The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
of the discovery of the North American continent. He was on his way from Norway to Greenland when he was driven out of his course, and so reached the mainland of the New World in that early century; even as, five centuries later, the Portuguese admiral, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, when on his way to the Cape, was driven westward to the coast of Brazil, and so to the discovery of the southern continent. For later generations the tale of the old Vinland explorers—whose goodly land of the vine, and of fertile meads of grain, had faded away as a dream—naturally gathered around it exaggerations and legendary fable; but such terms are wholly inapplicable to the original Saga. The story of Thorfinn’s expedition to effect a settlement on the new-found land, within three or four years after Leif Ericson’s reported discovery, is a simple, consistent narrative, rendered attractive by natural and highly suggestive incidents, but entirely free from mythical or legendary features. This is obviously the basis of the varying and inconsistent tales of later Sagas. The year 1003 is the date assigned to the expedition in which Thorfinn set out, with three ships and a considerable company of adventurers, and effected a temporary settlement of Vinland. Voyaging southward, he first landed on a barren coast where a great plain covered with flat stones stretched from the sea to a lofty range of ice-clad mountains. To this he gave the name of Helluland, from hella, a flat stone. The earlier editor, having the requirements of his main theory in view, found in its characteristics evidence sufficient to identify it with Newfoundland; but Professor Gustav Storm assigns reasons for preferring Labrador as more probable.[5] The next point touched presented a low shore of white sand, and beyond it a level country covered with forest, to which the name of Markland, or woodland, was given. This, which, so far as the description can guide us, might be anywhere on the American coast, was assumed by the editor of the Antiquitates Americanæ to be Nova Scotia; but, according to Professor Storm, can have been no other country than Newfoundland. The voyagers, after two more days at sea, again saw land; and of this the characteristic that the dew upon the grass tasted sweet, was accepted as sufficient evidence that Nantucket, where honey-dew abounds, is the place referred to. Their further course shoreward, and up a river into the lake from which it flowed, has been assumed to have been up the Pacasset River to Mount Hope Bay. There the voyagers passed the winter. After erecting temporary booths, their leader divided them into two parties, which alternately proceeded on exploring excursions. One of his followers, a southerner—sudrmadr, or German, as he is assumed to have been—having wandered, he reported on his return the discovery of wine-trees and grapes; and hence the name of Vineland, given to the locality.
This land of the vine, discovered by ancient voyagers on the shores of the New World, naturally awakened the liveliest interest in the minds of American antiquaries and historical students; nor is that interest even now wholly a thing of the past. Is this “Vinland the Good” a reality? Can it be located on any definite site? Montgomery’s Greenland epic was published in 1819; and the poet, with no American or Canadian pride of locality to beguile him in his interpretation of the evidence, observes in one of the notes to his poem: “Leif and his party wintered there, and observed that on the shortest day the sun rose about eight o’clock, which may correspond with the forty-ninth degree of latitude, and denotes the situation of Newfoundland, or the River St. Lawrence.” The reference here is to the sole data on which all subsequent attempts to determine the geographical location of Vinland have been based; and after upwards of sixty years of speculation and conjecture, Professor Gustav Storm in his Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, arrives at a nearly similar conclusion. Vinland cannot have lain farther north than 49°. How far southward of this its site may be sought for is matter of conjecture; but all probabilities are opposed to its discovery so far south as Rhode Island.
Professor Rafn, however, arrived at very different results; and found abundant confirmation in the sympathetic responses of the Rhode Island antiquaries. The famous Dighton Rock was produced, with its assumed runic inscription. The Newport Round Tower was a still more satisfactory indication of permanent settlement by its supposed Norse builders; and “The Skeleton in Armour,” on which Longfellow founded his ballad romance, was accepted without hesitation as a glimpse of one of the actual colonists of Vinland in the eleventh century. Professor Rafn accordingly summed up the inquiry, and set forth the conclusions arrived at, in this definite fashion. “It is the total result of the nautical, geographical, and astronomical evidence in the original documents, which places the situations of the countries discovered beyond all doubt. The number of days’ sail between the several newly-found lands, the striking description of the coasts, especially the sand-banks of Nova Scotia; and the long beaches and downs of a peculiar appearance on Cape Cod (the Kialarnes and Furdustrandir of the Northmen,) are not to be mistaken. In addition hereto we have the astronomical remark that the shortest day in Vinland was nine hours long, which fixes the latitude of 41° 24′ 10″, or just that of the promontories which limit the entrance to Mount Hope Bay, where Leif’s booths were built, and in the district around which the old Northmen had their head establishment, which was named by them Hóp, or the Creek.”
The Dighton Rock runes erelong fell into woeful discredit; and as for the Newport Round Tower, it has been identified as “The Old Stone Mill” built there by Governor Benedict Arnold, who removed from Providence to Newport in 1653. Though therefore no longer to be accredited to the Northmen, it is of very respectable architectural antiquity, according to New World reckoning. Nevertheless, in spite of such failure of all confirmatory evidence, the general summary of results was presented by Professor Rafn in such absolute terms, and the geographical details of the assumed localities were so confidently accredited by the members of the Rhode Island Historical Society, that his conclusions were accepted as a whole without cavil. In reality, however, when we revert to the evidence from which such definite results were derived, it proves vague, if not illusory. The voyagers crossed over from Greenland to Helluland, which we may assume without hesitation to have been the inhospitable coast of Labrador. They then pursued a south-western course, in a voyage in all of four days, subdivided into two nearly equal parts, until they landed on a coast where wild grapes grew, and which accordingly they named the Land of the Vine. To Icelandic or Greenland voyagers, the vine, with its clusters of grapes, however unpalatable, could not fail to prove an object of special note. But there is no need to prolong the four days’ run, and land the explorers beyond Cape Cod, in order to find the wild grape. It grows in sheltered localities in Nova Scotia; and so in no degree conflicts with the later deductions based on the same astronomical evidence of the length of the shortest day, which have induced subsequent investigators to adopt conclusions much more nearly approximating to those suggested by the poet Montgomery fully sixteen years before the issue of Professor Rafn’s learned quarto from the Copenhagen press.
The topographical details which have to be relied upon in any attempt to identify the precise locality are little less vague than those of the astronomical data from which the editor of the Antiquitates Americanæ assumed to compute his assigned latitude. The voyagers, after their first wintering, pursued their course southward; and again approaching the shore, made their way up a river, to a lake from whence it flowed. The land was wooded, with wild “wheat” in the low meadows, and on the high banks grape-bearing vines. The aspect of this strange land was tempting to voyagers from the north, so they erected booths, and wintered there. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence southward to Rhode Island, the coast is indented with many an estuary, up any of which the old voyagers may have found their way into lake or expanded basin, with overhanging forest trees, meadow flats, and other features sufficiently corresponding to all that we learn from the old Saga of the temporary settlement of Thorfinn and his fellow-voyagers. Fresh claimants accordingly enter the lists to contend for the honours that pertain to the landing-place of those first Pilgrim Fathers. New Englanders above all not unnaturally cherish the pleasant fancy that they had for their precursors the hardy Vikings, who, resenting the oppression of King Harold the fair-haired, sailed into the unknown west to find a free home for themselves. The fancy had a double claim on the gifted musician Ole Bull. Himself a wanderer from the Scandinavian fatherland, he started the proposition which was to give an air of indisputable reality to the old legend; and which culminated in the erection, on Boston Common, in 1888, of a fine statue of Leif Ericson.
“South of Greenland is Helluland; next is Markland; from thence is not far to Vinland the Good.” So reads the old Saga; and with the rearing of the statue of its finder, it seemed incumbent on some loyal son of the Commonwealth to demonstrate the site of