﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK I7I 



Wineland seems to have been understood as beginning with Cape 

 Breton, below the Strait of Cabot, and extending a long way south- 

 ward. The most general conjecture was that it joined Africa some- 

 where in the tropics ; until the Spanish discoveries made this untenable 

 and later explorations revealed a long coast-line independent of the 

 eastern world and broken by a few deep inlets, the greatest of which 

 was the Chesapeake. Then they pitched upon some such " fiord " as 

 marking Wineland off from America of the Spaniards. But at all 

 times its warmer and more prolific regions made the dominant ideal 

 of the new country among the northern people. 



Of course " discovery " in its fullest sense calls not only for finding 

 but for adequate disclosure. But what is adequate in this connection ? 

 Must we demonstrate a full understanding of the matter by the more 

 prosperous nations around the Mediterranean, or some effective 

 influence on exploration and colonization in later centuries? It is 

 a matter of definition only, but these requirements would be perhaps 

 a little immoderate. 



In Scandinavia the results were so effectually announced that 

 they remained sensational topics of conversation in a royal court 

 nearly seventy years afterward — a court and kingdom very indirectly 

 concerned. The same information was published by Adam of Bremen 

 about the same time in Germany, so amply that manuscript copies of 

 his book were to be found at widely separated points of central 

 Europe for half a millenium afterward. It is incredible that none of 

 them reached Italy, and equally so that the story of the three years' 

 Wineland adventure should not have been freely told there by Gudrid 

 during her eleventh century pilgrimage to Rome, and repeated from 

 time to time by the many Icelandic pilgrims and soldiers of fortune 

 whom we read of in other sagas. Furthermore * the tithes for the 

 support of Crusaders were paid by Greenland from time to time dur- 

 ing the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries at least, though in a dila- 

 tory way ; and men who were sometimes sent to collect them must have 

 wonderfully lacked curiosity if they made no inquiry concerning 

 Markland, if only to find out whether it might prove another resource. 

 What they learned would surely find its way back, in general outline, 

 if no more, to the central authority. On all grounds, we must believe 

 that the Vatican was aware of these new western lands, but probably 

 with little more interest than attached to the reports of upper Green- 

 land. That such knowledge should have been possessed and allowed 



1 B. F. De Costa: The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America, p. 322 et seq;. 

 also most of the other works before cited concerning Greenland. 



