NORSE TRAVELLERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 6, 7 July 1938, Page 32

NORSE TRAVELLERS

ON AMERICAN CONTINENT

Discoveries which support the contention that Norsemen crossed to this continent hundreds of years before Columbus have been reported by Commander Donald R. MacMillan, wellknown Arctic explorer, says a Mont-

real message to the "Christian Science Monitor.'-' Stopping in Montreal before embarking on a ten-week study trip to Labrador, he recently enumerated his findings at Nain, Northern Labrador, where he has established an Eskimo school. His evidence is based chiefly on Eskimo traditional accounts of as trans? people who came out of the sea in v boats that had no sails." These people were said to have built houses, whose rectangular foundations and partial walls still remain. . The Eskimo tradition, said Commander MacMillan, tells of a battle with the strange people in which they were driven up a mountain called Tupictu-lick, "the place of strange tents," where they were besieged. Commander MacMillan also describes caves with soot-stained roofs, which the strangers were said to have inhabited. He is further convinced ' that the Norsemen from Greenland came to this continent many times. When they speak of Markland in their sagas, ha said, they referred to Newfoundland; and when they talk of Helluland as on the way to Vinland, they speak of Labrador —Vinland being in the neighbourhood of Martha's Vineyard, near Caps Cod.