Note Back to Main Text — Chapter II · PRE-COLUMBIAN VOYAGES.

In the first place, it is an extremely probable story from the time that Eric once gets settled in Brattahlid. The founding of the Greenland colony is the only strange or improbable part of the narrative, but that is corroborated in so many other ways that we know it to be true; as already observed, no fact in mediæval history is better established. When I speak of the settlement of Greenland as strange, I do not mean that there is anything strange in the Northmen's accomplishing the voyage thither from Iceland. That island is nearer to Greenland than to Norway, and we know, moreover, that Norse sailors achieved more difficult things than penetrating the fiords of southern Greenland. Upon the island of Kingitorsook in Baffin's Bay (72° 55' N., 56° 5' W.) Voyage into Baffin's Bay, 1135. near Upernavik, in a region supposed to have been unvisited by man before the modern age of Arctic exploration, there were found in 1824 some small artificial mounds with an inscription upon stone:—"Erling Sighvatson and Bjarni Thordharson and Eindrid Oddson raised these marks and cleared ground on Saturday before Ascension Week, 1135." That is to say, they took symbolic possession of the land.[192]