Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/168

 Greenland, seems also ascertained by the yearly increase of the fields of ice in the neighbouring seas within the experience of our whale fishers.

The discovery of America, or Vinland, in the 11th century, by the same race of enduring enterprising seamen, is not less satisfactorily established by documentary evidence than the discovery and colonisation of Greenland; but it rests entirely upon documentary evidence, which cannot, as in the case of Greenland, be substantiated by any thing to be discovered in America. One or two adventurers made voyages, came to new countries to the south and west of Greenland, landed, repeated their visits, and even remained for one or two years trading for skins with the natives, and felling timber to take home in their ships; but they established no colony, left none behind them to multiply, and, as in Greenland, to construct, in stone, memorials of their existence on the coast of America. All that can be proved, or that is required to be proved, for establishing the priority of the discovery of America by the Northmen, is that the saga or traditional account of these voyages in the 11th century was committed to writing at a known date, viz. between 1387 and 1395, in a manuscript of unquestionable authenticity, of which these particular sagas or accounts relative to Vinland form but a small portion; and that this known date was eighty years before Columbus visited Iceland to obtain nautical information, viz. in 1477, when he must have heard of this written account of Vinland; and it was not till 1492 that he discovered America. This simple fact, established on documents altogether incontrovertible, is sufficient to prove all that is wanted to be proved, or can be proved, and is much more clearly and ably stated by Thormod Torfieus, the great antiquary of the last century, than it has been since, in his very rare little tract, " Historia Vinlandiæ