PAGE
1. MAP SHOWING THE ROUTES, OUTWARD AND RETURN, OF THE FOUR
VOYAGES OF COLUMBUS 88

2. FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE FOLIO (FIRST) EDITION OF
THE SPANISH TEXT OF COLUMBUS'S LETTER, DATED FEBRUARY 15, 1493,
TO SANTANGEL, DESCRIBING HIS FIRST VOYAGE. From the original
(unique) in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 262

3. THE NEW WORLD IN THE CANTINO CHART OF 1502, SHOWING THE
STATE OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE AT THE TIME OF THE DEATH OF
COLUMBUS 418

ORIGINAL NARRATIVES OF THE VOYAGES OF THE NORTHMEN

INTRODUCTION

The important documents from Norse sources that may be classed as
"Original Narratives of Early American History" are the Icelandic sagas
(prose narratives) that tell of the voyages of Northmen to Vinland. There
are two sagas that deal mainly with these voyages, while in other
Icelandic sagas and annals there are a number of references to Vinland
and adjacent regions. These two sagas are the "Saga of Eric the Red" and
another, which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the "Vinland
History of the Flat Island Book," but which might well bear the same name
as the other. This last history is composed of two disjointed accounts
found in a fine vellum manuscript known as the Flat Island Book
(Flateyjar-bok), so-called because it was long owned by a family that
lived on Flat Island in Broad Firth, on the northwestern coast of
Iceland. Bishop Brynjolf, an enthusiastic collector, got possession of
this vellum, "the most extensive and most perfect of Icelandic
manuscripts," and sent it, in 1662, with other vellums, as a gift to King
Frederick III. of Denmark, where it still is one of the great treasures
of the Royal Library.

On account of the beauty of the Flat Island vellum, and the number of
sagas that it contained (when printed it made 1700 octavo pages), it
early attracted the attention of Old Norse collectors and scholars, and
hence the narrative relating to Vinland that it contained came to be
better known than the vellum called Hauk's Book, containing the "Saga of
Eric the Red," and was the only account of Vinland that received any
particular attention from the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries The Flat Island Book narrative was also given first place in
Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_ (Copenhagen, 1837). This ponderous vol