NO. 12 THE WINELAND VOYAGES — S WANTON 63 



time, and until they came at last to a river, which flowed down from the land 

 into a lake, and so into the sea. There were great bars at the mouth of the 

 river, so that it could only be entered at the height of the flood-tide. Karlsefni 

 and his men sailed into the mouth of the river, and called it there Hop [a small 

 land-locked bay]. They found self-sown wheat fields on the land there, wherever 

 there were hollows, and wherever there was hilly ground, there were vines. 

 Every brook there was full of fish. They dug pits on the shore where the tide 

 rose highest, and when the tide fell, there were halibut in the pits. There 

 were great numbers of animals of all kinds in the woods. . . . No snow came 

 there, and all of their live-stock lived by grazing. 



The woods were near their dwellings as is proved by the fact that 

 a bull frightened visiting natives away by running out of the woods, 

 by the fact that one of the natives tested a Norse ax on a tree during 

 the battle between the two parties, and by the fact that the Norse 

 when attacked "fled into the forest." 



When the Norsemen were put to flight by the Skrellings, they 

 fled "up along the river bank" and "did not pause, until they came 

 to certain jutting crags," giving us incidentally a topographic note. 



After visiting the "land of the Unipeds" where Thorvald was 

 killed, Karlsefni and his companions — 



concluded that the mountains of Hop, and those which they had now found, 

 formed one chain, and this appeared to be so because they were about an equal 

 distance removed from Streamfirth, in either direction. 



This seems to establish the existence of mountains in sight of Hop 

 even if it was not in a mountainous country. 



From the Flat Island Book we glean the following: After some 

 details which evidently belong to the Streamfirth period confounded 

 with the Wineland visit, it continues — 



At ebb-tide there were broad reaches of shallow water there, and they ran 

 their ship aground there, and it was a long distance from the ship to the ocean ; 

 yet were they so anxious to go ashore that they could not wait until the tide 

 should rise under their ship, but hastened to the land, where a certain river 

 flows out from a lake. As soon as the tide rose beneath their ship, however, 

 they took the boat and rowed to the ship, which they conveyed up the river, 

 and so into the lake, where they cast anchor and carried their hammocks ashore 

 from the ship, and built themselves booths there. They afterwards determined 

 to establish themselves there for the winter, and they accordingly built a large 

 house. There was no lack of salmon there either in the river or in the lake, and 

 larger salmon than they had ever seen before. The country thereabouts seemed 

 to be possessed of such good qualities that cattle would need no fodder there 

 during the winters. There was no frost there in the winters, and the grass 

 withered but little. The days and nights there were of more nearly equal length 

 than in Greenland or Iceland. On the shortest day of winter the sun was up 

 between "eyktarstad" and "dagmalastad." 



