Dighton Rock

Forty tons of carved sandstone and centuries of argument about who cut it

Dighton Rock is a 40-ton boulder of grey-brown sandstone, about 11 feet long, 9.5 wide and 5 high, that sat for centuries in the bed of the Taunton River at Berkley, Massachusetts, once part of the town of Dighton. Its slanting face, turned to the water, is covered in carvings: lines, geometric shapes and schematic human figures, some of it plainly writing and some of it argued over. No one knows for certain who made them, and for more than three centuries people have found in them whatever they came looking for.

The Reverend John Danforth drew the markings in October 1680, and his sketch survives in the British Museum. Cotton Mather described the rock in 1690 as deeply engraved with strange characters, no man alive knows how or when, though he had probably never seen it. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin of Paris read it as a memorial of seamen from Carthage. In 1783 Ezra Stiles proposed Phoenicians, and others found Hebrew words, or Tyrians and Jews sent out by King Solomon.

The most influential reading came in 1837 from the Danish scholar Carl Christian Rafn, who saw in it the Norse saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni at the place called Hóp: his ship, his wife Gudrid, their son Snorri born in America, a fight with the natives, and runes reading NAM THORFINS. For decades the Viking theory was almost universally accepted. Then Edmund B. Delabarre of Brown University, who bought a summer home within a mile of the rock in 1912, found that Rafn had added lines of his own to the drawings he published. Delabarre compared the rock to a Rorschach inkblot, on which scholars saw their own thoughts.

Then, studying a photograph for the hundredth time, Delabarre saw the date 1511 and the Portuguese royal shield, and read an abbreviated Latin message from Miguel Corte-Real, who vanished off Newfoundland in 1502 searching for his lost brother: in this place, by the will of God, he had become a chief of the Indians. The theory made him a hero in Portugal and among the Portuguese of nearby Fall River, though Hunter in 2017 laid out the case against it. Before 1511 caught his eye, Delabarre had judged the carvings Native work, and a schematic face on the rock resembles a Native petroglyph in eastern Vermont.

The rock passed through the violinist Ole Bull and Denmark's Royal Society of Antiquaries to the Old Colony Historical Society, which deeded it to Massachusetts in 1955. In 1963 the state lifted it from the river during construction of a coffer dam, and it now stands in a museum in Dighton Rock State Park, listed on the National Register since 1971.