Trevelyan, dean of modern historians, says that if we are to proclaim history, we must present proofs. Let us proceed to our proofs. We go back in time to the year 1492. Columbus, persuaded by some erratic trigonometry and some terrible calculus that China was to be found somewhere relatively near to the west of Spain and close enough to be visited by the frail craft of the time, talked Queen Isabella into hocking her jewels, as the legend goes, to outfit three small ships for an expedition to Cathay, a land of untold riches, according to Marco Polo. After 40 sailing days and 40 nights, Columbus bumped into the island of Hispaniola, half of which is now the Dominican Republic, the other half being Haiti. And, based upon what Marco Polo had written, Columbus was puzzled. Not a chop suey joint in sight. No Won Ton soup. No Dim Sum joints. No firecrackers. No lovely Mandarin ladies in finely embroidered silk garments. No delegation eager to get a mah jong game going. No laundries.
Columbus might have been puzzled, but he was sure as hell not dissuaded. He was in China and he went back to Spain and so advised the few who had paid any attention to his claims and to his voyage. Eventually, as we know, he was clapped in jail. We do not know why. Isabella was not pleased, apparently.
Now, let us go further back into the past towards the end of the Tenth Century. No one disputes that Norwegian Vikings were living on the west coast of Greenland then; that there were many settlements; that the land was ruled by a red-headed Viking gentleman who was named, appropriately, Eric the Red. Eric had a son; a rash, belligerent young fellow named Leif who did not get along with his dad and was sick and tired of the terrible climate in Greenland. Leif had a buddy named Lars Almvig. Lars was a great teller of tales. These were called ''sagas'' in the Norse tradition. Everyone recited sagas from memory because few could read and write. One tantalizing tale, cast in the form of a saga, spoke of a land far to the west that had been seen through a mist by a Viking band that had been badly blown off-course. Egged on by Lars Almvig and anxious to get out of the shadow of the old man, Leif organized a voyage, borrowed a ''Long Ship'' and headed west on a fine summer day in about 990 A.D. We know this because it is proclaimed in many of the Norse sagas of the time. These sagas survive. They have been compiled by a thoughtful anthropologist by the name of Snorri Sturleson in a book called ''Prose Edda.'' They are also found scattered throughout the literature of the Vikings.
Now, let us look to the geography in question. Get out your Mercator Projection, find the scale, cut a measured length of string, and lay out some lines. Find Narsalik, Greenland at just about 60 degrees North Latitude and about 50 degrees West Longitude. Narsalik was then the capital of Greenland and had the best harbor. Note that the small circle distance from Narsalik to any point on the coast of Labrador is about 500 miles. Labrador is part of North America. Note the direction of the Labrador current which is southerly in those latitudes. Note that Viking long-boats under sail were good for 6 knots an hour in an average breeze. Add the velocity of the Labrador current which is about 3 knots an hour and is southerly in direction. Confidence factor by, say, two and you will derive probable sailing time from Narsalik to the coast of Labrador of about 110 hours or four and a half days. Would that have been hard sailing for Leif Erickson? That's about the time that it takes inept brothers-in-law in their leaky boat to make it to Catalina, when, hopefully, you are not aboard. Leif, incidentally, went ashore on Labrador and named it ''Markland',' Land of the Flat Stones.
We are doing the map work to determine whether or not Leif's voyage was feasible. Feasibility is an important issue in casting the likelihood of occurrences, as all lawyers know, or should know. Now, let's go down the coast of Labrador, hugging the shoreline, for about 400 more miles and perhaps four days. We arrive at the Gulf of the St. Lawrence River, with the huge and bountiful island of Newfoundland just to the south. Let's go another 300 miles or so and we come to Nova Scotia and the Grand Banks. About 300 miles to the south is Boston, which, of course wasn't there in the Tenth Century.
Recall that the Vikings sailed the North Atlantic just as easily as the Phoenicians sailed the Mediterranean and that the area from the coast of Norway, up across Iceland and on over to Greenland, a vast distance, was easily traversed by those hard Norseman in their superbly designed and constructed ships.
So, we know now that the voyages of Leif Erickson were entirely feasible and that the distances involved were not extreme and that reaching any point on the North American continent north of Boston was an easy sail and probably a lot of fun if attempted in the summer time when the North Atlantic is as still as a mill-pond. (Cf. Voyage of Ron Swearinger aboard the troopship U.S.S. General Mann, August, 1953; Memoirs of Ron Swearinger, unpublished as yet).
Now, did the voyages occur? I say voyages because according to the sagas there were two, two years apart. On his first return to Greenland, Leif described his ultimate destination as a land mass he called ''Vinland'' because he found wild grapes growing there. He wintered there and brought back a cargo of wine. This news was quickly incorporated into the Norse sagas and was loudly proclaimed in the very northern latitudes. Lars Almvig, of course, wrote many of these sagas, the most literate of which was ''Val Sturma Vinland,'' which gave sailing directions, distances and landmarks.
And, a literate fellow named Adam of Bremen (that's in Germany, you know) wrote the voyages up in considerable detail. Adam was essentially a journalist and his writings about Leif's voyages can be found in the Bremen Public Library today. So, it wasn't just the Norsemen who heard about the voyages. The news in the form of the sagas apparently spread far and wide in the northern latitudes.
A word now about the ''sagas.'' Nordic people of early times communicated information in the form of long, rambling epic poems that usually did not rhyme, or even scan very well. The Greeks, incidentally, did the same. Were the Norse or Greek ''sagas'' truthful and reliable? People of earlier times, we know, were rather long on hyperbole and overstatement, just as many of us are today, and history was written by imaginative folks ranging from the gullible Herodotus of the 5th Century B.C. to Saint Bede who wrote, for a long time, the Anglo Saxon Chronicles. On analysis, modern historians agree that the Norse sagas were factually correct, once one distilled out the embellishment and the serious overstatement.
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