To suppose that the old Norsemen, with a possibly imperfect recollection of the sagas, should have identified Labrador with Wineland is to accuse them of no grosser error than that committed by many modern critics of the subject, to whom the whole of the relevant evidence was readily accessible. The reader can hardly have failed to notice that some such confusion as is here suggested must, at a very early date, have taken place. Whereas the sagas themselves speak clearly of southerly latitudes and a temperate climate, the later tradition and such records as we have of possible later voyages indicate an idea that Wineland was to be found in the Arctic Regions. Thus, the Hönen runes speak of ‘ice in the uninhabited regions’, Adam of Bremen associates Wineland with ‘intolerable ice’ and frozen seas, the ‘New Land’ is identified in the later MSS. of the Annals with the wilds of Greenland, and Furdustrands becomes a region uninhabitable on account of frost (see p. 227). It is not difficult to see how such ideas may have arisen in Iceland and European Scandinavia. The maps under consideration supply us with a probable clue. Greenland is quite wrongly oriented, with its southern extremity pointing south-east instead of south, or, as a compass-chart would have represented it, considerably to the west of south. The cartographer has evidently been misled by the names Western and Eastern Settlement, conferred on the colonies at Godthaab and Julianehaab respectively, which are, in fact, more or less north and south in relation to one another. The confusion produced by this inappropriate nomenclature persisted down to very recent times. The effect of such an error is to suggest to intending explorers that land which really lies to the west of Greenland may be reached by sailing in a direction which is actually north. Although I have suggested another reason for Karlsefni’s alleged visit to the Western Settlement before setting out on his travels, it is always possible, as Dr. Nansen says (vol. 1, p. 321) that this too is a mistake on the part of the saga-writer, based on the not unnatural assumption that the Western Settlement lay due west of the Eastern, and was therefore the nearest point to Wineland instead of the farthest from it. The unduly shortened distance in the saga between Greenland and Helluland (two dægr) may possibly be explained in the same way, and in this case the Bear Islands may actually mean Disko. (Cf. Chapter VIII, p. 262). If so, however, one would have to suppose the saga-writer to have had access to the report of some subsequent explorer, who, sailing from Disko, had touched or sighted the Cumberland peninsula of Baffin Land, and the earlier part of the record of Karlsefni’s voyage would have to be rejected, in so far as it purported to represent historically the experience of that explorer.