THE SEA AND THE DESERT. 
173 
advantageous point from which to contemplate this 
world. It is even a trivial place. The waves for¬ 
ever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and un¬ 
tamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless 
beach amid the sun-squawl and the foam, it occurs to 
us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime. 
It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in 
it. Strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, 
and whatever the sea casts up, — a vast morgue^ where 
famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come 
daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. 
The carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately 
up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and 
waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks 
fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature, — inhu¬ 
manly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at 
the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. 
We saw this forenoon what, at a distance, looked like 
a bleached log with a branch still left on it. It proved 
to be one of the principal bones of a whale, whose car¬ 
cass, having been stripped of blubber at sea and cut 
adrift, had been washed up some months before. It 
chanced that this was the most conclusive evidence which 
we met. with to prove, what the Copenhagen antiquaries 
assert, that these shores were the Fiirdustrandas^ which 
Thorhall, the companion of Thorfinn during his expe¬ 
dition to Vinland in 1007, sailed past in disgust. It 
appears that after they had left the Cape and explored 
the country about Straum-Fiordr (Buzzards’ Bay!), 
Thorhall, who was disappointed at not getting any wine 
to drink there, determined to sail north again in search 
of Vinland. Though the antiquaries have given us the 
original Icelandic, I prefer to quote their translation, 
