Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/58

46 shore was low." This was therefore called "Markland," i. e., woodland. They sailed thence for two days with a northeasterly wind (the opposite to that which Bjarne met with), when they sighted an island to the northward of the land, and sailed into a sound between it and a cape which ran out northwardly from the land. Thence they sailed westwardly round the cape into a place where at ebb-tide the vessel was left high and dry some distance from the shore; and when the tide rose they towed the vessel into a river, which led into a lake (or inlet?), where they landed and built booths.

If this narrative is something more than a Norse "Odyssey" or a fiction, we must infer that Leif touched at Labrador (called by him Helluland), sailed thence to some more southern part of Labrador (called by him Markland), and thence past the Island of Belleisle into one of the many shallow inlets on the south side of the Strait of Belleisle. The "low land covered with wood" and its "white sands" may possibly be the part of Newfoundland sighted by Bjarne, or it may be Blanc Sablon, near Bradore Bay, on the south coast of Labrador. It is, however, evident that Leif can not have reached the south coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, judging by the number of days expended on the voyage. The Saga of Karlsefne says that the voyage from Greenland to Helluland only took two days, and that from Helluland to Markland three days. Now, Leif's voyage from Markland to Vinland took two days, or the number of days spent by Bjarne in going from the land first sighted by him to the "flat land covered with wood." Bjarne's voyage from the first land sighted by him to Greenland occupied in all 2 + 3 + 4 = 9 days.

From the Sagas of Eric the Red and of Karlsefne, we learn that the voyages from Greenland to Vinland took six days in all. Hence, Vinland, if beyond Labrador, must be sought for in Newfoundland, either in one of the shallow inlets near the Island of Belleisle, or in some place along the northwest coast of that island. The fact that grapes are found there, according to Anspach, lends some weight to this view. It is possible, too, that the Naskapi, sometimes found in Newfoundland and resembling the Eskimos in many respects, may have been included under the name Skraellings by the Northmen.

It is clear that, like Greenland, Vinland the Good was a fraud on emigrants; that the stories as to ship-loads of grapes, self-sown fields of wheat, genial winter weather, etc., were the productions of Eric's prolific brain; and that we must first succeed in finding Greenland's verdant mountains before we can hope to discover the vine-clad hills of Vinland the Good.

—The history of European colonization north of Florida has been hitherto supposed to have begun at the commencement of the seventeenth century, except perhaps a small English settlement at St. John's, Newfoundland. It has not hitherto been known to historians