There remains to be considered the episode of the savages captured in Markland on the return voyage. With the circumstance that one of the Skrælings captured on this occasion is said to have been bearded I have dealt already. The statement that those who escaped disappeared into the ground appears to me to mean no more than that, like good stalkers, they contrived to take cover and creep away unseen. There is therefore no clearer evidence of legendary influence in this case than in the rest of the story. The rest of what is reported is hearsay derived from the captives themselves, after they had—possibly not very effectually—been taught to speak Icelandic. I therefore agree with Dr. Nansen that it is hopeless to attempt, as some have done (notably Mr. Thalbitzer, 1905 and 1913), to trace the nationality of these savages from the words preserved, Vætilldi, Uvægi, Avalldamon, Valldidida.[90] The explorers of a later age were not very happy in their transliteration of native words, and we cannot imagine that these names were handed down through a period of oral transmission without a fatal amount of transformation. That the rest of what is reported is inaccurate in most particulars is no more than we should expect under the circumstances. _Hvítramannaland._ One statement, however, in this passage, to which most commentators have devoted an abnormal amount of attention, merely purports to be a conjecture on the part of those who heard the story, and does not involve any necessary inaccuracy in the reported utterance of the captives. I refer to the allusion to Hvítramannaland (White Man’s Country) or Ireland the Great. The existence or non-existence of such a place as this, while it has exercised the ingenuity of almost all writers on the present subject, has really nothing to do with the authenticity of the Wineland stories. All that appears from the passage is that certain persons, on hearing an account of an adjacent land supposed to have been described by these Skræling children, jumped to the conclusion that Hvítramannaland was the place described, and the non-existence of such a country would merely prove that these persons were wrong in their conjecture, not that the story itself was unworthy of credence. What the savages may have been struggling to explain I will suggest later. Here, the point having been made that it is quite irrelevant, it may be interesting to follow the allusion a little farther.