10. The descriptions are accurate and life-like, and show no clear traces of features borrowed from Celtic or other romantic sources. On the whole, then, we may assert confidently that the sagas contain accurate descriptions of American Indians, and that these, made at a time when savages were otherwise unknown to the Norsemen, constitute an unimpeachable confirmation of the essential historic accuracy of the story. V. THE ‘DÆGR’ AND ‘EYKTARSTAD’ QUESTIONS Before passing on to examine the voyages themselves, with a view to identifying so far as possible the territory explored, it is advisable to clear the way by the discussion of two questions, the first of which provides by its solution an approximate standard for the measurement of certain distances recorded, while the second provides a rough northerly limit to the possible situation of Wineland. The two questions are not in any way connected, except as being preliminaries to any trustworthy inquiry: as such they may conveniently be dealt with in one chapter, which may be skipped by the unscientifically inclined. ‘_Dægr sigling_’. In the early days with which the present volume is concerned, the only method of measuring distances at sea was necessarily by time. No astronomical observations capable of giving results even approximately exact can then have been understood, and it is a curious fact in the history of navigation that even the simplest form of log for calculating the rate of progress was not introduced until comparatively modern times. The most natural method of measuring nautical distances in these circumstances would be by means of units corresponding to the usual divisions of time. We should therefore expect to find one unit representing an hour’s sail, another representing a voyage of twelve hours, and for use over long tracts of open sea possibly a unit based on the average progress during a period of twenty-four hours. Now the standards of nautical measurement found actually to have been used by the Icelanders are primarily two—the ‘vika’, and the ‘tylft’ or dozen, which, as its name implies, represented twelve of the first-named units. It will be found useful for the present inquiry to establish first of all, with as much certainty as possible, the distances represented by the ‘vika’ and the ‘tylft’.