The principal difficulty lies in the fact that in the primitive state of the science of navigation at the period those particulars are naturally most vague and unreliable on which we are most accustomed to depend. There are no precise latitudes or longitudes, and even the compass, though in use before the extant manuscripts were written, was not known to these early explorers. For distances we have to depend on periods of time which may have been inaccurately copied, and the very meaning of which is a subject of acute controversy. (See previous chapter, §1.) The courses set down are quite likely to have been affected by the preconceived ideas of later editors, and are in any case vague, often only roughly indicated by the direction of the wind. We have in fact to depend to a large extent on what we are told of the appearance of the various coasts, and of the different local products. And so far as one version of the story is concerned, we have to depend for these on the description of one voyage only—Karlsefni’s. With regard to the other version, that of the Flatey Book, it must be borne in mind that the writers of that saga considered all the explorers to have made the same landfall. They came to ‘Leif’s camp’. Now, while this was a natural idea to those who had no notion of the size of the country, it seems to me improbable that it represents the actual facts. To the writer of the Flatey Book version, ‘Leif’s camp’ and ‘Wineland’ were more or less synonymous terms. But the more detailed account of Karlsefni’s voyage suggests that while the later explorer was looking for the district visited by Leif, he never in fact found it. Leif seems to have hurried ashore on his first sight of the country, and to have conducted a merely local exploration. His brother, Thorvald, who, following immediately after Leif, may have arrived at the same base, we are told, ‘thought that the exploration of the country had been confined to too narrow an area’. Karlsefni, on the other hand, after arrival at Keelness, conducted a very protracted exploration, and apparently split his party into two, one going north and the other south, with the object of rediscovering Leif’s Wineland. As I hope presently to show, Leif cannot have penetrated to Karlsefni’s Hóp. Yet the writer of the Flatey Book, imbued with the idea that Leif and Karlsefni occupied identical camps, has evidently felt himself at liberty to draw his description of the scene of Leif’s landing from the fullest report available, which, as he tells us, was Karlsefni’s. Given the notion that all the explorers made the same landfall, this was natural and legitimate enough, but it adds an element of confusion to our already difficult task. There can, I think, be little doubt that the combination of shoal, river, and lake in the description of Leif’s camp is Karlsefni’s Hóp, but, as will be seen later, it is improbable that Leif ever got there.