60 BALCH— EVOLUTION AND MYSTERY 



land and to Vinland. All these places were real, were genuinely 

 reached, but unfortunately their location is uncertain. Some 

 writers think the Vikings reached Labrador and Newfoundland; 

 others think they got as far as Cape Cod; and to this view I am 

 myself inclined. But from the evidence, the most southern locality 

 reached by the Vikings can not be positively identified. 



But in Greenland the Vikings left positive traces of their so- 

 journ in the shape of ruins. Some of these are the remains of 

 churches, and it is known that there were missionaries and religious 

 men among them. And towards the years 1 100-1200 A.D., there 

 is no doubt that there was intercourse between the Greenland settle- 

 ments and Iceland. Slowly however, darkness settles over the 

 Greenland Vikings. Did they all come back : did they die out : or 

 did they migrate to the West? We do not know. Only a few 

 years ago, some rather light-haired Eskimo were found near Corona- 

 tion Gulf and were surmised to be descended partly from the Green- 

 land Vikings. At any rate these latter were gradually forgotten 

 in Europe, where Greenland remained on the maps, however, as a 

 peninsula attached to Northern Norway, for instance in a map of 

 1368 and in the Ptolemy of i486. All this is hazy, it is mysterious, 

 but nevertheless it is certain that the Norse Vikings were genuine 

 European invaders of the New World. 



One tale there is that about 1170 A.D. a Welsh chieftain, by 

 the name of Madoc, reached the coast of North America. This 

 legend is unsupported by any evidence save that there is a simi- 

 larity between some half a dozen Welsh and American Indian 

 words, and this evidence is so perfectly flimsy, that it seems safe to 

 relegate a Welsh discovery of America to the realm of fairy stories. 



It was not, however, the voyages of the northern Vikings, it was 

 the voyages of the Portuguese, Spaniards and English, which led to 

 the peopling of the American continent by the European races. 

 While striving to reach the East Indies by sailing west, the hardy 

 mariners from southern and western Europe found the way barred 

 by the West Indies or New World. Already in the fourteenth 

 century, it is said as early as 1350, the Portuguese began to make 

 gradually lengthening voyages to the islands off the north-west 



