The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies

by Sir Daniel Wilson

From the sun’s axle. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . Now from the north

Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore,

Bursting their brazen dungeon, arm’d with ice,

And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw,

Boreas . . .

which seems to imply very Icelandic and Arctic associations of the Miltonic muse. But the gentle New England poet, Whittier, who had sung of his Christian knight in vain quest of the marvellous city, thus writes in sober prose to its modern discoverer: “I had supposed that the famed city of Norumbega was on the Penobscot when I wrote my poem some years ago; but I am glad to think of it as on the Charles, in our own Massachusetts.” This work of rearing anew on the banks of the river Charles the metropolis of Vinland the Good may be best entrusted to the poets of New England.

All praise is due to the enthusiastic editors of the Antiquitates Americanæ for their reproduction of the original records on which the history and the legends of Vinland rest. They found only too willing recipients of the theories and assumptions with which they supplemented the genuine narrative; nor has the uncritical spirit of credulous deduction wholly ceased. In the untimely death of Professor Munch, the historian of Norway, the University of Christiana lost a ripe and acutely critical scholar in the very flower of his years. But in Dr. Gustav Storm a successor has been found not unworthy to fill his place, and represent the younger generation of Northern antiquaries, who have now taken in hand, in a more critical spirit, yet with no less enthusiasm, the work so well begun by Rafn, Finn Magnusen, and Sveinbiorn Egilsson. In the same year in which Leif Ericson’s statue was set up in Boston, and all the old enthusiasm for the identification of the lost Vinland was revived, there appeared in the Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord a series of Studies on the Vineland Voyages, from the pen of Professor Storm, embodying a critical analysis of the evidence relating to the Vinland voyages, which is treated still more fully in his Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, Vinlands Geografi og Ethnographi. The whole is now available, along with valuable additions, including photographic facsimiles illustrative of the original MSS., in Reeves’ Finding of Wineland the Good.[^[7]] The evidence has to be gleaned from two independent series of narratives: the one the Icelandic Sagas and other embodiments of the Vinland tradition; the other the more amplified, but less reliable narratives of Norwegian chroniclers. The earliest Icelandic accounts are derived directly or indirectly from Ari froði, more particularly referred to on a later page, whose date as an author is given as about 1120; thereby marking the transmission of the narrative to a younger generation before it was committed to writing. Ari froði, i.e. the learned, derived the story from his paternal uncle Thorkell Gellisson of Helgufell, who lived in the latter half of the eleventh century; and so was a contemporary of Adam of Bremen, who, when resident at the Danish Court, about the year 1070, obtained the information relating to the Northern regions which he embodied in his Descriptio insularum aquilonis. Ari’s uncle, Thorkell, is said to have spoken, when in Greenland, with a man who, in the year 985, had accompanied Erik the Red on his expedition from Iceland; so that the authority is good, if the narrative were sufficiently ample; but unfortunately, though Ari’s notes of what he learned from his uncle are still extant in the Libellus Islandorum, they are exceedingly meagre. The Vinland explorations had no such importance for the men of that age as they possess for us, and are accordingly dealt with as a very secondary matter. Professor Gustav Storm, in his Studies on the Vineland Voyages, notes that Thorkell seems to have told his nephew most about the colonisation of Greenland. In Professor Storm’s Studies, and in the exhaustive Finding of Wineland the Good, by Arthur Middleton Reeves, the entire bearings of the evidence, and the relative value of the various ancient authorities, are discussed with minute care; and lead alike to the inevitable conclusion that any assignment of a site for the lost Vinland, either on Rhode Island, or on any part of the New England coast, is untenable. The deductions of Professor Rafn from the same evidence were accepted as a final verdict, until the too eager confirmation of his Rhode Island correspondents brought them into discredit. Now when we undertake an unbiassed review of them, it is manifest that too much weight has been attached to his estimate of distances measured by the vague standard of a day’s sail of a rude galley dependent on wind and tide. This Professor Rafn assumed as equivalent to twenty-four geographical miles. But very slight consideration suffices to show that, with an indefinite starting-point, and only a vague indication of the direction of sailing, with the unknown influences of wind and tide, any such arbitrary deduction of a definite measurement from the log of the old Northmen is not only valueless, but misleading.

A reconsideration of the evidence furnished by the references to the fauna and flora of the different points touched at, shows that others of Professor Rafn’s deductions are equally open to correction. Helluland, a barren region, of large stone slabs, with no other trace of life than the Arctic fox, presented the same aspect as Labrador still offers to the eye of the voyager. But there is no need to traverse the entire Canadian and New England coasts before a region can be found answering to the descriptions of a forest-clad country, of numerous deer, or even of the vine, as noted by the old explorers from Greenland. To the eye of the Greenlander, the Markland, or forest-clad land, lay within sight no farther south than Newfoundland or Cape Breton. To those who are accustomed to associate the vine with the Rhine land, or the plains of Champagne, it sounds equally extravagant to speak of the Maritime Provinces, or of the New England States, as “Vinland the Good.” But numerous allusions of voyagers and travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries refer with commendation to the wild grapes of North America. Jacques Cartier on making his way up the St. Lawrence, in his second voyage, gave to the Isle of Orleans the name of the Isle de Bacchus, because of the many wild vines found there; though he notes that, “not being cultivated nor pruned, the grapes are neither so large nor so sweet as ours”—that is, those of France. Lescarbot, in like manner, in 1606, records the grape vine as growing at Chuakouet, or Saco, in Maine, and in the following year they are noted as abundant along the banks of the river St. John in New Brunswick.

To voyagers from Iceland or Greenland many portions of the coast of Nova Scotia would present the aspect of a region clothed with forest, and, as such, “extremely beautiful.” Deer are still abundant both there and in Newfoundland; and as for the grapes gathered by Leif Ericson, or those brought back to Thorvald by Hake and Hekia, the swift runners, at their more northern place of landing, the wild vine is well known at the present time in sheltered localities of Nova Scotia. Having therefore carefully studied the earliest maps and charts, of which reduced copies are furnished in the Mémoires, and reviewed the whole evidence with minute care, Professor Storm thus unhesitatingly states the results: “Kjalarnes, the northern extremity of Vinland, becomes Cape Breton Island, specially described as low-lying and sandy. The fiord into which the Northmen steered, on the country becoming fjorthskorit, i.e. ‘fiord-indented,’ may have been one of the bays of Guysborough, the county of Nova Scotia lying farthest to the north-east; possibly indeed Canso Bay, or some one of the bays south of it. Therefore much further to the south in Nova Scotia must we seek the mouth of the river where Karlsefn made his abortive attempt at colonisation. . . . The west coast of northern Vinland is characterised as a region of uninhabited forest tracks, with few open spots, a statement admirably agreeing with the topographical conditions distinguishing the west coast of Cape Breton Island, which in a modern book of travels is spoken of as ‘an unexplored and trackless land of forests and mountains.’ Hence to the south of this region search has to be made for the mouth of the streamlet where Thorvald Eriksson was killed.” Various points, accordingly, such as Salmon river, or one of the rivers flowing into Pictou harbour, are suggested as furnishing features of resemblance and inviting to further research.