While on this subject I may as well refer to an inaccuracy which appears in the note on page 77 of Dr. Nansen’s second volume. He says there, ‘If it was the tradition of Karlsevne’s encounter with the Skrælings that was referred to, then of course neither he nor the greater part of his men were Greenlanders, but Icelanders, so that it might equally well have been said that the Icelanders called them Skrælings.’ This is in direct conflict with the statement in the Saga of Eric the Red, ‘ok váru þar flestir Grœnlendskir menn á’—‘and the majority of those there on (the expedition) were Greenlanders.’ Of course the real reason why Ari says ‘the Greenlanders call them Skrælings’ is that he is here citing, as he tells us, a Greenland source, viz. the information obtained by his uncle, Thorkel Gellison, in Greenland. The argument, therefore, in Dr. Nansen’s note, like that of the text, falls to the ground. _The Skræling Canoes._ Conceding, however, that some knowledge of the Eskimo may have prevailed at the time when our sagas assumed their present form, though the ‘King’s Mirror’, composed about the middle of the thirteenth century, says nothing of these people in its detailed description of Greenland, the question next arises as to how far the writers can have been indebted to such knowledge for their realistic descriptions of the Wineland savages. These Skrælings, as they are called, make their first appearance in the story during the exploration of Thorvald, as narrated in the Flatey Book. We are told how three canoes of skin (húðkeipar) were observed, with three men sleeping beneath each. These canoes appear to have been so portable that one man, the only survivor of the ensuing slaughter, was enabled to escape with one. Now here at first sight we have an Eskimo characteristic, in the fact that the canoes are said to have been of skin. And indeed it may well be that the word used is simply the Greenlanders name for a kayak. This, however, is not certain, for it would need a close inspection of an Indian canoe, with its sewn ‘skin’ of birch-bark, to enable a people unfamiliar with the use of this material in boat-building to distinguish between such a covering and a hide. I prefer not to lay stress, as some have done, on the fact that some Indian tribes used skin coverings for their canoes, for the natives of the latitudes with which we are concerned are represented in the earliest authorities as using birch-bark. Turning, however, from the name used to the thing described, it is quite clear that we here have neither kayaks nor umiaks, but Indian canoes. Three men could not possibly sleep under a kayak, which is a narrow craft covered in at all points but one, like a Rob Roy canoe or a racing outrigger. Nor could one man carry off an umiak, which is a large and clumsy boat, usually manned (if this is not a bull) by women. Both these forms of Eskimo boat were observed and accurately described in