[Illustration: The southern glacier (Hvitserk) in 62° 10' N. lat.; seen from the drift-ice in July 1888]
In the introduction to Hauk's Landnámabók we read: "en dœgr sigling er til vbygda a Grœnalandi or Kolbeins ey i norðr" (it is a day's sail to the uninhabited regions of Greenland northward from Kolbein's island). Kolbein's island is the little Mevenklint, out at sea to the north of Grim's island and 56 nautical miles (100 kilometres) north of Iceland. The uninhabited regions here referred to are most probably East Greenland at about 69° N. lat. (Egede Land), which lies to the north-west (to the north there is no land, unless the magnetic north is meant). But it is scarcely credible that the Icelanders ever reached land on this part of the coast, which is nearly always closed by ice. It may be supposed that they often sailed along the edge of the ice when seal-hunting, as the bladder-nose is abundant there in summer; they may then have seen the land inside, and so knew of it, without having reached it. In this way the statement as to the distance may have originated, and the day's sail may mean to the edge of the ice, whence the land is visible.
According to statements in the fourth part of the "Rymbegla" [1780, p. 482], a "dœgr's" sail (dœgr == half a day of twenty-four hours) was equivalent to a distance of two degrees of latitude. But even if we accept this large estimate, it will not suffice for the distance between Mevenklint and the coast of Greenland to the north-west of it, which is about equal to three degrees of latitude (180 geographical miles).
It has been assumed that the Icelanders and Norwegians were acquainted with the east coast of Greenland north of 70° N. lat., and visited it for hunting seals, etc. But in order to reach it, it is nearly always necessary to sail through ice, and during the greater part of the summer one has to go as far north as Jan Mayen, or farther, to find the ice sufficiently open to allow one to reach the land. It is a somewhat tricky piece of sailing, which requires an intimate knowledge of the ice conditions; and it is not to be expected that any one should have acquired it without having frequently been among the ice with a definite purpose. That storm-driven vessels should have been accidentally cast ashore on this coast is unlikely; as a rule they would be stopped by the ice before they came so far. We may doubtless believe that the Norwegians and Icelanders sailed over the whole Arctic Ocean, along the edge of the ice, when hunting seals and the valuable walrus; but that on their sealing expeditions they should have made a practice of penetrating far into the ice is not credible, since their clinker-built craft were not adapted to sailing among ice; nor have we any information that would point to this. It is nevertheless not entirely impossible that they should have reached the northern east coast, since it may be comparatively free from ice in late summer and autumn. There would be plenty of seals, and especially of walrus, and on land there were reindeer and musk ox, which latter, however, is nowhere mentioned in Norse literature.