Are there iron-rich peat bogs on the Labrador Coast? If, as many scholars think, the "Markland" where the Greenlandic Vikings got their timber was northern Labrador, could a realization that the area contained both iron-rich peat, and the lumber needed for smelting it into metallic iron, prompt settlement? Would the Dorsets who then inhabited the area have been able to resist Viking incursions? Would the presence of such a colony eventually generate enough epidemics to render the Upper Atlantic Seaboard easy pickings?