but sometimes it was thought of as an oceanic island, with greater or less shifting of location, and seems to be responsible for divers mythical Green Islands of various maps and languages. Less than a quarter of a century after their first landing the Norse Greenlanders became aware of a more temperate coast line to the southwest, the better part of which they called Vinland, or Wineland, but all of which we now name America. Perhaps Leif Ericsson brought the first report of it as the result of an accidental landfall close to the year 1000 A. D. Not long afterward, Thorfinn Karlsefni with three ships and 160 people attempted to colonize a part of the region. The venture failed, owing chiefly to the hostility of the Indians at the most favorable point. The visitors, however, made the acquaintance of the typical American Atlantic shore line of beach and sand dune which stretches from Cape Cod to the tip of Florida with one or two slight interruptions and one or two fragmentary minor northward extensions. The Norsemen or some predecessor had observed and named the three great zones of territory which must always have existed. Among investigators there has been general concurrence as to their discovery of Labrador and Newfoundland, to which most would add Cape Breton Island and more or less of the coast beyond. It has appeared to me that they made their chief abode in the New World on the shore of Passamaquoddy Bay behind Grand Manan Island and Grand Manan Channel, with the racing ocean streams of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy; and that they found this site inclement in winter and tried to remove to a land-locked bay of southern New England but were baffled and withdrew. My reasons have been pretty fully set forth in "Early Norse Visits to North America."[1] For the present it is enough to say that the discovered regions seem some- times to have been thought of as a continuous coast line, some- times as separate islands more or less at sea. But they did not get upon the maps in any shape until several centuries later.
- ↑ Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 59, No. 19, Washington, D. C., 1913. See also: Recent History' and Present Status of the Vinland Problem, Geogr. Rev., Vol. II, 1921, pp. 265-282.
