﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 9 1 



crews were not all of one nation, and a sense that the discovery of 

 grapes in particular would probably be made by foreigners among 

 them. 



Professor Fernald 1 suggests that wild currants or more probably 

 rock-cranberries and not grapes were found, awakening the wide- 

 spread and long continued interest already stated. In support of 

 this hypothesis, he cites Linnaeus, a better authority on botany than 

 on vintages as holding " currant-wine " equal to the real article, if 

 only you add a little sugar. Prof. Fernald says that rock-cranberries 

 are a great treat to the birds of Labrador. He believes that the 

 Norsemen, coming from Greenland, were delighted with their pro- 

 fusion and went no farther. Now I do not know what sort of wine 

 may be made from cranberries, but the prospect is unpleasing. It is 

 true enough that beverages with hyphenated names are evolved in 

 divers rural districts and old fashioned households from currants, 

 elderberries, blackberries, wild cherries and the like ; and some 

 people have experienced them. Every such name, for example 

 gooseberry-wine, testifies to the pre-existence of real wine as a 

 standard, and to the fact of feeble imitation. Are these the fruits 

 from which the stout Danish king declared " the best of wine " could 

 be made? Can we imagine these Icelandic broadswordsmen in 

 armor growing ecstatic over the prospect of berry decoctions? 

 Would it have been possible, even in later and milder days, to have 

 sustained on them the " true vinous enthusiasm " which Dr. Saints- 

 bury celebrates and which roared through " the tumultuous choruses 

 of Headlong Hall " ? Professor Fernald observes the phenomenon 

 too much through the spectacles of the dry-leaf collector and speci- 

 men man, omitting the greater part of eleventh century Norse human 

 nature. These men of Greenland and Iceland were after intoxicants. 

 Furthermore, the Ericsfirth region was a berry-country, no less than 

 Labrador. Even 250 miles farther up the coast, Davis 2 found red- 

 currants growing wild near the end of the sixteenth century, and 

 Dr. Rink s attests the great practical value to the inhabitants of the 

 crowberry-crop in southern Greenland at the end of the nineteenth 

 century. He says that the cowberries though plentiful are not eaten. It 

 it not at all believable that men should sail out of one profusion of 

 small fruit into another, 4 like in kind, but inferior and despised at 

 home, and trumpet their experience abroad as something wonderful. 



x The Plants of Wineland. Rhodora, Feb. 1910. 



2 The Voyages and Works of John Davis, edited by A. H. Markham, 1880. 

 3 H. J. Rink: Danish Greenland, pp. 86, 88. 



4 Nansen, in stating this, seems to have confused crowberries with cowberries, 

 but his argument is sound. 

 7 



