chapter 2._

"What Leif and Karlsefne knew they experienced," writes Professor Justin Winsor, "and what the sagas tell us they underwent, must have just the difference between a crisp narrative of personal adventure and the oft-repeated and embellished story of a fireside narrator, since the traditions of the Norse voyages were not put in the shape of records till about two centuries had elapsed, and we have no earlier manuscript of such a record than one made nearly two hundred years later still. … A blending of history and myth prompts Horn to say that 'some of the sagas were doubtless originally based on facts, but the telling and retelling have changed them into pure myths.' The unsympathetic stranger sees this in stories that the patriotic Scandinavians are over-anxious to make appear as genuine chronicles. … The weight of probability is in favor of a Northman descent upon the coast of the American mainland at some point, or at several, somewhere to the south of Greenland; but the evidence is hardly that which attaches to well established historical records. … There is not a single item of all the evidence thus advanced from time to time which can be said to connect by archæological traces the presence of the Northmen on the soil of North America south of Davis' Straits." Of other imagined pre-Columban discoveries of America, by the Welsh, by the Arabs, by the Basques, &c., the possibilities and probabilities are critically discussed by Professor Winsor in the same connection.

_J. Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, volume 1, chapter 2, and Critical Notes to the same._

ALSO IN _Bryant and Gay, Popular History of the United States,