[Sidenote: No trace of a thought of Vinland appears in the voyages of
Columbus.]

Furthermore, this silence is in harmony with the fact that in none of
his four voyages across the Atlantic did Columbus betray any
consciousness that there was anything for him to gain by steering toward
the northwest. If he could correctly have conceived the position of
Vinland he surely would not have conceived it as south of the fortieth
parallel. On his first voyage he steered due west in latitude 28 deg.
because Toscanelli placed Japan opposite the Canaries. When at length
some doubts began to arise and he altered his course, as we shall
hereafter see, the change was toward the southwest. His first two
voyages did not reveal to him the golden cities for which he was
looking, and when on his third and fourth voyages he tried a different
course it was farther toward the equator, not farther away from it, that
he turned his prows. Not the slightest trace of a thought of Vinland
appears in anything that he did.

[Sidenote: Why did not Norway or Iceland utter a protest in 1493?]

Finally it may be asked, if the memory of Vinland was such a living
thing in Iceland in 1477 that a visitor would be likely to be told about
it, why was it not sufficiently alive in 1493 to call forth a protest
from the North? When the pope, as we shall presently see, was
proclaiming to the world that the Spanish crown was entitled to all
heathen lands and islands already discovered or to be discovered in the
ocean west of the Azores, why did not some zealous Scandinavian at once
jump up and cry out, "Look here, old Columbus, _we_ discovered that
western route, you know! Stop thief!" Why was it necessary to wait more
than a hundred years longer before the affair of Vinland was mentioned
in this connection?

[Sidenote: The idea of Vinland was not associated with the idea of
America until the seventeenth century.]

Simply because it was not until the seventeenth century that the
knowledge of North American geography had reached such a stage of
completeness as to suggest to anybody the true significance of the old
voyages from Greenland. That significance could not have been understood
by Leif and Thorfinn themselves, or by the compilers of Hauks-bok and
Flateyar-bok, or by any human being, until about the time of Henry
Hudson. Not earlier than that time should we expect to find it
mentioned, and it is just then, in 1610, that we do find it mentioned by
Arn