THE MEDITERRANEAN LOOKS WEST 91 



returned to find the rest murdered. This stone was made and 

 set up as a final marker — and then there is silence. For a 

 number of years this Kensington stone was not believed to be 

 authentic. But after thorough antiquarian study both in this 

 country and Scandinavia this mid-fourteenth-century stone is 

 now believed to be genuine. A replica of it is on view at the 

 Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Here were actually 

 the first explorers of the North American continent. 



All this adds up to a strong impression — for we have no 

 written proof — that the fraternity of pilots, sailors, and navi- 

 gators of the western continent knew much more before 

 Columbus than the historians like to admit. This in no way 

 detracts from the bold venture of the Italian navigator, but it 

 does indicate that an educated and traveled sea captain of his 

 time probably knew whatever was current in fact or rumor 

 from the ports of Iceland south to Portugal. 



It is written that a Danish vessel, storm-driven beyond her 

 course, put in at the old port of Gardar in Greenland in 1450. 

 The Greenland colony no longer existed; but there were 

 traces of an Eskimo invasion, and in a few graves the last of 

 the vigorous descendants of Eric the Red had left remains of 

 woefully undernourished and diseased creatures lying with 

 their wornout iron weapons by their side. 



Now it was the turn of another race, under the stimulus of 

 a renewed vigor coming from the Renaissance in the Mediter- 

 ranean, to take up the never-ending though often interrupted 

 revelation of the wide Atlantic waters. The people of Spain 

 and Portugal in the fifteenth century once more resumed the 

 explorations that had been hampered by the dark ages of the 

 past thousand years. It will always remain an interesting spec- 

 ulation just how much the common knowledge of the fishing 

 fleets of Brest, Dieppe, St. Malo, and the Basque coast ports 

 gave confidence to the learned pilots and navigators who at 

 this time plotted new discoveries. It is true no written record 



