Now if we assume that the dispute between Karlsefni and the unruly Thorhall took place on Fisher’s Island or the mainland near it, the arguments of the two men would run somewhat as follows: Thorhall asserts that Leif’s landfall in Wineland must lie to the north of Keelness (Cape Cod), because Leif could not possibly have arrived on the coast which the later expedition had just explored, after leaving Markland, without previously sighting land. Karlsefni, on the other hand, regarding Keelness as the northernmost extremity of the country, has observed that from that narrow promontory the land has widened indefinitely as its southern coast was explored, and his view ‘that the region which lay more to the south was the larger’ may be paraphrased thus: the northern extremity of the country was obviously so narrow that Leif’s landfall could hardly have passed unobserved, whereas, here, to the south, the country is of enormous extent, so that, while we know everything there is to the north, to the south we may find anything. This appears to me a more reasonable explanation of this rather obscure passage than Dr. Nansen’s, viz. that it ‘was evidently due to the assumption that it (Wineland) was connected with Africa’.[103] Of such an assumption no real trace can be found, except in a later Icelandic geography, ‘thence it is not far to Wineland the Good, which some think is connected with Africa.’ To a geographer, anxious to place his countries within the limits of the known world, such a theory would be eminently natural. Confused by classical notions of the all-encircling Mare Oceanum, and hampered by the limitations imposed by early religious orthodoxy, primitive science would tend to deny the possibility of land connected with the known world on the farther side of the Atlantic; and to Africa, as the most westerly part of the world to the south of Iceland, the newly discovered lands would naturally be attributed; but it is hardly likely that Karlsefni would be hampered by geographical theories—at any rate there is no real trace of it in the saga. _The Situation of Hóp._ Coming now to the furthest limits of Karlsefni’s expedition, at Hóp, it is obvious that we are provided in this case with a description which affords us more promising data than those with which we have hitherto been forced to be content. If we combine the information given in Eric’s Saga with that provided by the Flatey Book account of Leif’s camp, which clearly refers to the same place, the description becomes even more distinctive.