This circumstance has induced many to doubt of the facts which have been related. If, they contend, North America were really discovered and repeatedly visited by the Icelanders, how came a country, so fertile in comparison with that island, or with Greenland, or even Norway, to be so suddenly abandoned? This is certainly a difficulty; but a greater one, in our opinion, is involved in the rejection of all the evidence that has been adduced. It is not Snorro merely who mentions Vinland: many other sagas do the same; and even before Snorro, Adam of Bremen obtained from the lips of Sweyn II., king of Denmark, a confirmation of the alleged discovery. For relations so numerous and so uniform, for circumstances so naturally and so graphically described, there must have been some foundation. Even fiction does not invent, it only exaggerates. There is nothing improbable in the alleged voyages. The Scandinavians were the best navigators in the world. From authentic and indubitable testimony we know that their vessels visited every sea from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from the extremity of the Finland Gulf to the entrance at least of Davis’s Straits. Men thus familiar with distant seas must have made a greater progress in the science of navigation than we generally allow. The voyage from Reykiavik, in Iceland, to Cape Farewell, is not longer than that from the south-western extremity of Iceland—once well colonized—to the eastern coast of Labrador. But does the latter country itself exhibit, in modern times, any vestiges of a higher civilization than we should expect to find if no Europeans had ever visited it? So at least the Jesuit missionaries inform us. They found the cross, a knowledge of the stars, a superior kind of worship, a more ingenious mind, among the inhabitants of the coast which is thought to have been colonized from Greenland. They even assure us that many Norwegian words are to be found in the dialect of the people. The causes which led to the destruction of the settlement were probably similar to those which produced the same effect in Greenland. A handful of colonists, cut off from all communication with the mother country, and consequently deprived of the means for repressing their savage neighbours, could not be expected always to preserve their original characteristics. They would either be exterminated by hostilities, or driven to amalgamate with the natives: probably both causes led to this unfortunate result. The only difficulty in this subject is that which we have before mentioned, viz. the sudden and total cessation of all intercourse with Iceland or Greenland; and even this must diminish when we remember that in the fourteenth century the Norwegian colony in Greenland disappeared in the same manner, after a residence in the country of more than three hundred years. On weighing the preceding circumstances, and the simple natural language in which they are recorded, few men not born in Italy or Spain will deny to the Scandinavians the claim of having been the original discoverers of the New World. Even Robertson, imperfectly acquainted as he was with the links in this chain of evidence, dared not wholly to reject it. Since his day, the researches of the northern critics, and a more attentive consideration of the subject, have caused most writers to mention it with respect.[11]