hagen; "Those sly rogues of Americans,"
says he, "dearly love a quiet hoax;" and he can almost hear
them chuckling over their joke in their club-room at Newport. I
am afraid these Yankees were less rogues and more fools than
Mr. Laing makes out.]

[Footnote 260: Laing, _Heimskringla_, vol. i. p. 181.]

[Sidenote: If the Northmen had founded a successful colony, they would
have introduced domestic cattle into the North American fauna;]

[Sidenote: and such animals could not have vanished and left no trace of
their existence.]

The most convincing proof that the Northmen never founded a colony in
America, south of Davis strait, is furnished by the total absence of
horses, cattle, and other domestic animals from the soil of North
America until they were brought hither by the Spanish, French, and
English settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the
Northmen had ever settled in Vinland, they would have brought cattle
with them, and if their colony had been successful, it would have
introduced such cattle permanently into the fauna of the country.
Indeed, our narrative tells us that Karlsefni's people "had with them
all kinds of cattle, having the intention to settle in the land if they
could."[261] Naturally the two things are coupled in the narrator's
mind. So the Portuguese carried livestock in their earliest expeditions
to the Atlantic islands;[262] Columbus brought horses and cows, with
vines and all kinds of grain, on his second voyage to the West
Indies;[263] when the French, under Baron Lery, made a disastrous
attempt to found a colony on or about Cape Breton in 1518, they left
behind them, upon Sable island, a goodly stock of cows and pigs, which
throve and multiplied long after their owners had gone;[264] the
Pilgrims at Plymouth had cattle, goats, and swine as early as 1623.[265]
In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a community of Europeans
subsisting anywhere for any length of time without domestic animals. We
have seen that the Northmen took pains to raise cattle in Greenland, and
were quick to comment upon the climate of Vinland as favourable for
pasturage. To suppose that these men ever founded a colony in North
America, but did not bring domestic animals thither, would be absurd.
But it would be scarcely less absurd to suppose that such animals,
having been once fairly introduced into the fauna of North America,
would afterward have vanished