American Vikings by Martyn Whittock

Author:Martyn Whittock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Newport Stone Tower, Rhode Island

The structure—also known as the Old Stone Mill, the Viking Tower (clues in these names regarding competing theories)—is a round stone tower, located in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island. While tree growth now obscures the view from the spot to Narragansett Bay, eighteenth-century paintings show that it was once visible from the sea. The question is: what is it and when was it constructed?

The tower features on the service patch of the “landing ship tanks” (LST 1179) USS Newport, commissioned in 1968, but controversial theories seek to connect the stone structure with a much older set of seaborne warriors: the Vikings. The earliest example of such a claim appears to date from 1837. It was then that the Danish archaeologist, Carl Christian Rafn (who commented on Dighton Rock), proposed this in the book Antiquitates Americanæ.36 This identification was partly based on work that he had carried out on the inscriptions found on Dighton Rock.

Rafn’s theory inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Skeleton in Armor. This connected with the discovery, in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1832, of a skeleton with a triangular brass plate on the chest, a broad belt of brass tubes, and several arrowheads made from brass or copper. From the 1840s onward, most experts concluded that this was the body of a Native American, whose metal objects were probably derived from repurposed European metal trade goods. However, as with many finds involving metalwork or complex building structures (which clearly had Native American origins) there was a tendency among some early commentators to ascribe such objects to nonnative influences. This was part of a process whereby things showing signs of cultural sophistication were denied as being of Native American origin. Those thought to be responsible in this case ranging from Phoenicians and Carthaginians to Viking explorers. An example of Phoenician identification was made by John Stark, a lawyer from Illinois, in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (1837). But Vikings would soon be on the scene, and this linked the skeleton to the tower at Newport.

When Longfellow published his poem in 1841, his evocation of the discovery of the body of a Viking warrior appears to combine awareness of the find from Fall River, with the ideas of Rafn regarding the alleged Norse-origins of the tower at Newport. Within the poem, we find assertions such as “I was a Viking old!”; the warrior flees with his love from pursuit; and “Three weeks we westward bore,” which allows for a North American adventure.

Having landed on a western shore marked by “the vast forest”:

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