for the majority of his working life. Second, he is remarkably humble in his theories; this is particularly evident in his second point, and to an extent the third. He accepts that "the trustworthiness of my conclusions might be tested by the spade,"[@HorsDisc90, 41] and that he had not been able to do much of his own archaeology. Horsford did not build the tower to be himself remembered, rather to inspire others to continue his work. Indeed, the plaque at the base of the tower does not bear his name.
Eben Norton Horsford would die two years after The Discovery was published, on January first, 1893.[@AdamsMemBiog08, 103] He believed himself a pioneer; at the cutting edge of discovery, the first breakthrough in a movement that would long outlive him. After his death, however, there was little interest in furthering Horsford's ideas. His biographers mostly gloss over the veracity of his theories, focusing more on his considerable achievements in chemistry, large and generous donations to various colleges, and support for women's education.[@JackHors92, 345] The tower remains. Built to inspire an awe of history, it now draws confused second glances in the rear-view mirror. A century of wind and rain have washed out its words, and the trees it once dominated now cast it in shadow.
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