Yet it can hardly be disputed that at the date under consideration all that we are told of Helluland would suit Newfoundland as well as Labrador. No doubt at the present day the arctic fox is more suggestive of Labrador, but in past times this animal seems to have been quite common in Newfoundland. Thus Antony Parkhurst writes to Hakluyt from that country in 1578,—‘I had almost forgotten to speake of the plentie of wolves, and to show you that there be foxes, blacke, _white and grey_’, and in another passage he speaks of the remarkable fearlessness of these foxes—a trait more characteristic, even in a new country, of the arctic than the red species. The red fox, even where it is unaccustomed to the sight of man, is easily scared and habitually cunning, but I myself have found the arctic fox so fearless that it was practically impossible to keep it away from meat lying close to the camp. A handkerchief tied to the horn of a dead caribou was of no use even as a temporary check. Still, so far as all this goes, Helluland might well be in Labrador. But even if Helluland be Labrador, can we consider Newfoundland as Markland? Accepting the only authority relied on by Storm and his school, we do not get any positive clue from the description given of the country. ‘Much wood and many beasts’ is not distinctive, though, no doubt, it can be made to apply to Newfoundland as well as any other place. If we include the Flatey Book description, ‘low-lying, with wide stretches of white sand, the slope from the sea was not abrupt’, it is difficult any longer to look for Markland along the bold, rocky coasts of Newfoundland. The description is certainly not characteristic. But setting the question of local resemblance apart, the identification is defended on the ground that one text gives for the direction from Helluland, ‘they changed their course from south to south-east’. This seems to me a most unreliable statement on which to found a definite and positive conclusion. In the first place, the change of course indicated is only given by Hauk; the purer companion version states merely that the explorers had a north wind. Having regard to the fact that the word ‘south-east’ (landsuðr) occurs in the very next sentence,—‘an island lay to the south-east’—there is here an obvious trap for the unwary copyist. Supposing the word in the archetype of the saga to have been originally south-west (utsuðr), a course more consistent with the general direction of Karlsefni’s investigations, it is extremely likely to have been mistranscribed with a word so like it close at hand to catch the eye. Besides, the courses on the whole are so manifestly wrong, or at best vague approximations, that no one can be on sure ground who relies on them. (Cf. Chapter II, p. 131.)