﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 57 



excepting only bread. Those large grapes are here yet and still 

 wild, ranging above the middle of New England along the coast ; 

 their abundance then is plentifully attested and beyond all doubting. 



Quite recently we have been invited to find a sufficient explanation 

 of Adam's words in his credulity which resembled that of many other 

 old writers, in the possibility that he might have read or heard of a 

 statement by Isidore * of Seville attributing wild grapes, messis 

 (perhaps grain) and vegetables to the ridges of the Canaries ; in the 

 fact that some ancient Irish sea-stories mention grape islands — 

 as well as apple islands and other delectable places — and that he 

 might have heard of them; and in the etymological, mythical, and 

 every way mysterious relation of the unusual verbal form which 

 we translate Wineland the Good (perhaps more adequately the 

 Blessed) to the Isles of the Blest, the Fortunate Isles, the Irish Isles 

 of the Undying and the fairy isles and hills of Scandinavia. But 

 as Adam of Bremen adds no word, magical or otherwise, to plain 

 Wineland — nor, for that matter, is any word added by the saga — we 

 need not linger over the final point. 



But is it not curious that Adam himself gives us no hint of these 

 classical, Irish, and north European sources ; that the next European 

 visitors, Yerrazano and Cartier, Strachey and Brereton, Champlain 

 and Lescarbot, are equally reticent in this regard, and equally positive 

 about the grapes; that the European writers who followed Adam 

 of Bremen used his material freely but abstained from this particular 

 statement as though to save their credit. Fearing this, he had taken 

 pains to protest in advance that it was " not a fabulous fancy " ; but 

 the asseveration evidently was distrusted. 



It may be objected that the sixteenth and seventeenth century 

 Europeans had nothing to say about the wild grain, but Carrier's " 

 " wild grain like rye " on the southern shore of the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence can be nothing but wild rice plainly distinguished as it is 

 by him from the cultivated maize which he met soon afterward as 

 an article of diet and called " millet as large as peas," even after 

 he had seen it growing at Hochelaga. Neither he nor any other 

 European would consider the wild rice after making the acquaintance 

 of this greater cultivated Indian corn, which had nearly eclipsed its 

 rival even among the natives. But in its absence the former was 

 highly important to all. In our present corn belt, even wheat holds 

 its ground beside maize almost wholly by alternation; but there 



1 Nansen : In Northern Mists, vol. 1, p. 345, and other passages, 



2 The Voyages of Cartier. Orig. Narr. Early Amer. Hist. 



