8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



Nansen's In Northern Mists, the Norse-Irish accounts of the finding 

 of Ari Marsson in his western home, and other reports of unlucky 

 men who from time to time were storm-driven far across the 

 Atlantic. If mariners or wanderers could thus casually make the 

 passage from west to east, why not from east to west? The still 

 rather common fate of being at the mercy of the elements and of an 

 undesired landfall should not be regarded as suspicious, although of 

 course often utilized in the fiction of all countries and periods. 

 Horsford's * chart of the courses of wrecks and derelicts is a curious 

 exhibit of their frequency in later years along a part of our coast. 

 Would that frequency be less when both vessels and skippers were 

 without compasses or charts, and in every way poorly equipped to 

 elude or overcome their dangers ? D'Avezac 2 relates, in passing, two 

 rather early instances recorded of wrecks on the Canaries and the 

 Azores a French vessel of about the year 1336 and a Greek craft in 

 1370. For that matter, disabled ships have been known to wander 

 over the Atlantic month after month in recent years, reaching in 

 succession widely separated regions ; and, if left to themselves, 

 might have stranded finally almost anywhere. 



The map of the Atlantic Ocean itself suggests that very early 

 crossings were much more than possible ; exhibiting as it does a 

 strait-like narrowing between South America and Africa, and an- 

 other at the far north, where the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Green- 

 land make convenient stepping stones. Moreover, warm, alluring 

 islands are scattered out before Morocco and the Iberian peninsula 

 so widely that the farthest is about halfway between Cadiz and Cape 

 Race. Even from the tip of Brittany, the southwest of Ireland, or 

 the Basque provinces of northwestern Spain, that corner of New- 

 foundland was not inordinately far. There were also favorable 

 ocean currents at some points, the most notable of which swept then, 

 as now, southward along the outer front of the Azores, Madeira, and 

 the Canaries ; then in a wide curve moved westward to the Caribbean, 

 joining there another stream from the lower African coast. The 

 various natural crossing routes above indicated were the main 

 highways of early accidents like those above mentioned, often merely 

 legendary, but historical in the cases of Leif and Cabral. 



landfall of Leif, p. 4. 



' 2 Discoveries of the Middle Ages, p. 32. Much more recently a small vessel, 

 leaving one Canary Island for another, was blown off and afterward found 

 with her crew well over toward South America. Also a fishing crew of the 

 Newfoundland banks was similarly driven to the Azores. 



