Contemporary Accounts.--Hakluyt, _Voyages_; Camden Society, _Publications_, lxxxvii.; _Relation of Captain Gosnold's Voyage_ (1602); Breton, _Brief and True Relation_ (1602); Pring, _Voyage for Discovery of North Part of Virginia_ (1603); Rosier, _True Relation_ (1605); Amerigo Vespuccius, _Letters._--Reprints: Prince Society, _Publications; American History told by Contemporaries_, I. part ii.; J. Jameson, _Original Narratives of Early American History; American History Leaflets_, 1, 3, 9, 13. 7. Pre-Columbian Discoveries. Sidenote: The Scandinavian claim. The Basques, Normans, Welsh, Irish, and Scandinavians are the principal claimants for the honor of discovering America before Columbus; and there are also believers in early African migrations to the western continent, chiefly influenced by supposed ethnological and botanical evidences found in South America. The Scandinavians make out the strongest case. Iceland, so tradition runs, was first conquered by the Britons in the sixth century. Then followed a succession of Danish and Irish settlements. But the Celts were driven out by Ingolf, who led a colony of Norwegians thither in 875 and founded Reikjavik. The ancient Norse sagas--oral traditions, none of which were fixed in writing until the twelfth century, and most of them not until the fourteenth--mention voyages to the west from Iceland, and the discovery of new lands in that quarter as early as 876. In 985 Eric the Red is said to have led colonies to this western land,--by this time called Greenland. The following year (986) Bjarni Herjulfson claimed to have been driven by contrary winds to a strange shore nine days' sail southwest from Greenland,--"to a land flat and covered with trees." Then comes the familiar story, that in the year 1000 Leif, son of Eric the Red, having come from Norway and introduced Christianity into both Iceland and Greenland, sailed away to the southwest with thirty-five companions, intent on visiting the country which Bjarni had discovered before him. They wintered, so the saga reads, "at a place where a river flowed out from a lake," called the region Vinland because of wild grapes growing there, "erected large buildings," and then set out for Greenland with a cargo of timber,--a commodity much needed in the fishing colonies of the less-favored North. It is related that other explorations succeeded this, and that in 1007 a temporary settlement was formed in sunny Vinland, where the colonists, nearly one hundred in number, "had all the good things of the country, both of grapes and of all sorts of game and other things." Trading voyages to the new country now became frequent, say the sagas, and considerable shipments of timber were made from Vinland to Greenland. Eric Upsi, a Greenland bishop, is alleged, on doubtful authority, to have gone to Vinland in 1121; and in 1347 there is mention of a Greenland ship sailing out there for a cargo of timber,--but this is the very last