een on the
famous Norman tapestry at Bayeux.

The Icelandic Sagas possess a basis of historical truth, and there is
reason to believe that Leif Ericson discovered three countries. The
first land he made after leaving Greenland he named Helluland on
account of its slaty rocks. Then he came to a {20} flat country with
white beaches of sand, which he called Markland because it was so well
wooded.

After a sail of some days the Northmen arrived on a coast where they
found vines laden with grapes, and very appropriately named Vinland.
The exact situation of Vinland and the other countries visited by Leif
Ericson and other Norsemen, who followed in later voyages and are
believed to have founded settlements in the land of vines, has been
always a subject of perplexity, since we have only the vague Sagas to
guide us. It may be fairly assumed, however, that the rocky land was
the coast of Labrador; the low-lying forest-clad shores which Ericson
called Markland was possibly the southeastern part of Cape Breton or
the southern coast of Nova Scotia; Vinland was very likely somewhere in
New England. Be that as it may, the world gained nothing from these
misty discoveries--if, indeed, we may so call the results of the
voyages of ten centuries ago. No such memorials of the Icelandic
pioneers have yet been found in America as they have left behind them
in Greenland. The old ivy-covered round tower at Newport in Rhode
Island is no longer claimed as a relic of the Norse settlers of
Vinland, since it has been proved beyond doubt to be nothing more than
a very substantial stone windmill of quite recent times, while the
writing on the once equally famous rock, found last century at Dighton,
by the side of a New England river, is now generally admitted to be
nothing more than a memorial of one of the Indian tribes who have
inhabited the country since the voyages of the Norsemen.

{21}

Leaving this domain of legend, we come to the last years of the
fifteenth century, when Columbus landed on the islands now often known
as the Antilles--a memorial of that mysterious Antillia, or Isle of the
Seven Cities, which was long supposed to exist in the mid-Atlantic, and
found a place in all the maps before, and even some time after, the
voyages of the illustrious Genoese. A part of the veil was at last
lifted from that mysterious western ocean--that Sea of Darkness, which
had perplexed philosophers, geographers, and sailors, from the days o