4 LABRADOR 
of open sea without compass or astrolabe. They went 
everywhere.’ In 1824 there were found on an island in 
Baffin Bay, in a region supposed to have been unvisited 
by man before the modern age of Arctic exploration, a 
stone inscription: “Erling Sighvatson and Bjarni Thor- 
harson and Eindrid Oddson raised these marks and cleared 
ground on Saturday before Ascension week, 1135.” There 
is a strong probability that the Northmen made voyages 
to the coast of America oftener than we imagine. Timber 
was scarce in Greenland; what more likely than that they 
should have cut their timber on the shores of Newfound- 
Jand or in places like Hamilton Inlet on the Labrador coast, 
where there is still timber of the finest sort ? 
The voyages of the Northmen, however, were quite 
barren of results of either historical or geographical im- 
portance. The very tradition of Vinland seems to have 
died out in Europe. There are, indeed, accounts of voy- 
ages made to the coast of America in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries; but these are almost wholly, if not 
entirely, mythical. Antonio Zeno, a Venetian gentle- 
man, writing to his brother Carlo about 1400, tells of some 
fishermen who had been blown out to sea twenty-six 
years before, and had been thrown up on a strange coast, 
where they were well received by the people. The land 
was an island with a high mountain whence flowed four 
rivers. There was a populous city surrounded by walls; 
and the king had Latin books in his library which nobody 
could read. All kinds of metals abounded, and especially 
? A stone bearing a Runic inscription and the date 1362, has been 
found in the heart of North America, at Kensington, Minnesota; but 
very strong doubts have been cast on its genuineness, 
