Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/665

 Olson and Bourne : Northmen, Cohtmbus and Cabot 655 land. Again under Columhus Professor E. G. Bourne gives us the Articles of Agreement between Columbus and the Catholic kings (April 17, 1492) ; the Official Grant of Titles by the latter to the former (April 30, 1492) ; the Journal of the First Voyage (from Sir Clements Mark- ham's version of the fuller text discovered in 1825) ; the Letters of Columbus to Luis de Santangel and to the Catholic sovereigns (March 14, 1493, and later) ; Dr. Chanca's Letter on Columbus's Second Voy- age; Las Casas's record of the Third Voyage; and the Admiral's Letters descriptive of his Fourth Voyage and of his sufferings and ill treatment (the latter addressed to the Nurse of Prince John). Lastly under the Cabots Professor Bourne reprints the Letters of Pasqualigo and Son- cino (August 23, 24, and December 18, 1497), and Pedro de Ayala's despatch to Ferdinand and Isabella (July 25, 1498). Most serviceable and in all ways to be welcomed is this volume, as has been said. But it might have been made still more serviceable. Why, for instance, did the editor not furnish us with the Vinland and other American references from the Icelandic historian Are Frode, from the famous traveller abbot Nicolas of Thingeyre, from the Kristni Saga, the Eyrbyggja Saga, and the Grcttis Saga, references which add so concisely and suggestively to the chain of testimony reaching down from the earliest Icelandic chronicler to the composition of Red Eric Saga in the thirteenth century ? Surely it would have been better to print all these among our texts, at the cost of some three or four additional pages of transcription, rather than merely to give, as he has done, a version of the Kristni Saga passage in a foot-note to the introduction, while referring the inquirer to A. M. Reeves's Winelaud the Good for the rest. Also I would suggest that Adam of Bremen, the first and best his- torian of northern Germany in the Middle Ages, the one contemporary who has preserved a record of the polar voyage of Harald Hardrada, is not adequately dealt with in note i. p. 67 ; that his primary position (in time order) among the witnesses to the Scandinavian discovery of America is either not properly appreciated or at least not duly empha- sized ; and that Professor Olson's seeming acquiescence (pp. 6-7) in the common and ignorant presumption of a complete " absence of con- temporary record " for the Vinland voyages does wrong to the chronicler of the church of Hamburg — like Bede, an investigator of much more than ecclesiastical affairs. For, as the dates furnished by Mr. Olson sufficiently testify, both Adam and his royal informant Svein Estrith- son of Denmark (from whom the passage on the "insula . . . quae dicitur Winland " is mainly derived) are younger contemporaries of Leif Ericson and Thorfinn Karlsefne — to say nothing of Are Frode, whose birth (in 1067) lies within a measurable distance of the American discoveries of the " Vinland-farers '' (1000-1006). Again, why not have added to the concluding medieval notices of Greenland in papal letters some earlier references to the same country such as those in Adam himself, in Ordericus Vitalis. in other Middle