to found a colony and failed; and it tells us why he
failed. The Indians were too many for him. The Northmen of the eleventh
century, without firearms, were in much less favourable condition for
withstanding the Indians than the Englishmen of the seventeenth; and at
the former period there existed no cause for emigration from Norway and
Iceland at all comparable to the economic, political, and religious
circumstances which, in a later age, sent thousands of Englishmen to
Virginia and New England. The founding of colonies in America in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was no pastime; it was a tale of
drudgery, starvation, and bloodshed, that curdles one's blood to read;
more attempts failed than succeeded. Assuredly Thorfinn gave proof of
the good sense ascribed to him when he turned his back upon Vinland. But
if he or any other Northman had ever succeeded in establishing a colony
there, can anybody explain why it should not have stamped the fact of
its existence either upon the soil, or upon history, or both, as
unmistakably as the colony of Greenland? Archaeological remains of the
Northmen abound in Greenland, all the way from Immartinek to near Cape
Farewell; the existence of one such relic on the North American
continent has never yet been proved. Not a single vestige of the
Northmen's presence here, at all worthy of credence, has ever been
found. The writers who have, from time to time, mistaken other things
for such vestiges, have been led astray because they have failed to
distinguish between the different conditions of proof in Greenland and
in Vinland. As Mr. Laing forcibly put the case, nearly half a century
ago, "Greenland was a colony with communications, trade, civil and
ecclesiastical establishments, and a considerable population," for more
than four centuries. "Vinland was only visited by flying parties of
woodcutters, remaining at the utmost two or three winters, but never
settling there permanently.... To expect here, as in Greenland, material
proofs to corroborate the documentary proofs, is weakening the latter by
linking them to a sort of evidence which, from the very nature of the
case,--the temporary visits of a ship's crew,--cannot exist in Vinland,
and, as in the case of Greenland, come in to support them."[260]

[Footnote 258: See _Pickwick Papers_, chap. xi. I am indebted
to Mr. Tillinghast, of Harvard University Library, for calling
my attention to a letter from