[Footnote 217: It is not meant that stone implements did not continue to be used in some parts of Europe far into the Middle Ages. But this was not because iron was not perfectly well known, but because in many backward regions it was difficult to obtain or to work, so that stone continued in use. As my friend, Mr. T. S. Perry, reminds me, Helbig says that stone-pointed spears were used by some of the English at the battle of Hastings, and stone battle-axes by some of the Scots under William Wallace at the end of the thirteenth century. Die Italiker in der Poebene, Leipsic, 1879, p. 42. Helbig's statement as to Hastings is confirmed by Freeman, Norman Conquest of England, vol. iii. p. 473.]

[Footnote 218: My use of the word "inventing" is, in this connection, a slip of the pen. Of course the tales of "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," the Sciopedae, etc., as told by Sir John Mandeville, were not invented by the mediaeval imagination, but copied from ancient authors. They may be found in Pliny, Hist. Nat., lib. vii., and were mentioned before his time by Ktesias, as well as by Hecataeus, according to Stephanus of Byzantium. Cf. Aristophanes, Aves, 1553; Julius Solinus, Polyhistor, ed. Salmasius, cap. 240. Just as these sheets are going to press there comes to me Mr. Perry's acute and learned History of Greek Literature, New York, 1890, in which this subject is mentioned in connection with the mendacious and medical Ktesias:—These stories have probably acquired a literary currency "by exercise of the habit, not unknown even to students of science, of indiscriminate copying from one's predecessors, so that in reading Mandeville we have the ghosts of the lies of Ktesias, almost sanctified by the authority of Pliny, who quoted them and thereby made them a part of mediaeval folk-lore—and from folk-lore, probably, they took their remote start" (p. 522).]

[Footnote 219: "En that var gravara ok safvali ok allskonar skinnavara" (Rafn, p. 59),—i. e. gray fur and sable and all sorts of skinwares; in another account, "skinnavoeru ok algra skinn," which in the Danish version is "skindvarer og aegte graaskind" (id. p. 150),—i. e. skinwares and genuine gray furs. Cartier in Canada and the Puritans in Massachusetts were not long in finding that the natives had good furs to sell.]

[Footnote 220: Rafn, p. 156.]

[Footnote 221: Much curious information respecting the use of elephants in war may be found in the learned work of the Chevalier Armandi, Histoire militaire des elephants, Paris, 1843. As regards Thorfinn's bull, Mr. Laing makes the kind of blunder that our British cousins are sometimes known to make when they get the Rocky Mountains within sight of Bunker Hill monument. "A continental people in that part of America," says Mr. Laing, "could not be strangers to the much more formidable bison." Heimskringla, p. 169. Bisons on the Atlantic coast, Mr. Laing?! And then his comparison quite misses the point; a bison, if the natives had been familiar with him, would not have been at all formidable as compared to the bull which they had never before seen. A horse is much less formidable than a cougar, but Aztec warriors who did not mind a cougar were paralyzed with terror at the sight of men on horseback. It is the unknown that frightens in such cases. Thorfinn's natives were probably familiar with such large animals as moose and deer, but a deer isn't a bull.]

[Sidenote: Meaning of the epithet "Skraelings."]

These incidents are of surpassing interest, for they were attendant upon the first meeting (in all probability) that ever took place between civilized Europeans and any people below the upper status of barbarism.[222] Who were these natives encountered by Thorfinn? The Northmen called them "Skraelings," a name which one is at first sight strongly tempted to derive from the Icelandic verb skraekja, identical with the English screech. A crowd of excited Indians might most appropriately be termed Screechers.[223] This derivation, however, is not correct. The word skraeling survives in modern Norwegian, and means a feeble or puny or insignificant person. Dr. Storm's suggestion is in all probability correct, that the name "Skraelings," as applied to the natives of America, had no ethnological significance, but simply meant "inferior people;" it gave concise expression to the white man's opinion that they were "a bad lot." In Icelandic literature the name is usually applied to the Eskimos, and hence it has been rashly inferred that Thorfinn found Eskimos in Vinland. Such was Rafn's opinion, and since his time the commentators have gone off upon a wrong trail and much ingenuity has been wasted.[224] It would be well to remember, however, that the Europeans of the eleventh century were not ethnologists; in meeting these inferior peoples for the first time they were more likely to be impressed with the broad fact of their inferiority than to be nice in making distinctions. When we call both Australians and Fuegians "savages," we do not assert identity or relationship between them; and so when the Northmen called Eskimos and Indians by the same disparaging epithet, they doubtless simply meant to call them savages.

[Footnote 222: The Phoenicians, however (who in this connection may be classed with Europeans), must have met with some such people in the course of their voyages upon the coasts of Africa. I shall treat of this more fully below, p. 327.]

[Footnote 223: As for Indians, says Cieza de Leon, they are all noisy (alharaquientos). Segunda Parte de la Cronica del Peru, cap. xxiii.]

[Footnote 224: For example, Dr. De Costa refers to Dr. Abbott's discoveries as indicating "that the Indian was preceded by a people like the Eskimos, whose stone implements are found in the Trenton gravel." Pre-Columbian Discovery, p. 132. Quite so; but that was in the Glacial Period (!!), and when the edge of the ice-sheet slowly retreated northward, the Eskimo, who is emphatically an Arctic creature, doubtless retreated with it, just as he retreated from Europe. See above, p. 18. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that there were any Eskimos south of Labrador so lately as nine hundred years ago.]

[Sidenote: Personal appearance of the Skraelings.]

Our chronicle describes the Skraelings of Vinland as swarthy in hue, ferocious in aspect, with ugly hair, big eyes, and broad cheeks.[225] This will do very well for Indians, except as to the eyes. We are accustomed to think of Indian eyes as small; but in this connection it is worthy of note that a very keen observer, Marc Lescarbot, in his minute and elaborate description of the physical appearance of the Micmacs of Acadia, speaks with some emphasis of their large eyes.[226] Dr. Storm quite reasonably suggests that the Norse expression may refer to the size not of the eye-ball, but of the eye-socket, which in the Indian face is apt to be large; and very likely this is what the Frenchman also had in mind.

[Footnote 225: "Their voru svartir menn ok illiligir, ok havdhu illt har a hoefdhi. Their voru mjoek eygdhir ok breidhir i kinnum," i. e. "Hi homines erant nigri, truculenti specie, foedam in capite comam habentes, oculis magnis et genis latis." Rafn, p. 149. The Icelandic svartr is more precisely rendered by the identical English swarthy than by the Latin niger.]

[Footnote 226: "Mais quat a noz Sauvages, pour ce qui regarde les ieux ilz ne les ont ni bleuz, ni verds, mais noirs pour la pluspart, ainsi que les cheveux; & neantmoins ne sont petits, come ceux des anciens Scythes, mais d'une grandeur bien agreable." Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, Paris, 1612, tom. ii. p. 714.]

[Sidenote: The Skraelings of Vinland were Indians,—very likely Algonquins.]

These Skraelings were clad in skins, and their weapons were bows and arrows, slings, and stone hatchets. In the latter we may now, I think, be allowed to recognize the familiar tomahawk; and when we read that, in a sharp fight with the natives, Thorbrand, son of the commander Snorro, was slain, and the woman Freydis afterward found his corpse in the woods, with a flat stone sticking in the head, and his naked sword lying on the ground beside him, we seem to see how it all happened.[227] We seem to see the stealthy Indian suddenly dealing the death-blow, and then obliged for his own safety to dart away among the trees without recovering his tomahawk or seizing the sword. The Skraelings came up the river or lake in a swarm of canoes, all yelling at the top of their voices (et illi omnes valde acutum ululabant), and, leaping ashore, began a formidable attack with slings and arrows. The narrative calls these canoes "skin-boats" (hudhkeipar), whence it has been inferred that the writer had in mind the kayaks and umiaks of the Eskimos.[228] I suspect that the writer did have such boats in mind, and accordingly used a word not strictly accurate. Very likely his authorities failed to specify a distinction between bark-boats and skin-boats, and simply used the handiest word for designating canoes as contrasted with their own keeled boats.[229]

[Footnote 227: "Hun fann fyrir ser mann daudhan, thar var Thorbrandr Snorrason, ok stodh hellusteinn i hoefdhi honum; sverdhit la bert i hja honum," i. e. "Illa incidit in mortuum hominem, Thorbrandum Snorrii filium, cujus capiti lapis planus impactus stetit; nudus juxta eum gladius jacuit." Rafn, p. 154.]

[Footnote 228: These Eskimo skin-boats are described in Rink's Danish Greenland, pp. 113, 179.]

[Footnote 229: Cf. Storm, op. cit. pp. 366, 367.]

One other point which must be noticed here in connection with the Skraelings is a singular manoeuvre which they are said to have practised in the course of the fight. They raised upon the end of a pole a big ball, not unlike a sheep's paunch, and of a bluish colour; this ball they swung from the pole over the heads of the white men, and it fell to the ground with a horrid noise.[230] Now, according to Mr. Schoolcraft, this was a mode of fighting formerly common among the Algonquins, in New England and elsewhere. This big ball was what Mr. Schoolcraft calls the "balista," or what the Indians themselves call the "demon's head." It was a large round boulder, sewed up in a new skin and attached to a pole. As the skin dried it enwrapped the stone tightly; and then it was daubed with grotesque devices in various colours. "It was borne by several warriors who acted as balisteers. Plunged upon a boat or canoe, it was capable of sinking it. Brought down upon a group of men on a sudden, it produced consternation and death."[231] This is a most remarkable feature in the narrative, for it shows us the Icelandic writer (here manifestly controlled by some authoritative source of information) describing a very strange mode of fighting, which we know to have been characteristic of the Algonquins. Karlsefni's men do not seem to have relished this outlandish style of fighting; they retreated along the river bank until they came to a favourable situation among some rocks, where they made a stand and beat off their swarming assailants. The latter, as soon as they found themselves losing many warriors without gaining their point, suddenly turned and fled to their canoes, and paddled away with astonishing celerity. Throughout the account it seems to me perfectly clear that we are dealing with Indians.

[Footnote 230: "That sa their Karlsefni at Skraelingar faerdhu upp a stoeng knoett stundar mykinn thvi naer til at jafna sem saudharvoemb, ok helzt blan at lit, ok fleygdhu af stoenginni upp a landit yfir lidh theirra Karlsefnis, ok let illilega vidhr, thar sem nidhr kom. Vidh thetta slo otta myklum a Karlsefni ok allt lidh hans, sva at tha fysti engis annars enn flyja, ok halda undan upp medh anni, thviat theim thotti lidh Skraelinga drifa at ser allum megin, ok letta eigi, fyrr enn their koma til hamra nokkurra, ok veittu thar vidhrtoeku hardha," i. e. "Viderunt Karlsefniani quod Skraelingi longurio sustulerunt globum ingentem, ventri ovillo haud absimilem, colore fere caeruleo; hune ex longurio in terram super manum Karlsefnianorum contorserunt, qui ut decidit, dirum sonuit. Hac re terrore perculsus est Karlsefnius suique omnes, ut nihil aliud cuperent quam fugere et gradum referre sursum secundum fluvium: credebant enim se ab Skraelingis undique circumveniri. Hinc non gradum stitere, priusquam ad rupes quasdam pervenissent, ubi acriter resistebant." Rafn, p. 153.]

[Footnote 231: Schoolcraft, Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1860, 6 vols. 4to, vol. i. p. 89; a figure of this weapon is given in the same volume, plate xv. fig. 2, from a careful description by Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief.]

[Sidenote: The uniped.]

The coexistence of so many unmistakable marks of truth in our narratives may fairly be said to amount to a demonstration that they must be derived, through some eminently trustworthy channel, from the statements of intelligent eye-witnesses who took part in the events related. Here and there, no doubt, we come upon some improbable incident or a touch of superstition, such as we need not go back to the eleventh century to find very common among seamen's narratives; but the remarkable thing in the present case is that there are so few such features. One fabulous creature is mentioned. Thorfinn and his men saw from their vessel a glittering speck upon the shore at an opening in the woods. They hailed it, whereupon the creature proceeded to perform the quite human act of shooting an arrow, which killed the man at the helm. The narrator calls it a "uniped," or some sort of one-footed goblin,[232] but that is hardly reasonable, for after the shooting it went on to perform the further quite human and eminently Indian-like act of running away.[233] Evidently this discreet "uniped" was impressed with the desirableness of living to fight another day. In a narrative otherwise characterized by sobriety, such an instance of fancy, even supposing it to have come down from the original sources, counts for as much or as little as Henry Hudson's description of a mermaid.[234]

[Footnote 232: Rafn, p. 160; De Costa, p. 134; Storm, p. 330.]

[Footnote 233: Here the narrator seems determined to give us a genuine smack of the marvellous, for when the fleeing uniped comes to a place where his retreat seems cut off by an arm of the sea, he runs (glides, or hops?) across the water without sinking. In Vigfusson's version, however, the marvellous is eliminated, and the creature simply runs over the stubble and disappears. The incident is evidently an instance where the narrative has been "embellished" by introducing a feature from ancient classical writers. The "Monocoli," or one-legged people, are mentioned by Pliny, Hist. Nat., vii. 2: "Item hominum genus qui Monocoli vocarentur, singulis cruribus, mirae pernicitatis ad saltum." Cf. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, viii. 4.]

[Footnote 234: Between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla, June 15, 1608. For the description, with its droll details, see Purchas his Pilgrimes, iii. 575.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Misleading associations with the word "saga."]

[Sidenote: Unfortunate comparison between Leif Ericsson and Agamemnon.]

[Sidenote: The story of the Trojan War, as we have it, is pure folk-lore.]

It is now time for a few words upon the character of the records upon which our story is based. And first, let us remark upon a possible source of misapprehension due to the associations with which a certain Norse word has been clothed. The old Norse narrative-writings are called "sagas," a word which we are in the habit of using in English as equivalent to legendary or semi-mythical narratives. To cite a "saga" as authority for a statement seems, therefore, to some people as inadmissible as to cite a fairy-tale; and I cannot help suspecting that to some such misleading association of ideas is due the particular form of the opinion expressed some time ago by a committee of the Massachusetts Historical Society,—"that there is the same sort of reason for believing in the existence of Leif Ericsson that there is for believing in the existence of Agamemnon. They are both traditions accepted by later writers, and there is no more reason for regarding as true the details related about the discoveries of the former than there is for accepting as historic truth the narrative contained in the Homeric poems." The report goes on to observe that "it is antecedently probable that the Northmen discovered America in the early part of the eleventh century; and this discovery is confirmed by the same sort of historical tradition, not strong enough to be called evidence, upon which our belief in many of the accepted facts of history rests."[235] The second of these statements is characterized by critical moderation, and expresses the inevitable and wholesome reaction against the rash enthusiasm of Professor Rafn half a century ago, and the vagaries of many an uninstructed or uncritical writer since his time. But the first statement is singularly unfortunate. It would be difficult to find a comparison more inappropriate than that between Agamemnon and Leif, between the Iliad and the Saga of Eric the Red. The story of the Trojan War and its heroes, as we have it in Homer and the Athenian dramatists, is pure folk-lore as regards form, and chiefly folk-lore as regards contents. It is in a high degree probable that this mass of folk-lore surrounds a kernel of plain fact, that in times long before the first Olympiad an actual "king of men" at Mycenae conducted an expedition against the great city by the Simois, that the Agamemnon of the poet stands in some such relation toward this chieftain as that in which the Charlemagne of mediaeval romance stands toward the mighty Emperor of the West.[236] Nevertheless the story, as we have it, is simply folk-lore. If the Iliad and Odyssey contain faint reminiscences of actual events, these events are so inextricably wrapped up with mythical phraseology that by no cunning of the scholar can they be construed into history. The motives and capabilities of the actors and the conditions under which they accomplish their destinies are such as exist only in fairy-tales. Their world is as remote from that in which we live as the world of Sindbad and Camaralzaman; and this is not essentially altered by the fact that Homer introduces us to definite localities and familiar customs as often as the Irish legends of Finn M'Cumhail.[237]

[Footnote 235: Proceedings Mass. Hist. Soc., December, 1887.]

[Footnote 236: I used this argument twenty years ago in qualification of the over-zealous solarizing views of Sir G. W. Cox and others. See my Myths and Mythmakers, pp. 191-202; and cf. Freeman on "The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early English History," in his Historical Essays, i. 1-39.]

[Footnote 237: Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, pp. 12, 204, 303; Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts, pp. 203-311.]

[Sidenote: The Saga of Eric the Red is not folk-lore.]

It would be hard to find anything more unlike such writings than the class of Icelandic sagas to which that of Eric the Red belongs. Here we have quiet and sober narrative, not in the least like a fairy-tale, but often much like a ship's log. Whatever such narrative may be, it is not folk-lore. In act and motive, in its conditions and laws, its world is the every-day world in which we live. If now and then a "uniped" happens to stray into it, the incongruity is as conspicuous as in the case of Hudson's mermaid, or a ghost in a modern country inn; whereas in the Homeric fabric the supernatural is warp and woof. To assert a likeness between two kinds of literature so utterly different is to go very far astray.

[Sidenote: Mythical and historical sagas.]

As already observed, I suspect that misleading associations with the word "saga" may have exerted an unconscious influence in producing this particular kind of blunder,—for it is nothing less than a blunder. Resemblance is tacitly assumed between the Iliad and an Icelandic saga. Well, between the Iliad and some Icelandic sagas there is a real and strong resemblance. In truth these sagas are divisible into two well marked and sharply contrasted classes. In the one class belong the Eddic Lays, and the mythical sagas, such as the Volsunga, the stories of Ragnar, Frithiof, and others; and along with these, though totally different in source, we may for our present purpose group the romantic sagas, such as Parceval, Remund, Karlamagnus, and others brought from southern Europe. These are alike in being composed of legendary and mythical materials; they belong essentially to the literature of folk-lore. In the other class come the historical sagas, such as those of Njal and Egil, the Sturlunga, and many others, with the numerous biographies and annals.[238] These writings give us history, and often very good history indeed. "Saga" meant simply any kind of literature in narrative form; the good people of Iceland did not happen to have such a handy word as "history," which they could keep entire when they meant it in sober earnest and chop down into "story" when they meant it otherwise. It is very much as if we were to apply the same word to the Arthur legends and to William of Malmesbury's judicious and accurate chronicles, and call them alike "stories."

[Footnote 238: Nowhere can you find a more masterly critical account of Icelandic literature than in Vigfusson's "Prolegomena" to his edition of Sturlunga Saga, Oxford, 1878, vol. i. pp. ix.-ccxiv. There is a good but very brief account in Horn's History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North, transl. by R. B. Anderson, Chicago, 1884, pp. 50-70.]

[Sidenote: The western or Hauks-bok version of Eric the Red's Saga.]

The narrative upon which our account of the Vinland voyages is chiefly based belongs to the class of historical sagas. It is the Saga of Eric the Red, and it exists in two different versions, of which one seems to have been made in the north, the other in the west, of Iceland. The western version is the earlier and in some respects the better. It is found in two vellums, that of the great collection known as Hauks-bok (AM. 544), and that which is simply known as AM. 557 from its catalogue number in Arni Magnusson's collection. Of these the former, which is the best preserved, was written in a beautiful hand by Hauk Erlendsson, between 1305 and 1334, the year of his death. This western version is the one which has generally been printed under the title, "Saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni." It is the one to which I have most frequently referred in the present chapter.[239]

[Footnote 239: It is printed in Rafn, pp. 84-187, and in Groenlands historiske Mindesmaerker, i. 352-443. The most essential part of it may now be found, under its own name, in Vigfusson's Icelandic Prose Reader, pp. 123-140.]

[Sidenote: The northern or Flateyar-bok version.]

The northern version is that which was made about the year 1387 by the priest Jon Thordharson, and contained in the famous compilation known as the Flateyar-bok, or "Flat Island Book."[240] This priest was editing the saga of King Olaf Tryggvesson, which is contained in that compilation, and inasmuch as Leif Ericsson's presence at King Olaf's court was connected both with the introduction of Christianity into Greenland and with the discovery of Vinland, Jon paused, after the manner of mediaeval chroniclers, and inserted then and there what he knew about Eric and Leif and Thorfinn. In doing this, he used parts of the original saga of Eric the Red (as we find it reproduced in the western version), and added thereunto a considerable amount of material concerning the Vinland voyages derived from other sources. Jon's version thus made has generally been printed under the title, "Saga of Eric the Red."[241]

[Footnote 240: It belonged to a man who lived on Flat Island, in one of the Iceland fiords.]

[Footnote 241: It is printed in Rafn, pp. 1-76, under the title "Thaettir af Eireki Rauda ok Graenlendingum." For a critical account of these versions, see Storm, op. cit. pp. 319-325; I do not, in all respects, follow him in his depreciation of the Flateyar-bok version.]

[Sidenote: Presumption against sources not contemporary.]

Now the older version, written at the beginning of the fourteenth century, gives an account of things which happened three centuries before it was written. A cautious scholar will, as a rule, be slow to consider any historical narrative as quite satisfactory authority, even when it contains no improbable statements, unless it is nearly contemporary with the events which it records. Such was the rule laid down by the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and it is a very good rule; the proper application of it has disencumbered history of much rubbish. At the same time, like all rules, it should be used with judicious caution and not allowed to run away with us. As applied by Lewis to Roman history it would have swept away in one great cataclysm not only kings and decemvirs, but Brennus and his Gauls to boot, and left us with nothing to swear by until the invasion of Pyrrhus.[242] Subsequent research has shown that this was going altogether too far. The mere fact of distance in time between a document and the events which it records is only negative testimony against its value, for it may be a faithful transcript of some earlier document or documents since lost. It is so difficult to prove a negative that the mere lapse of time simply raises a presumption the weight of which should be estimated by a careful survey of all the probabilities in the case. Among the many Icelandic vellums that are known to have perished[243] there may well have been earlier copies of Eric the Red's Saga.

[Footnote 242: Lewis's Inquiry into the Credibility of the Early Roman History, 2 vols., London, 1855.]

[Footnote 243: And notably in that terrible fire of October, 1728, which consumed the University Library at Copenhagen, and broke the heart of the noble collector of manuscripts, Arni Magnusson. The great eruption of Hecla in 1390 overwhelmed two famous homesteads in the immediate neighbourhood. From the local history of these homesteads and their inmates, Vigfusson thinks it not unlikely that some records may still be there "awaiting the spade and pickaxe of a new Schliemann." Sturlunga Saga, p. cliv.]

[Sidenote: Hauk Erlendsson and his manuscripts.]

Hauk Erlendsson reckoned himself a direct descendant, in the eighth generation, from Snorro, son of Thorfinn and Gudrid, born in Vinland. He was an important personage in Iceland, a man of erudition, author of a brief book of contemporary annals and a treatise on arithmetic in which he introduced the Arabic numerals into Iceland. In those days the lover of books, if he would add them to his library, might now and then obtain an original manuscript, but usually he had to copy them or have them copied by hand. The Hauks-bok, with its 200 skins, one of the most extensive Icelandic vellums now in existence, is really Hauk's private library, or what there is left of it, and it shows that he was a man who knew how to make a good choice of books. He did a good deal of his copying himself, and also employed two clerks in the same kind of work.[244]

[Footnote 244: An excellent facsimile of Hauk's handwriting is given in Rafn, tab. iii., lower part; tab. iv. and the upper part of tab. iii. are in the hands of his two amanuenses. See Vigfusson, op. cit. p. clxi.]

[Sidenote: The story is not likely to have been preserved to Hauk's time by oral tradition only.]

Now I do not suppose it will occur to any rational being to suggest that Hauk may have written down his version of Eric the Red's Saga from an oral tradition nearly three centuries old. The narrative could not have been so long preserved in its integrity, with so little extravagance of statement and so many marks of truthfulness in details foreign to ordinary Icelandic experience, if it had been entrusted to oral tradition alone. One might as well try to imagine Drake's "World Encompassed" handed down by oral tradition from the days of Queen Elizabeth to the days of Queen Victoria. Such transmission is possible enough with heroic poems and folk-tales, which deal with a few dramatic situations and a stock of mythical conceptions familiar at every fireside; but in a simple matter-of-fact record of sailors' observations and experiences on a strange coast, oral tradition would not be long in distorting and jumbling the details into a result quite undecipherable. The story of the Zeno brothers, presently to be cited, shows what strange perversions occur, even in written tradition, when the copyist, instead of faithfully copying records of unfamiliar events, tries to edit and amend them. One cannot reasonably doubt that Hauk's vellum of Eric the Red's Saga, with its many ear-marks of truth above mentioned, was copied by him—and quite carefully and faithfully withal—from some older vellum not now forthcoming.

[Sidenote: Allusions to Vinland in other documents.]

As we have no clue, however, beyond the internal evidence, to the age or character of the sources from which Hauk copied, there is nothing left for us to do but to look into other Icelandic documents, to see if anywhere they betray a knowledge of Vinland and the voyages thither. Incidental references to Vinland, in narratives concerned with other matters, are of great significance in this connection; for they imply on the part of the narrator a presumption that his readers understand such references, and that it is not necessary to interrupt his story in order to explain them. Such incidental references imply the existence, during the interval between the Vinland voyages and Hauk's manuscript, of many intermediate links of sound testimony that have since dropped out of sight; and therefore they go far toward removing whatever presumption may be alleged against Hauk's manuscript because of its distance from the events.

[Sidenote: Eyrbyggja Saga.]

Now the Eyrbyggja Saga, written between 1230 and 1260, is largely devoted to the settlement of Iceland, and is full of valuable notices of the heathen institutions and customs of the tenth century. The Eyrbyggja, having occasion to speak of Thorbrand Snorrason, observes incidentally that he went from Greenland to Vinland with Karlsefni and was killed in a battle with the Skraelings.[245] We have already mentioned the death of this Thorbrand, and how Freydis found his body in the woods.

[Footnote 245: Vigfusson, Eyrbyggja Saga, pp. 91, 92. Another of Karlsefni's comrades, Thorhall Gamlason, is mentioned in Grettis Saga, Copenhagen, 1859, pp. 22, 70; he went back to Iceland, settled on a farm there, and was known for the rest of his life as "the Vinlander." See above, pp. 165, 168.]

[Sidenote: The abbot Nikulas, etc.]

Three Icelandic tracts on geography, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, mention Helluland and Vinland, and in two of these accounts Markland is interposed between Helluland and Vinland.[246] One of these tracts mentions the voyages of Leif and Thorfinn. It forms part of an essay called "Guide to the Holy Land," by Nikulas Saemundsson, abbot of Thvera, in the north of Iceland, who died 1159. This Nikulas was curious in matters of geography, and had travelled extensively.

[Footnote 246: Werlauf, Symbolae ad Geogr. Medii AEvi, Copenhagen, 1820.]

[Sidenote: Ari Frodhi.]

With the celebrated Ari Thorgilsson, usually known as Frodhi, "the learned," we come to testimony nearly contemporaneous in time and extremely valuable in character. This erudite priest, born in 1067, was the founder of historical writing in Iceland. He was the principal author of the "Landnama-bok," already mentioned as a work of thorough and painstaking research unequalled in mediaeval literature. His other principal works were the "Konunga-bok," or chronicle of the kings of Norway, and the "Islendinga-bok," or description of Iceland.[247] Ari's books, written not in monkish Latin, but in a good vigorous vernacular, were a mine of information from which all subsequent Icelandic historians were accustomed to draw such treasures as they needed. To his diligence and acumen they were all, from Snorro Sturlason down, very much indebted. He may be said to have given the tone to history-writing in Iceland, and it was a high tone.

[Footnote 247: For a critical estimate of Ari's literary activity and the extent of his work, the reader is referred to Moebius, Are's Islaenderbuch, Leipsic, 1869; Maurer, "Ueber Ari Thorgilsson und sein Islaenderbuch," in Germania, xv.; Olsen, Ari Thorgilsson hinn Frodhi, Reykjavik, 1889, pp. 214-240.]

[Sidenote: Ari's significant allusion to Vinland.]

Unfortunately Ari's Islendinga-bok has perished. One cannot help suspecting that it may have contained the contemporary materials from which Eric the Red's Saga in the Hauks-bok was ultimately drawn. For Ari made an abridgment or epitome of his great book, and this epitome, commonly known as "Libellus Islandorum," still survives. In it Ari makes brief mention of Greenland, and refers to his paternal uncle, Thorkell Gellison, as authority for his statements. This Thorkell Gellison, of Helgafell, a man of high consideration who flourished about the middle of the eleventh century, had visited Greenland and talked with one of the men who accompanied Eric when he went to settle in Brattahlid in 986. From this source Ari gives us the interesting information that Eric's party found in Greenland "traces of human habitations, fragments of boats, and stone implements; so from this one might conclude that people of the kind who inhabited Vinland and were known by the (Norse) Greenlanders as Skraelings must have roamed about there."[248] Observe the force of this allusion. The settlers in Greenland did not at first (nor for a long time) meet with barbarous or savage natives there, but only with the vestiges of their former presence. But when Ari wrote the above passage, the memory of Vinland and its fierce Skraelings was still fresh, and Ari very properly inferred from the archaeological remains in Greenland that a people similar (in point of barbarism) to the Skraelings must have been there. Unless Ari and his readers had a distinct recollection of the accounts of Vinland, such a reference would have been only an attempt to explain the less obscure by the more obscure. It is to be regretted that we have in this book no more allusions to Vinland; but if Ari could only leave us one such allusion, he surely could not have made that one more pointed.

[Footnote 248: Their "fundo thar manna vister baethi austr ok vestr a landi ok kaeiplabrot ok steinsmithi, that es af thvi ma scilja, at thar hafdhi thessconar thjoth farith es Vinland hefer bygt, ok Graenlendinger calla Skrelinga," i. e. "invenerunt ibi, tam in orientali quam occidentali terrae parte, humanae habitationis vestigia, navicularum fragmenta et opera fabrilia ex lapide, ex quo intelligi potest, ibi versatum esse nationem quae Vinlandiam incoluit quamque Graenlandi Skraelingos appellant." Rafn, p. 207.]

[Sidenote: Other references.]

But this is not quite the only reference that Ari makes to Vinland. There are three others that must in all probability be assigned to him. Two occur in the Landnama-bok, the first in a passage where mention is made of Ari Marsson's voyage to a place in the western ocean near Vinland;[249] the only point in this allusion which need here concern us is that Vinland is tacitly assumed to be a known geographical situation to which others may be referred. The second reference occurs in one of those elaborate and minutely specific genealogies in the Landnama-bok: "Their son was Thordhr Hest-hoefdhi, father of Karlsefni, who found Vinland the Good, Snorri's father," etc.[250] The third reference occurs in the Kristni Saga, a kind of supplement to the Landnama-bok, giving an account of the introduction of Christianity into Iceland; here it is related how Leif Ericsson came to be called "Leif the Lucky," 1. from having rescued a shipwrecked crew off the coast of Greenland, 2. from having discovered "Vinland the Good."[251] From these brief allusions, and from the general relation in which Ari Frodhi stood to later writers, I suspect that if the greater Islendinga-bok had survived to our time we should have found in it more about Vinland and its discoverers. At any rate, as to the existence of a definite and continuous tradition all the way from Ari down to Hauk Erlendsson, there can be no question whatever.[252]

[Footnote 249: Landnama-bok, part ii. chap. xxii.]

[Footnote 250: Id. part iii. chap. x.]

[Footnote 251: Kristni Saga, apud Biskupa Soegur, Copenhagen, 1858, vol. i. p. 20.]

[Footnote 252: Indeed, the parallel existence of the Flateyar-bok version of Eric the Red's Saga, alongside of the Hauks-bok version, is pretty good proof of the existence of a written account older than Hauk's time. The discrepancies between the two versions are such as to show that Jon Thordharson did not copy from Hauk, but followed some other version not now forthcoming. Jon mentions six voyages in connection with Vinland: 1. Bjarni Herjulfsson; 2. Leif; 3. Thorvald; 4. Thorstein and Gudrid; 5. Thorfinn Karlsefni; 6. Freydis. Hauk, on the other hand, mentions only the two principal voyages, those of Leif and Thorfinn; ignoring Bjarni, he accredits his adventures to Leif on his return voyage from Norway in 999, and he makes Thorvald a comrade of Thorfinn, and mixes his adventures with the events of Thorfinn's voyage. Dr. Storm considers Hauk's account intrinsically the more probable, and thinks that in the Flateyar-bok we have a later amplification of the tradition. But while I agree with Dr. Storm as to the general superiority of the Hauk version, I am not convinced by his arguments on this point. It seems to me likely that the Flateyar-bok here preserves more faithfully the details of an older tradition too summarily epitomized in the Hauks-bok. As the point in no way affects the general conclusions of the present chapter, it is hardly worth arguing here. The main thing for us is that the divergencies between the two versions, when coupled with their agreement in the most important features, indicate that both writers were working upon the basis of an antecedent written tradition, like the authors of the first and third synoptic gospels. Only here, of course, there are in the divergencies no symptoms of what the Tuebingen school would call "tendenz," impairing and obscuring to an indeterminate extent the general trustworthiness of the narratives. On the whole, it is pretty clear that Hauks-bok and Flateyar-bok were independent of each other, and collated, each in its own way, earlier documents that have probably since perished.]

[Sidenote: Adam of Bremen.]

The testimony of Adam of Bremen brings us yet one generation nearer to the Vinland voyages, and is very significant. Adam was much interested in the missionary work in the north of Europe, and in 1073, the same year that Hildebrand was elected to the papacy, he published his famous "Historia Ecclesiastica" in which he gave an account of the conversion of the northern nations from the time of Leo III. to that of Hildebrand's predecessor. In prosecuting his studies, Adam made a visit to the court of Swend Estridhsen, king of Denmark, nephew of Cnut the Great, king of Denmark and England. Swend's reign began in 1047, so that Adam's visit must have occurred between that date and 1073. The voyage of Leif and Thorfinn would at that time have been within the memory of living men, and would be likely to be known in Denmark, because the intercourse between the several parts of the Scandinavian world was incessant; there was continual coming and going. Adam learned what he could of Scandinavian geography, and when he published his history, he did just what a modern writer would do under similar circumstances; he appended to his book some notes on the geography of those remote countries, then so little known to his readers in central and southern Europe. After giving some account of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, he describes the colony in Iceland, and then the further colony in Greenland, and concludes by saying that out in that ocean there is another country, or island, which has been visited by many persons, and is called Vinland because of wild grapes that grow there, out of which a very good wine can be made. Either rumour had exaggerated the virtues of fox-grape juice, or the Northmen were not such good judges of wine as of ale. Adam goes on to say that corn, likewise, grows in Vinland without cultivation; and as such a statement to European readers must needs have a smack of falsehood, he adds that it is based not upon fable and guess-work, but upon "trustworthy reports (certa relatione) of the Danes."

[Sidenote: Adam's misconception of the situation.]

Scanty as it is, this single item of strictly contemporary testimony is very important, because quite incidentally it gives to the later accounts such confirmation as to show that they rest upon a solid basis of continuous tradition and not upon mere unintelligent hearsay.[253] The unvarying character of the tradition, in its essential details, indicates that it must have been committed to writing at a very early period, probably not later than the time of Ari's uncle Thorkell, who was contemporary with Adam of Bremen. If, however, we read the whole passage in which Adam's mention of Vinland occurs, it is clear from the context that his own information was not derived from an inspection of Icelandic documents. He got it, as he tells us, by talking with King Swend; and all that he got, or all that he thought worth telling, was this curious fact about vines and self-sown corn growing so near to Greenland; for Adam quite misconceived the situation of Vinland, and imagined it far up in the frozen North. After his mention of Vinland, the continental character of which he evidently did not suspect, he goes on immediately to say, "After this island nothing inhabitable is to be found in that ocean, all being covered with unendurable ice and boundless darkness." That most accomplished king, Harold Hardrada, says Adam, tried not long since to ascertain how far the northern ocean extended, and plunged along through this darkness until he actually reached the end of the world, and came near tumbling off![254] Thus the worthy Adam, while telling the truth about fox-grapes and maize as well as he knew how, spoiled the effect of his story by putting Vinland in the Arctic regions. The juxtaposition of icebergs and vines was a little too close even for the mediaeval mind so hospitable to strange yarns. Adam's readers generally disbelieved the "trustworthy reports of the Danes," and when they thought of Vinland at all, doubtless thought of it as somewhere near the North Pole.[255] We shall do well to bear this in mind when we come to consider the possibility of Columbus having obtained from Adam of Bremen any hint in the least likely to be of use in his own enterprise.[256]

[Footnote 253: It is further interesting as the only undoubted reference to Vinland in a mediaeval book written beyond the limits of the Scandinavian world. There is also, however, a passage in Ordericus Vitalis (Historia Ecclesiastica, iv. 29), in which Finland and the Orkneys, along with Greenland and Iceland, are loosely described as forming part of the dominions of the kings of Norway. This Finland does not appear to refer to the country of the Finns, east of the Baltic, and it has been supposed that it may have been meant for Vinland. The book of Ordericus was written about 1140.]

[Footnote 254: The passage from Adam of Bremen deserves to be quoted in full: "Praeterea unam adhuc insulam [regionam] recitavit [i. e. Svendus rex] a multis in eo repertam oceano, quae dicitur Vinland, eo quod ibi vites sponte nascantur, vinum bonum gerentes [ferentes]; nam et fruges ibi non seminatas abundare, non fabulosa opinione, sed certa comperimus relatione Danorum. Post quam insulam terra nulla invenitur habitabilis in illo oceano, sed omnia quae ultra sunt glacie intolerabili ac caligine immensa plena sunt; cujus rei Marcianus ita meminit: ultra Thyle, inquiens, navigare unius diei mare concretum est. Tentavit hoc nuper experientissimus Nordmannorum princeps Haroldus, qui latitudinem septentrionalis oceani perscrutatus navibus, tandem caligantibus ante ora deficientis mundi finibus, immane abyssi baratrum, retroactis vestigiis, vix salvus evasit." Descriptio insularum aquilonis, cap. 38, apud Hist. Ecclesiastica, iv. ed. Lindenbrog, Leyden, 1595. No such voyage is known to have been undertaken by Harold of Norway, nor is it likely. Adam was probably thinking of an Arctic voyage undertaken by one Thorir under the auspices of King Harold; one of the company brought back a polar bear and gave it to King Swend, who was much pleased with it. See Rafn, 339. "Regionam" and "ferentes" in the above extract are variant readings found in some editions.]

[Footnote 255: "Det har imidlertid ikke forhindret de senere forfattere, der benyttede Adam, fra at blive mistaenksomme, og saalaenge Adams beretning stod alene, har man i regelen vaegret sig for at tro den. Endog den norske forfatter, der skrev 'Historia Norvegiae' og som foruden Adam vel ogsaa bar kjendt de hjemlige sagn om Vinland, maa have anseet beretningen for fabelagtig og derfor forbigaaet den; han kjendte altfor godt Gronland som et nordligt isfyldt Polarland til at ville tro paa, at i naerheden fandtes et Vinland." Storm, in Aarboger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed, etc., Copenhagen, 1887, p. 300.]

[Footnote 256: See below, p. 386.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Summary of the argument.]

To sum up the argument:—we have in Eric the Red's Saga, as copied by Hauk Erlendsson, a document for the existence of which we are required to account. That document contains unmistakable knowledge of some things which mediaeval Europeans could by no human possibility have learned, except through a visit to some part of the coast of North America further south than Labrador or Newfoundland. It tells an eminently probable story in a simple, straightforward way, agreeing in its details with what we know of the North American coast between Point Judith and Cape Breton. Its general accuracy in the statement and grouping of so many remote details is proof that its statements were controlled by an exceedingly strong and steady tradition,—altogether too strong and steady, in my opinion, to have been maintained simply by word of mouth. These Icelanders were people so much given to writing that their historic records during the Middle Ages were, as the late Sir Richard Burton truly observed, more complete than those of any other country in Europe.[257] It is probable that the facts mentioned in Hauk's document rested upon some kind of a written basis as early as the eleventh century; and it seems quite clear that the constant tradition, by which all the allusions to Vinland and the Skraelings are controlled, had become established by that time. The data are more scanty than we could wish, but they all point in the same direction as surely as straws blown by a steady wind, and their cumulative force is so great as to fall but little short of demonstration. For these reasons it seems to me that the Saga of Eric the Red should be accepted as history; and there is another reason which might not have counted for much at the beginning of this discussion, but at the end seems quite solid and worthy of respect. The narrative begins with the colonization of Greenland and goes on with the visits to Vinland. It is unquestionably sound history for the first part; why should it be anything else for the second part? What shall be said of a style of criticism which, in dealing with one and the same document, arbitrarily cuts it in two in the middle and calls the first half history and the last half legend? which accepts its statements as serious so long as they keep to the north of the sixtieth parallel, and dismisses them as idle as soon as they pass to the south of it? Quite contrary to common sense, I should say.

[Footnote 257: Burton, Ultima Thule, London, 1875, i. 237.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Absurd speculations of zealous antiquarians.]

[Sidenote: There is no reason for supposing that the Northmen founded a colony in Vinland.]

[Sidenote: No archaeological remains of the Northmen have been found south of Davis strait.]

The only discredit which has been thrown upon the story of the Vinland voyages, in the eyes either of scholars or of the general public, has arisen from the eager credulity with which ingenious antiquarians have now and then tried to prove more than facts will warrant. It is peculiarly a case in which the judicious historian has had frequent occasion to exclaim, Save me from my friends! The only fit criticism upon the wonderful argument from the Dighton inscription is a reference to the equally wonderful discovery made by Mr. Pickwick at Cobham;[258] and when it was attempted, some sixty years ago, to prove that Governor Arnold's old stone windmill at Newport[259] was a tower built by the Northmen, no wonder if the exposure of this rather laughable notion should have led many people to suppose that the story of Leif and Thorfinn had thereby been deprived of some part of its support. But the story never rested upon any such evidence, and does not call for evidence of such sort. There is nothing in the story to indicate that the Northmen ever founded a colony in Vinland, or built durable buildings there. The distinction implicitly drawn by Adam of Bremen, who narrates the colonization of Iceland and Greenland, and then goes on to speak of Vinland, not as colonized, but simply as discovered, is a distinction amply borne out by our chronicles. Nowhere is there the slightest hint of a colony or settlement established in Vinland. On the contrary, our plain, business-like narrative tells us that Thorfinn Karlsefni tried to found a colony and failed; and it tells us why he failed. The Indians were too many for him. The Northmen of the eleventh century, without firearms, were in much less favourable condition for withstanding the Indians than the Englishmen of the seventeenth; and at the former period there existed no cause for emigration from Norway and Iceland at all comparable to the economic, political, and religious circumstances which, in a later age, sent thousands of Englishmen to Virginia and New England. The founding of colonies in America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no pastime; it was a tale of drudgery, starvation, and bloodshed, that curdles one's blood to read; more attempts failed than succeeded. Assuredly Thorfinn gave proof of the good sense ascribed to him when he turned his back upon Vinland. But if he or any other Northman had ever succeeded in establishing a colony there, can anybody explain why it should not have stamped the fact of its existence either upon the soil, or upon history, or both, as unmistakably as the colony of Greenland? Archaeological remains of the Northmen abound in Greenland, all the way from Immartinek to near Cape Farewell; the existence of one such relic on the North American continent has never yet been proved. Not a single vestige of the Northmen's presence here, at all worthy of credence, has ever been found. The writers who have, from time to time, mistaken other things for such vestiges, have been led astray because they have failed to distinguish between the different conditions of proof in Greenland and in Vinland. As Mr. Laing forcibly put the case, nearly half a century ago, "Greenland was a colony with communications, trade, civil and ecclesiastical establishments, and a considerable population," for more than four centuries. "Vinland was only visited by flying parties of woodcutters, remaining at the utmost two or three winters, but never settling there permanently.... To expect here, as in Greenland, material proofs to corroborate the documentary proofs, is weakening the latter by linking them to a sort of evidence which, from the very nature of the case,—the temporary visits of a ship's crew,—cannot exist in Vinland, and, as in the case of Greenland, come in to support them."[260]

[Footnote 258: See Pickwick Papers, chap. xi. I am indebted to Mr. Tillinghast, of Harvard University Library, for calling my attention to a letter from Rev. John Lathrop, of Boston, to Hon. John Davis, August 10, 1809, containing George Washington's opinion of the Dighton inscription. When President Washington visited Cambridge in the fall of 1789, he was shown about the college buildings by the president and fellows of the university. While in the museum he was observed to "fix his eye" upon a full-size copy of the Dighton inscription made by the librarian, James Winthrop. Dr. Lathrop, who happened to be standing near Washington, "ventured to give the opinion which several learned men had entertained with respect to the origin of the inscription." Inasmuch as some of the characters were thought to resemble "oriental" characters, and inasmuch as the ancient Phoenicians had sailed outside of the Pillars of Hercules, it was "conjectured" that some Phoenician vessels had sailed into Narragansett bay and up the Taunton river. "While detained by winds, or other causes now unknown, the people, it has been conjectured, made the inscription, now to be seen on the face of the rock, and which we may suppose to be a record of their fortunes or of their fate."

"After I had given the above account, the President smiled and said he believed the learned gentlemen whom I had mentioned were mistaken; and added that in the younger part of his life his business called him to be very much in the wilderness of Virginia, which gave him an opportunity to become acquainted with many of the customs and practices of the Indians. The Indians, he said, had a way of writing and recording their transactions, either in war or hunting. When they wished to make any such record, or leave an account of their exploits to any who might come after them, they scraped off the outer bark of a tree, and with a vegetable ink, or a little paint which they carried with them, on the smooth surface they wrote in a way that was generally understood by the people of their respective tribes. As he had so often examined the rude way of writing practised by the Indians of Virginia, and observed many of the characters on the inscription then before him so nearly resembled the characters used by the Indians, he had no doubt the inscription was made long ago by some natives of America." Proceedings of Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. x. p. 115. This pleasant anecdote shows in a new light Washington's accuracy of observation and unfailing common-sense. Such inscriptions have been found by the thousand, scattered over all parts of the United States; for a learned study of them see Garrick Mallery, "Pictographs of the North American Indians," Reports of Bureau of Ethnology, iv. 13-256. "The voluminous discussion upon the Dighton rock inscription," says Colonel Mallery, "renders it impossible wholly to neglect it.... It is merely a type of Algonquin rock-carving, not so interesting as many others.... It is of purely Indian origin, and is executed in the peculiar symbolic character of the Kekeewin," p. 20. The characters observed by Washington in the Virginia forests would very probably have been of the same type. Judge Davis, to whom Dr. Lathrop's letter was addressed, published in 1809 a paper maintaining the Indian origin of the Dighton inscription.

A popular error, once started on its career, is as hard to kill as a cat. Otherwise it would be surprising to find, in so meritorious a book as Oscar Peschel's Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Stuttgart, 1877, p. 82, an unsuspecting reliance upon Rafn's ridiculous interpretation of this Algonquin pictograph. In an American writer as well equipped as Peschel, this particular kind of blunder would of course be impossible; and one is reminded of Humboldt's remark, "Il est des recherches qui ne peuvent s'executer que pres des sources memes." Examen critique, etc., tom. ii. p. 102.

In old times, I may add, such vagaries were usually saddled upon the Phoenicians, until since Rafn's time the Northmen have taken their place as the pack-horses for all sorts of antiquarian "conjecture."]

[Footnote 259: See Palfrey's History of New England, vol. i. pp. 57-59; Mason's Reminiscences of Newport, pp. 392-407. Laing (Heimskringla, pp. 182-185) thinks the Yankees must have intended to fool Professor Rafn and the Royal Society of Antiquaries at Copenhagen; "Those sly rogues of Americans," says he, "dearly love a quiet hoax;" and he can almost hear them chuckling over their joke in their club-room at Newport. I am afraid these Yankees were less rogues and more fools than Mr. Laing makes out.]

[Footnote 260: Laing, Heimskringla, vol. i. p. 181.]

[Sidenote: If the Northmen had founded a successful colony, they would have introduced domestic cattle into the North American fauna;]

[Sidenote: and such animals could not have vanished and left no trace of their existence.]

The most convincing proof that the Northmen never founded a colony in America, south of Davis strait, is furnished by the total absence of horses, cattle, and other domestic animals from the soil of North America until they were brought hither by the Spanish, French, and English settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the Northmen had ever settled in Vinland, they would have brought cattle with them, and if their colony had been successful, it would have introduced such cattle permanently into the fauna of the country. Indeed, our narrative tells us that Karlsefni's people "had with them all kinds of cattle, having the intention to settle in the land if they could."[261] Naturally the two things are coupled in the narrator's mind. So the Portuguese carried livestock in their earliest expeditions to the Atlantic islands;[262] Columbus brought horses and cows, with vines and all kinds of grain, on his second voyage to the West Indies;[263] when the French, under Baron Lery, made a disastrous attempt to found a colony on or about Cape Breton in 1518, they left behind them, upon Sable island, a goodly stock of cows and pigs, which throve and multiplied long after their owners had gone;[264] the Pilgrims at Plymouth had cattle, goats, and swine as early as 1623.[265] In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a community of Europeans subsisting anywhere for any length of time without domestic animals. We have seen that the Northmen took pains to raise cattle in Greenland, and were quick to comment upon the climate of Vinland as favourable for pasturage. To suppose that these men ever founded a colony in North America, but did not bring domestic animals thither, would be absurd. But it would be scarcely less absurd to suppose that such animals, having been once fairly introduced into the fauna of North America, would afterward have vanished without leaving a vestige of their presence. As for the few cattle for which Thorfinn could find room in his three or four dragon-ships, we may easily believe that his people ate them up before leaving the country, especially since we are told they were threatened with famine. But that domestic cattle, after being supported on American soil during the length of time involved in the establishment of a successful colony (say, for fifty or a hundred years), should have disappeared without leaving abundant traces of themselves, is simply incredible. Horses and kine are not dependent upon man for their existence; when left to themselves, in almost any part of the world, they run wild and flourish in what naturalists call a "feral" state. Thus we find feral horned cattle in the Falkland and in the Ladrone islands, as well as in the ancient Chillingham Park, in Northumberland; we find feral pigs in Jamaica; feral European dogs in La Plata; feral horses in Turkestan, and also in Mexico, descended from Spanish horses.[266] If the Northmen had ever founded a colony in Vinland, how did it happen that the English and French in the seventeenth century, and from that day to this, have never set eyes upon a wild horse, or wild cattle, pigs, or hounds, or any such indication whatever of the former presence of civilized Europeans? I do not recollect ever seeing this argument used before, but it seems to me conclusive. It raises against the hypothesis of a Norse colonization in Vinland a presumption extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome.[267]

[Footnote 261: "Their hoefdhu medh ser allskonar fenadh, thviat their aetloedhu at byggja landit, ef their maetti that," i. e., "illi omne pecudum genus secum habuerunt, nam terram, si liceret, coloniis frequentare cogitarunt." Rafn, p. 57.]

[Footnote 262: Major, Prince Henry the Navigator, p. 241.]

[Footnote 263: Irving's Life of Columbus, New York, 1828, vol. i. p. 293.]

[Footnote 264: Histoire chronologique de la Nouvelle France, pp. 40, 58; this work, written in 1689 by the Recollet friar Sixte le Tac, has at length been published (Paris, 1888) with notes and other original documents by Eugene Reveillaud. See, also, Laet, Novus Orbis, 39.]

[Footnote 265: John Smith, Generall Historie, 247.]

[Footnote 266: Darwin, Animals and Plants under Domestication, London, 1868, vol. i pp. 27, 77, 84.]

[Footnote 267: The views of Professor Horsford as to the geographical situation of Vinland and its supposed colonization by Northmen are set forth in his four monographs, Discovery of America by Northmen—address at the unveiling of the statue of Leif Eriksen, etc., Boston, 1888; The Problem of the Northmen, Cambridge, 1889; The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, Boston, 1890; The Defences of Norumbega, Boston, 1891. Among Professor Horsford's conclusions the two principal are: 1. that the "river flowing through a lake into the sea" (Rafn, p. 147) is Charles river, and that Leif's booths were erected near the site of the present Cambridge hospital; 2. that "Norumbega"—a word loosely applied by some early explorers to some region or regions somewhere between the New Jersey coast and the Bay of Fundy—was the Indian utterance of "Norbega" or "Norway;" and that certain stone walls and dams at and near Watertown are vestiges of an ancient "city of Norumbega," which was founded and peopled by Northmen and carried on a more or less extensive trade with Europe for more than three centuries.

With regard to the first of these conclusions, it is perhaps as likely that Leif's booths were within the present limits of Cambridge as in any of the numerous places which different writers have confidently assigned for them, all the way from Point Judith to Cape Breton. A judicious scholar will object not so much to the conclusion as to the character of the arguments by which it is reached. Too much weight is attached to hypothetical etymologies.

With regard to the Norse colony alleged to have flourished for three centuries, it is pertinent to ask, what became of its cattle and horses? Why do we find no vestiges of the burial-places of these Europeans? or of iron tools and weapons of mediaeval workmanship? Why is there no documentary mention, in Scandinavia or elsewhere in Europe, of this transatlantic trade? etc., etc. Until such points as these are disposed of, any further consideration of the hypothesis may properly be postponed.]



[Sidenote: Further fortunes of the Greenland colony.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Eric's voyage in search of Vinland, 1121.]

[Sidenote: The ship from Markland, 1347.]

As for the colony in Greenland, while its population seems never to have exceeded 5,000 or 6,000 souls, it maintained its existence and its intercourse with Europe uninterruptedly from its settlement in 986, by Eric the Red, for more than four hundred years. Early in the fourteenth century the West Bygd, or western settlement, near Godthaab, seems to have contained ninety farmsteads and four churches; while the East Bygd, or eastern settlement, near Julianeshaab, contained one hundred and ninety farmsteads, with one cathedral and eleven smaller churches, two villages, and three or four monasteries.[268] Between Tunnudliorbik and Igaliko fiords, and about thirty miles from the ruined stone houses of Brattahlid, there now stands, imposing in its decay, the simple but massive structure of Kakortok church, once the "cathedral" church of the Gardar bishopric, where the Credo was intoned and censers swung, while not less than ten generations lived and died. About the beginning of the twelfth century there was a movement at Rome for establishing new dioceses in "the islands of the ocean;" in 1106 a bishop's see was erected in the north of Iceland, and one at about the same time in the Faeroes. In 1112, Eric Gnupsson,[269] having been appointed by Pope Paschal II. "bishop of Greenland and Vinland in partibus infidelium," went from Iceland to organize his new diocese in Greenland. It is mentioned in at least six different vellums that in 1121 Bishop Eric "went in search of Vinland."[270] It is nowhere mentioned that he found it, and Dr. Storm thinks it probable that he perished in the enterprise, for, within the next year or next but one, the Greenlanders asked for a new bishop, and Eric's successor, Bishop Arnold, was consecrated in 1124.[271] After Eric there was a regular succession of bishops appointed by the papal court, down at least to 1409, and seventeen of these bishops are mentioned by name. We do not learn that any of them ever repeated Eric's experiment of searching for Vinland. So far as existing Icelandic vellums know, there was no voyage to Vinland after 1121. Very likely, however, there may have been occasional voyages for timber from Greenland to the coast of the American continent, which did not attract attention or call for comment in Iceland. This is rendered somewhat probable from an entry in the "Elder Skalholt Annals," a vellum written about 1362. This informs us that in 1347 "there came a ship from Greenland, less in size than small Icelandic trading-vessels. It was without an anchor. There were seventeen men on board, and they had sailed to Markland, but had afterwards been driven hither by storms at sea."[272] This is the latest mention of any voyage to or from the countries beyond Greenland.

[Footnote 268: Laing, Heimskringla, i. 141. A description of the ruins may be found in two papers in Meddelelser om Gronland, Copenhagen, 1883 and 1889.]

[Footnote 269: Sometimes called Eric Uppsi; he is mentioned in the Landnama-bok as a native of Iceland.]

[Footnote 270: Storm, Islandske Annaler, Christiania, 1888; Reeves, The Finding of Wineland the Good, London, 1890, pp. 79-81.]

[Footnote 271: Storm, in Aarboger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed, 1887, p. 319.]

[Footnote 272: Reeves, op. cit. p. 83. In another vellum it is mentioned that in 1347 "a ship came from Greenland, which had sailed to Markland, and there were eighteen men on board." As Mr. Reeves well observes: "The nature of the information indicates that the knowledge of the discovery had not altogether faded from the memories of the Icelanders settled in Greenland. It seems further to lend a measure of plausibility to a theory that people from the Greenland colony may from time to time have visited the coast to the southwest of their home for supplies of wood, or for some kindred purpose. The visitors in this case had evidently intended to return directly from Markland to Greenland, and had they not been driven out of their course to Iceland, the probability is that this voyage would never have found mention in Icelandic chronicles, and all knowledge of it must have vanished as completely as did the colony to which the Markland visitors belonged."]

[Sidenote: The Greenland colony attacked by Eskimos.]

If the reader is inclined to wonder why a colony could be maintained in southern Greenland more easily than on the coasts of Nova Scotia or Massachusetts, or even why the Northmen did not at once abandon their fiords at Brattahlid and come in a flock to these pleasanter places, he must call to mind two important circumstances. First, the settlers in southern Greenland did not meet with barbarous natives, but only with vestiges of their former presence. It was not until the twelfth century that, in roaming the icy deserts of the far north in quest of seals and bearskins, the Norse hunters encountered tribes of Eskimo using stone knives and whalebone arrow-heads;[273] and it was not until the fourteenth century that we hear of their getting into a war with these people. In 1349 the West Bygd was attacked and destroyed by Eskimos; in 1379 they invaded the East Bygd and wrought sad havoc; and it is generally believed that some time after 1409 they completed the destruction of the colony.

[Footnote 273: Storm, Monumenta historica Norvegiae, p. 77.]

[Sidenote: Queen Margaret's monopoly, and its baneful effects.]

Secondly, the relative proximity of Greenland to the mother country, Iceland, made it much easier to sustain a colony there than in the more distant Vinland. In colonizing, as in campaigning, distance from one's base is sometimes the supreme circumstance. This is illustrated by the fact that the very existence of the Greenland colony itself depended upon perpetual and untrammelled exchange of commodities with Iceland; and when once the source of supply was cut off, the colony soon languished. In 1380 and 1387 the crowns of Norway and Denmark descended upon Queen Margaret, and soon she made her precious contribution to the innumerable swarm of instances that show with how little wisdom the world is ruled. She made the trade to Greenland, Iceland, and the Faeroe isles "a royal monopoly which could only be carried on in ships belonging to, or licensed by, the sovereign.... Under the monopoly of trade the Icelanders could have no vessels, and no object for sailing to Greenland; and the vessels fitted out by government, or its lessees, would only be ready to leave Denmark or Bergen for Iceland at the season they ought to have been ready to leave Iceland to go to Greenland. The colony gradually fell into oblivion."[274] When this prohibitory management was abandoned after 1534 by Christian III., it was altogether too late. Starved by the miserable policy of governmental interference with freedom of trade, the little Greenland colony soon became too weak to sustain itself against the natives whose hostility had, for half a century, been growing more and more dangerous. Precisely when or how it perished we do not know. The latest notice we have of the colony is of a marriage ceremony performed (probably in the Kakortok church), in 1409, by Endrede Andreasson, the last bishop.[275] When, after three centuries, the great missionary, Hans Egede, visited Greenland, in 1721, he found the ruins of farmsteads and villages, the population of which had vanished.

[Footnote 274: Laing, Heimskringla, i. 147. It has been supposed that the Black Death, by which all Europe was ravaged in the middle part of the fourteenth century, may have crossed to Greenland, and fatally weakened the colony there; but Vigfusson says that the Black Death never touched Iceland (Sturlunga Saga, vol. i. p. cxxix.), so that it is not so likely to have reached Greenland.]

[Footnote 275: Laing, op. cit. i. 142.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The story of the Venetian brothers.]

Our account of pre-Columbian voyages to America would be very incomplete without some mention of the latest voyage said to have been made by European vessels to the ancient settlement of the East Bygd. I refer to the famous narrative of the Zeno brothers, which has furnished so many subjects of contention for geographers that a hundred years ago John Pinkerton called it "one of the most puzzling in the whole circle of literature."[276] Nevertheless a great deal has been done, chiefly through the acute researches of Mr. Richard Henry Major and Baron Nordenskjoeld, toward clearing up this mystery, so that certain points in the Zeno narrative may now be regarded as established;[277] and from these essential points we may form an opinion as to the character of sundry questionable details.

[Footnote 276: Yet this learned historian was quite correct in his own interpretation of Zeno's story, for in the same place he says, "If real, his Frisland is the Ferro islands, and his Zichmni is Sinclair." Pinkerton's History of Scotland, London, 1797, vol. i. p. 261.]

[Footnote 277: Major, The Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, Nicolo and Antonio Zeno, to the Northern Seas in the XIVth Century, London, 1873 (Hakluyt Society); cf. Nordenskjoeld, Om broederna Zenos resor och de aeldsta kartor oefner Norden, Stockholm, 1883.]

[Sidenote: The Zeno family.]

[Sidenote: Nicolo Zeno wrecked upon one of the Faeroe islands, 1390.]

[Sidenote: Nicolo's voyage to Greenland, cir. 1394.]

[Sidenote: Voyage of Earl Sinclair and Antonio Zeno.]

The Zeno family was one of the oldest and most distinguished in Venice. Among its members in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we find a doge, several senators and members of the Council of Ten, and military commanders of high repute. Of these, Pietro Dracone Zeno, about 1350, was captain-general of the Christian league for withstanding the Turks; and his son Carlo achieved such success in the war against Genoa that he was called the Lion of St. Mark, and his services to Venice were compared with those of Camillus to Rome. Now this Carlo had two brothers,—Nicolo, known as "the Chevalier," and Antonio. After the close of the Genoese war the Chevalier Nicolo was seized with a desire to see the world,[278] and more particularly England and Flanders. So about 1390 he fitted up a ship at his own expense, and, passing out from the strait of Gibraltar, sailed northward upon the Atlantic. After some days of fair weather, he was caught in a storm and blown along for many days more, until at length the ship was cast ashore on one of the Faeroe islands and wrecked, though most of the crew and goods were rescued. According to the barbarous custom of the Middle Ages, some of the natives of the island (Scandinavians) came swarming about the unfortunate strangers to kill and rob them, but a great chieftain, with a force of knights and men-at-arms, arrived upon the spot in time to prevent such an outrage. This chief was Henry Sinclair of Roslyn, who in 1379 had been invested by King Hacon VI., of Norway, with the earldom of the Orkneys and Caithness. On learning Zeno's rank and importance, Sinclair treated him with much courtesy, and presently a friendship sprang up between the two. Sinclair was then engaged with a fleet of thirteen vessels in conquering and annexing to his earldom the Faeroe islands, and on several occasions profited by the military and nautical skill of the Venetian captain. Nicolo seems to have enjoyed this stirring life, for he presently sent to his brother Antonio in Venice an account of it, which induced the latter to come and join him in the Faeroe islands. Antonio arrived in the course of 1391, and remained in the service of Sinclair fourteen years, returning to Venice in time to die there in 1406. After Antonio's arrival, his brother Nicolo was appointed to the chief command of Sinclair's little fleet, and assisted him in taking possession of the Shetland islands, which were properly comprised within his earldom. In the course of these adventures, Nicolo seems to have had his interest aroused in reports about Greenland. It was not more than four or five years since Queen Margaret had undertaken to make a royal monopoly of the Greenland trade in furs and whale oil, and this would be a natural topic of conversation in the Faeroes. In July, 1393, or 1394, Nicolo Zeno sailed to Greenland with three ships, and visited the East Bygd. After spending some time there, not being accustomed to such a climate, he caught cold, and died soon after his return to the Faeroes, probably in 1395. His brother Antonio succeeded to his office and such emoluments as pertained to it; and after a while, at Earl Sinclair's instigation, he undertook a voyage of discovery in the Atlantic ocean, in order to verify some fishermen's reports of the existence of land a thousand miles or more to the west. One of these fishermen was to serve as guide to the expedition, but unfortunately he died three days before the ships were ready to sail. Nevertheless, the expedition started, with Sinclair himself on board, and encountered vicissitudes of weather and fortune. In fog and storm they lost all reckoning of position, and found themselves at length on the western coast of a country which, in the Italian narrative, is called "Icaria," but which has been supposed, with some probability, to have been Kerry, in Ireland. Here, as they went ashore for fresh water, they were attacked by the natives and several of their number were slain. From this point they sailed out into the broad Atlantic again, and reached a place supposed to be Greenland, but which is so vaguely described that the identification is very difficult.[279] Our narrative here ends somewhat confusedly. We are told that Sinclair remained in this place, "and explored the whole of the country with great diligence, as well as the coasts on both sides of Greenland." Antonio Zeno, on the other hand, returned with part of the fleet to the Faeroe islands, where he arrived after sailing eastward for about a month, during five and twenty days of which he saw no land. After relating these things and paying a word of affectionate tribute to the virtues of Earl Sinclair, "a prince as worthy of immortal memory as any that ever lived for his great bravery and remarkable goodness," Antonio closes his letter abruptly: "But of this I will say no more in this letter, and hope to be with you very shortly, and to satisfy your curiosity on other subjects by word of mouth."[280]

[Footnote 278: "Or M. Nicolo il Caualiere ... entro in grandissimo desiderio di ueder il mondo, e peregrinare, e farsi capace di varij costumi e di lingue de gli huomini, accio che con le occasioni poi potesse meglio far seruigio alla sua patria ed a se acquistar fama e onore." The narrative gives 1380 as the date of the voyage, but Mr. Major has shown that it must have been a mistake for 1390 (op. cit. xlii.-xlviii.).]

[Footnote 279: It appears on the Zeno map as "Trin ppmontor," about the site of Cape Farewell; but how could six days' sail W. from Kerry, followed by four days' sail N. E., reach any such point? and how does this short outward sail consist with the return voyage, twenty days E. and eight days S. E., to the Faeroes? The place is also said to have had "a fertile soil" and "good rivers," a description in nowise answering to Greenland.]

[Footnote 280: "Pero non ni diro altro in questa lettera, sperando tosto di essere con uoi, e di sodisfarui di molte altre cose con la uiua uoce." Major, p. 34.]

[Sidenote: Publication of the remains of the documents by the younger Nicolo Zeno.]

The person thus addressed by Antonio was his brother, the illustrious Carlo Zeno. Soon after reaching home, after this long and eventful absence, Antonio died. Besides his letters he had written a more detailed account of the affairs in the northern seas. These papers remained for more than a century in the palace of the family at Venice, until one of the children, in his mischievous play, got hold of them and tore them up. This child was Antonio's great-great-great-grandson, Nicolo, born in 1515. When this young Nicolo had come to middle age, and was a member of the Council of Ten, he happened to come across some remnants of these documents, and then all at once he remembered with grief how he had, in his boyhood, pulled them to pieces.[281] In the light of the rapid progress in geographical discovery since 1492, this story of distant voyages had now for Nicolo an interest such as it could not have had for his immediate ancestors. Searching the palace he found a few grimy old letters and a map or sailing chart, rotten with age, which had been made or at any rate brought home by his ancestor Antonio. Nicolo drew a fresh copy of this map, and pieced together the letters as best he could, with more or less explanatory text of his own, and the result was the little book which he published in 1558.[282]

[Footnote 281: "All these letters were written by Messire Antonio to Messire Carlo, his brother; and I am grieved that the book and many other writings on these subjects have, I don't know how, come sadly to ruin; for, being but a child when they fell into my hands, I, not knowing what they were, tore them in pieces, as children will do, and sent them all to ruin: a circumstance which I cannot now recall without the greatest sorrow. Nevertheless, in order that such an important memorial should not be lost, I have put the whole in order, as well as I could, in the above narrative." Major, p. 35.]

[Footnote 282: Nicolo Zeno, Dello scoprimento dell' isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engronelanda, Estotilanda, & Icaria, fatto per due fratelli Zeni, M. Nicolo it Caualiere, & M. Antonio. Libro Vno, col disegno di dette Isole. Venice, 1558. Mr. Major's book contains the entire text, with an English translation.]



[Sidenote: Queer transformations of names.]

[Sidenote: "Frislanda."]

Unfortunately young Nicolo, with the laudable purpose of making it all as clear as he could, thought it necessary not simply to reproduce the old weather-beaten map, but to amend it by putting on here and there such places and names as his diligent perusal of the manuscript led him to deem wanting to its completeness.[283] Under the most favourable circumstances that is a very difficult sort of thing to do, but in this case the circumstances were far from favourable. Of course Nicolo got these names and places into absurd positions, thus perplexing the map and damaging its reputation. With regard to names, there was obscurity enough, to begin with. In the first place, they were Icelandic names falling upon the Italian ears of old Nicolo and Antonio, and spelled by them according to their own notions; in the second place, these outlandish names, blurred and defaced withal in the weather-stained manuscript, were a puzzle to the eye of young Nicolo, who could but decipher them according to his notions. The havoc that can be wrought upon winged words, subjected to such processes, is sometimes marvellous.[284] Perhaps the slightest sufferer, in this case, was the name of the group of islands upon one of which the shipwrecked Nicolo was rescued by Sinclair. The name Faeroislander sounded to Italian ears as Frislanda, and was uniformly so written.[285] Then the pronunciation of Shetland was helped by prefixing a vowel sound, as is common in Italian, and so it came to be Estland and Esland. This led young Nicolo's eye in two or three places to confound it with Islanda, or Iceland, and probably in one place with Irlanda, or Ireland. Where old Nicolo meant to say that the island upon which he was living with Earl Sinclair was somewhat larger than Shetland, young Nicolo understood him as saying that it was somewhat larger than Ireland; and so upon the amended map "Frislanda" appears as one great island surrounded by tiny islands.[286] After the publication of this map, in 1558, sundry details were copied from it by the new maps of that day, so that even far down into the seventeenth century it was common to depict a big "Frislanda" somewhere in mid-ocean. When at length it was proved that no such island exists, the reputation of the Zeno narrative was seriously damaged. The nadir of reaction against it was reached when it was declared to be a tissue of lies invented by the younger Nicolo,[287] apparently for the purpose of setting up a Venetian claim to the discovery of America.

[Footnote 283: The map is taken from Winsor's Narr. and Crit. Hist., i. 127, where it is reduced from Nordenskjoeld's Studien ok Forskningar. A better because larger copy may be found in Major's Voyages of the Venetian Brothers. The original map measures 12 x 15-1/2 inches. In the legend at the top the date is given as M CCC LXXX. but evidently one X has been omitted, for it should be 1390, and is correctly so given by Marco Barbaro, in his Genealogie dei nobili Veneti; of Antonio Zeno he says, "Scrisse con il fratello Nicolo Kav. li viaggi dell' Isole sotto il polo artico, e di quei scoprimente del 1390, e che per ordine di Zieno, re di Frislanda, si porto nel continente d'Estotilanda nell' America settentrionale e che si fermo 14 anni in Frislanda, cioe 4 con suo fratello Nicolo e 10 solo." (This valuable work has never been published. The original MS., in Barbaro's own handwriting, is preserved in the Biblioteca di San Marco at Venice. There is a seventeenth century copy of it among the Egerton MSS. in the British Museum.)—Nicolo did not leave Italy until after December 14, 1388 (Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, tom. xxii. p. 779). The map can hardly have been made before Antonio's voyage, about 1400. The places on the map are wildly out of position, as was common enough in old maps. Greenland is attached to Norway according to the general belief in the Middle Ages. In his confusion between the names "Estland" and "Islanda," young Nicolo has tried to reproduce the Shetland group, or something like it, and attach it to Iceland. "Icaria," probably Kerry, in Ireland, has been made into an island and carried far out into the Atlantic. The queerest of young Nicolo's mistakes was in placing the monastery of St. Olaus ("St. Thomas"). He should have placed it on the southwest coast of Greenland, near his "Af pmontor;" but he has got it on the extreme northeast, just about where Greenland is joined to Europe.]

[Footnote 284: "Combien de coquilles typographiques ou de lectures defectueuses ont cree de noms boiteux, qu'il est ensuite bien difficile, quelquefois impossible de redresser! L'histoire et la geographie en sont pleines." Avezac, Martin Waltzemueller, p. 9.

It is interesting to see how thoroughly words can be disguised by an unfamiliar phonetic spelling. I have seen people hopelessly puzzled by the following bill, supposed to have been made out by an illiterate stable-keeper somewhere in England:—

Osafada 7s 6d Takinonimome 4d ——— 7s 10d

Some years ago Professor Huxley told me of a letter from France which came to the London post-office thus addressed:—

Sromfredevi, Pique du lait, Londres, Angleterre.

This letter, after exciting at first helpless bewilderment and then busy speculation, was at length delivered to the right person, Sir Humphry Davy, in his rooms at the Royal Institution on Albemarle street, just off from Piccadilly!]

[Footnote 285: Columbus, on his journey to Iceland in 1477, also heard the name Faeroislander as Frislanda, and so wrote it in the letter preserved for us in his biography by his son Ferdinand, hereafter to be especially noticed. See Major's remarks on this, op. cit. p. xix.]

[Footnote 286: Perhaps in the old worn-out map the archipelago may have been blurred so as to be mistaken for one island. This would aid in misleading young Nicolo.]

[Footnote 287: See the elaborate paper by Admiral Zahrtmann, in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed, Copenhagen, 1834, vol. i., and the English translation of it in Journal of Royal Geographical Society, London, 1836, vol. v. All that human ingenuity is ever likely to devise against the honesty of Zeno's narrative is presented in this erudite essay, which has been so completely demolished under Mr. Major's heavy strokes that there is not enough of it left to pick up. As to this part of the question, we may now safely cry, "finis, laus Deo!"]

[Sidenote: The narrative nowhere makes a claim to the "discovery of America."]

The narrative, however, not only sets up no such claim, but nowhere betrays a consciousness that its incidents entitle it to make such a claim. It had evidently not occurred to young Nicolo to institute any comparison between his ancestors' voyages to Greenland and the voyages of Columbus to the western hemisphere, of which we now know Greenland to be a part. The knowledge of the North American coast, and of the bearing of one fact upon another fact in relation to it, was still, in 1558, in an extremely vague and rudimentary condition. In the mind of the Zeno brothers, as the map shows, Greenland was a European peninsula; such was the idea common among mediaeval Northmen, as is nowhere better illustrated than in this map. Neither in his references to Greenland, nor to Estotiland and Drogio, presently to be considered, does young Nicolo appear in the light of a man urging or suggesting a "claim." He appears simply as a modest and conscientious editor, interested in the deeds of his ancestors and impressed with the fact that he has got hold of important documents, but intent only upon giving his material as correctly as possible, and refraining from all sort of comment except such as now and then seems needful to explain the text as he himself understands it.