Restaurants, bars and museums in Lisbon · Page 298

Réplica da Pedra de Dighton

Belém · Monuments & Historic Buildings

The Réplica da Pedra de Dighton stands in Belém, on Praça do Império (1400-206 Lisboa), just outside the Museu de Marinha, the Navy Museum. It rests on a low stone base near the western wing of the square's gardens, by the museum entrance. The monument is a copy of Dighton Rock and was given to Lisbon in 1983 by Portuguese-American communities from New England. The original boulder lay in the Taunton River estuary at Berkley, Massachusetts, a place that was once part of the town of Dighton, which gave the rock its name. It is a block of feldspathic sandstone weighing about 40 tons and measuring roughly 1.5 m high, 2.9 m wide and 3.4 m long. It is thought to have been deposited there during the last glaciation, around 13,000 years ago. Its upward-facing surface bears heavily eroded inscriptions, cut with a metal or very hard stone tool to depths of 2 to 7 mm. Ice, temperature cycles, weathering and vandalism have destroyed some markings. Plans to lift the rock out of the estuary and place it in a museum date from 1829. A first attempt in 1955 was stopped by a court order once the cables were found to be damaging the stone. After a study showed it was a loose boulder rather than a rock outcrop, it was taken from the river in 1963 to prevent damage from vandalism, tidal erosion and temperature changes, and Massachusetts classed it as a protected object. It now has its own museum. What the markings mean has been argued over for roughly 350 years. The earliest known descriptions date from 1680, when the Reverend John Danforth copied them and sent them to London hoping for an interpretation. Proposed authors include the Narragansett and other Algonquian peoples, Phoenician sailors, and Vikings, the last in a theory put forward in 1837 by Carl Christian Rafn. A further theory credits the Portuguese navigator Miguel Corte Real. Edmund B. Delabarre proposed it in 1918 and defended it in a 1929 work, and the Portuguese-American physician Manuel Luciano da Silva later took it up. Supporters of the Portuguese reading cite four crosses of the Order of Christ, seven letters of Corte Real's name, Portuguese national shields and the sixteenth-century Portuguese way of writing the numeral 5. On this account, Corte Real reached North America around 1502. Da Silva presented his documentation in Lisbon in 1960, at the 1st International Congress of the Discoveries.

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