Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/183

land, fall to the ground. The eyder duck, on our side of the world, is very rarely seen in lower latitudes than 60°. It maybe different on the American coast; but the Skrselingers, the sallow-complexioned people with skin-canoes with whom they bartered cloth and milk for sable and squirrel or grey skins, are, together with their articles of traffic, of northern origin. The red race of Indians could never have been called Skrælingers, and described as such,—viz. with broad cheeks, and sallow complexions,—by Northmen who knew the Skrselingers, or Esquimaux race, in Greenland. But we are told the Esquimaux race extended once much farther south, beyond Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and as far south as we please to have them. It is as easy to tell us that once the juice of the grape would intoxicate without the vinous fermentation,—that wheat would grow without being sown,—and that a barn, or more properly a kiln-barn, might be found in a land without dwelling-houses. All the geographical knowledge that can be drawn from the accounts of the natural products of Vinland in these eight chapters, points clearly to the Labrador coast, or Newfoundland, or some places north of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The terror of the Skrselingers at the bellowing of Karlsefne's bull points rather to an island people, as the natives of Prince Edward's Island, or of Newfoundland; for a continental people in that part of America could not be strangers to the much more formidable bisson, or musk ox, or buffalo. The piece of massur-wood from Yinland, which Karlsefne sold to a Bremen merchant for half a mark of gold, must have derived its value either from its intrinsic worth or beauty as wood or dye-wood, or as a stick coming from a distant unknown land. In the latter case the kind or quality of the wood, and whether it grew south or north, were circumstances of no consequence to the buyer: it was a curiosity