40 THE VINLAND VOYAGES 



York Bay and the mouth of Hudson River correspond 

 to the description of Hop. The fallacy in his argument 

 seems to me to be, that New York Bay and Hudson 

 River are too far south, and even west, of the south- 

 western extremity of Nova Scotia. The distance from 

 any of the bays on the east coast of New Brunswick 

 into the St. Lawrence is much shorter than that from 

 those bays all the way south to Long Island. Be- 

 sides, although certain apparent similarity might be 

 found between Hop and New York Bay, there are 

 other reasons why such a theory is highly problematic, 

 and the comparison between the two is difficult at the 

 present day, among other things, because probably the 

 shore line around New York has been sinking during 

 the last centuries.** 



Before Gathorne-Hardy had developed his theory 

 that Hop was New York, several scholars had sug- 

 gested other places. E. N. Horsford and his 

 daughter, Cornelia Horsford, considered that Hop 

 was Back Bay, Boston, at the mouth of the Charles 

 River. They believed that they had found Norse 

 ruins at Cambridge and elsewhere. Cornelia Hors- 

 ford engaged two noted Icelandic scholars, Thorsteinn 

 Erlingsson and Valtyr Gudmundsson, to examine 

 these ruins in the summer of 1896. They concluded 



**W. H. Babcock, Early Norse Visits to North America, Smith- 

 sonian Misc. Colls., Vol. 59, No. 19, Washington, 191 3, p. 137. 



