Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/182

 wormeaten to be fit for ship-building, even if it were of a sufficient size. To go in quest of the wooded countries to the south-west, from whence drift wood came to their shores, was a reasonable, intelligible motive, for making a voyage in search of the lands from whence it came, and where this valuable ma¬ terial could be got for nothing. So far we see rea¬ sonable motives followed by reasonable and perfectly credible acts and results. In the account, however, of the details upon which so much has been built up by modern antiquaries, we find no such consistency, credibility, or internal evidence of truthfulness. Leif and his successors, Karlsefne and others, arrive in Yinland in spring—say in May, June, or July. In what climate, or part of the world, are grapes to be found in those months? They can hardly tread on Straum Island—settled by our modern antiquaries to be Egg Island, at the mouth of Plymouth Sound in Massachusetts—for the eggs of eyder ducks. It was consequently early in spring, before birds were hatched, and before grapes have the shape of fruit in any climate, that they found ripe grapes and ears of wheat! Do vines, or wheat, or corn of any kind, grow spontaneously in those countries? This is a question by no means satisfactorily ascertained. Tyrker the German, who knew so well grapes and vines, "because he was born in a country in which these are not scarce," comes back to his party after a short absence, rolling his eyes, making faces, talking German, and half drunk. All the grapes in Germany, and Vinland to boot, would not make a man drunk, without their juice undergoing the vinous fermentation. This is clearly the fiction of some saga-maker, who knew no more of wine than that it was the juice of the grape; and all the geographical speculations upon the sites and localities of the Yinland of the Northmen, built upon the natural products of the