They describe with great distinctness the outlines of our eastern coast, including soil, products, and climate, beginning in the cold, sterile regions of the north and extending down to the warm and fruitful shores of the south. It is to be observed that there is no improbability that these alleged voyages should have been made. That a vessel, sailing from Iceland and bound for Greenland, should be blown from its course and drifted to the coast of Nova Scotia or of New England, is an occurrence that might well be expected; and to believe that such an accidental voyage should be followed by other voyages of discovery, demands no extraordinary credulity.
The sagas, or narratives, in which the alleged voyages are described, were written out as we have them to-day, more than a hundred years before the discoveries of Columbus were made in the West Indies,[4] or those of John Cabot on our northern Atlantic shores. The writers of these sagas had no information derived from other sources on which to build up the fabric of their story. To believe that the agreement of the narratives in their general outlines with the facts as we now know them was accidental, a mere matter of chance, is impossible. The coincidences are so many, and the events so far removed from anything that the authors had themselves ever seen, or of which they had any knowledge, that it becomes easier and more reasonable to accept the narratives in their general features than to deny the authenticity of the records. If we reject them, we must on the same principle reject the early history of all the civilized peoples of the earth, since that history has been obtained in all cases more or less directly from oral tradition.
In their general scope, therefore, the narrative of the sagas has been accepted by the most judicious and dispassionate historical students, who have given to the subject careful and conscientious study.
But when we descend to minor particulars, unimportant to the general drift and import of the narratives, we find it difficult, nay, I may say impossible, to accept them fully and with an unhesitating confidence. Narratives that have come down to us on the current of oral tradition are sure to be warped and twisted from their original form and meaning. Consciously or unconsciously they are shaped and colored more or less by the several minds through which they have passed. No one can fail to have witnessed the changes that have grown up in the same story, as repeated by one and another in numerous instances within his own observation. The careful historian exercises, therefore, great caution in receiving what comes to him merely in oral tradition.[5]