NO. 12 THE WINELAND VOYAGES — SWANTON 3 



right in placing the Saga of Eric the Red in the primary position, but 

 it does not therefore follow that it is invariably correct and the Flat 

 Island Book alvi^ays in error. Essentially the Saga is the story of 

 Thorfinn Karlsefni and his American expedition; it is based, I feel, 

 on the reports of eyewitnesses on an actual voyage, and I am inclined 

 to give great weight to the statements it contains. It is disappointing, 

 however, in the small space devoted to other expeditions, and I am 

 of the opinion that the Flat Island Book has preserved certain items 

 regarding them which had escaped the writer of the Saga. I do not 

 think that its account of Karlsefni's expedition is merely a garbled 

 version of that contained in the Saga. In the discussion to follow we 

 shall try to see what it seems possible to make out of these narratives 

 by a careful cross-examination and the demands of logic. 



Following upon Gustav Storm's work, the wave of enthusiasm for 

 "precursers of Columbus" and for things Scandinavian gave place to 

 a counter wave of skepticism. In 1892 J. P. McLean, in order to 

 confute the claims being put forth that many Atlantic crossings had 

 been made before Columbus and that Columbus had learned of 

 America through the Norsemen, attacked with vigor and success 

 various stories of trans-Atlantic voyages by Irish, Welsh, and others, 

 but pressed his charges also against the claims of the Icelanders and 

 Greenlanders. This is reflected in the writings of the period by less 

 extreme opponents. In the same year B. H. DuBois wrote: "That 

 the Northmen sailed south along the coast of America is not im- 

 probable, but it cannot be proved." A similar opinion rendered by a 

 committee of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1887) has often 

 been quoted and well exemplifies the attitude toward this question by 

 the scholars of the period (McLean, 1892, p. 39) : 



There is the same sort of reason for believing in the existence of Leif Ericson 

 that there is for believing in the existence of Agamemnon — they are both tra- 

 ditions accepted by later writers ; but there is no more reason for regarding as 

 true the details related about his discoveries than there is for accepting as his- 

 toric truth the narratives contained in the Homeric poems. It is antecedently 

 probable that the Northmen discovered America in the early part of the eleventh 

 century; and this discovery is confirmed by the same sort of historical tradi- 

 tion, not strong enough to be called evidence, upon which our belief in many 

 of the accepted facts of history rests. 



Skepticism reached its culmination, however, in Fridtjof Nansen's 

 work "In Northern Mists" (1911), which cast doubt upon the his- 

 toricity of all of the Wineland narratives though Nansen did not 

 deny that the Norsemen had some knowledge of the coasts west and 

 southwest of Davis Strait. However, Nansen has had few followers 



