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“Fiery
Young Dr. Manuel Luciano da Silva”
By
Earl Banner Published: "Boston
Globe",
January 25, 1961
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Dighton
Rock at midtide, until 1963 the tides protected the inscriptions from the
vandals |
Panoramic view of the Dighton Rock Museum . The
building with small windows contains the rock. The building in the
foreground is the Museum proper which contains the
panels and artifacts. |
In a few days it will be
44 years that there was a public hearing at the State House in Boston,
Massachusetts, to discuss the First
Bill proposed to have the
Dighton Rock
moved, from the tidal waters of the
Taunton River, to dry land,
such as a cofferdam nearby, in Berkley.
At this public meeting were present, with
opposite views, two Portuguese-Americans: Professor
Francis Rogers from Harvard University and Dr. Manuel Luciano da Silva from
Lahey Clinic, in
Boston
.
Here is the way the Boston Globe reporter, Earl Banner
related the event, on January 15, 1961. With the title:
The
Doctors Still Disagree Dighton Rock
Row Up Again
“A
world ranging debate between a Harvard professor and a Lahey Clinic doctor as to
whether
Dighton Rock
in
Berkley is a genuine artifact of the early Portuguese explorers held the attention of a
Legislative hearing in the State House today.
The heated exchange between fiery young Dr. Manuel
Luciano da Silva of Lahey Clinic, who says the rock indicates that Portuguese
explorers were ranging this coast before
Columbus sailed in 1492, and Prof. Francis H. Rogers of Harvard, an authority on
Portuguese literature and history, shook up an international congress of world
historians in Lisbon last fall”. [See --- My Historical Communication to the First
International Congress of the History of Discoveries
in Lisbon, 1960. ]
“Dr.
Rogers, a native of New Bedford and of Portuguese descent himself, is just as
proud of his Portuguese heritage as is Dr. da Silva, but he shares the opinion
of fellow-Harvard historian, Dr. Samuel
Eliot
Morison, that the marks on the Rock may have no more significance than
the inscriptions “Kilroy was here”.
This First Bill was not approved.
But I moved to have a Second Bill
submitted, and I arranged to have its public hearing when Rogers was on
vacation, and its public hearing passed smoothly,
and eventually was approved by the House of the Representatives, by the
Senate and signed by the Governor of the Commonwealth
and the cofferdam was built, in 1963.
Subsequently two other Bills went through
the same “delivery pains” for: (1)
the Pavilion to protect the
Dighton Rock
was built in 1974,
and (2) the Museum proper was
finished in 1978.
Eureka
! Since then the
Dighton
Rock
Museum
has been completed and the
Dighton Rock
has been preserved for posterity!
My perseverance and success prove, beyond
any doubt, that the two professors from Harvard were WRONG – Rogers and
Morrison. These guys thought because
they were from Harvard
they knew it all!.. Yet neither one knew anything about Epigraphy and yet
they dared to emit their opinions about
Dighton Rock
inscriptions. How sad! They both
died several years ago, together
with their ignorance! Let them rest
in peace for ever!
A Physical description of
Dighton Rock
Dighton Rock weighs 40 tons. It
is a bolder. It is upside-down. It migrated from somewhere in North America
during the melting of the ice cap, ten thousand years ago, rolling down until it
stopped on the left margin of the Taunton River.
When Dighton Rock lay in the
riverbed, (until 1963), it was covered by tidal water all but four hours each
day. At high tide, the top of the rock was covered by three or four feet of
water.
In the winter, when the
Taunton River was frozen, the rock remained hidden under an ice cap. These harsh
conditions, ironically, protected the inscriptions from vandalism.
Dighton Rock is gray-brown
crystalline sandstone of medium to coarse texture. It has the form of a slanted,
six-sided block, 5 feet high, 9. 5 feet wide, and 11 feet long. The surface with
the inscriptions has a trapezoidal face and is inclined 70 degrees to the
northwest.
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