Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/53

Rh The probable dates of those that are the subject of this paper are: 1. Vinland the Good, discovered 994; 2. Fagundes's settlement in Cape Breton, 1521; 3. A second Portuguese settlement in Cape Breton, 1567; 4. A Spanish settlement in Cape Breton, between 1580 and 1597.

I. —It is unfortunate that the early settlers ever thought of calling a place near Rhode Island Martha's Vine-yard, for its resemblance to Vinland has led Danish and American archæologists to identify them as the same locality. They seem not to have remembered, that wild grapes are found on the south shore of the gulf and river St. Lawrence, from Cape North to Quebec, the Island of Orleans having for this reason been called the Island of Bacchus. Wild grapes, too, are found on the west coast of Newfoundland, according to Anspach; and in 1521 the Portuguese colonists in Cape Breton sent word home that among the products of that country were grapes. The writer of this paper has tasted some excellent wine made by a relative living at Fredericton, New Brunswick, from the wild grapes that are to be seen hanging in clusters from the elm-trees on the intervale lands along the St. John River.

But as Vinland and Martha's Vineyard were assumed to be the same, a voyage by the Northmen from Greenland, not exceeding seven or eight days, has been extended to Rhode Island, and the circumnavigation of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia has been assumed, although the Saga of Eric the Red is silent as to it, and though such a voyage, still a perilous one, was at that time a most difficult and dangerous undertaking.

The Saga of Eric the Red was written in Greenland by, or in honor of, Eric and his family, who were the discoverers, explorers, and chroniclers of Vinland the Good.

The later Saga of his son-in-law, Karlsefne, which, like the geographical notices quoted by Rafn, was written in Iceland, was evidently based, not on information derived from people who had been in Vinland, but on an imperfect version of the Greenland Saga, for almost all the courses described by them differ 90° from those given in the Saga of Eric the Red, a uniformity of error which must have arisen from the use of a sketch-map of the voyage to Vinland, in which the points of the compass were omitted or incorrectly placed. What is north in the one is generally east in the other.

We have therefore to depend on the Greenland Saga, and what are its claims to be considered a credible authority? It was written in glorification of Eric and his family, and describes the discoveries made by his sons or sons-in-law, and testified to by no one outside of his family circle.

Two persons, father and son, the latter of whom was named Eric the Red, having been guilty of murder in Norway, took refuge in Iceland, where Eric committed one if not two more murders, and in