One of the men who accompanied Eric, the murderer, to Greenland was named Herjulf. This bold and daring adventurer had a son named Bjarni, who roved the seas over, in search of adventure, for many, many years. Finally, in 986, he came home to Iceland in order to drink the Yuletide ale with his father. Finding that his parent had gone away, he weighed anchor and started after him to Greenland, but he encountered foggy weather, and thus sailed for many days by guess work, without seeing either the sun or the stars. When, at length, he sighted land, it was a shore without mountains. He saw, through the misty murk, only a small height covered with dense woods. So, without stopping in order to make explorations, he turned his prow to the north and kept on. He knew that this was not Greenland, and, so we may think it strange that he did not stop to examine the rugged coastline.
The sky was now fair and a brisk breeze was astern, so, after scudding along for nine or ten days, Bjarni saw the icy crags of Greenland looming up before him, and, after some further searching, found his way to his father’s house. He had more than once sighted a heavily timbered shore-line, to the west, while steering for home, and, when he told of it, great curiosity was excited amongst the Norsemen.
Little Leif had now grown to be a man of size and strength. He had made many a journey to Norway, and, when there, in the year 998, found that Roman missionary priests were preaching up and down the land, and had converted the King, Olaf Tryggbesson, who had formerly worshiped the Gods Thor and Odin. Leif, himself, became a Christian and was baptized, so, when he returned to Greenland, he took several priests with him, who converted many of the people. Old Eric the Red, however, preferred to worship in the way of his fathers, and continued to believe in the mystical Valhalla, or hall of departed spirits, where the dead Vikings were supposed to drink huge cups of ale while feasting with their gods.
Upon a bright, warm day in the year 1000 a.d., a great Viking ship lay calmly upon the waters of the bay before the town of Bratthalid in Greenland, and on shore all was bustle and confusion. Leif Ericson, in fact, had determined to sail far to the westward, even as he had dreamed of doing when a little boy; and so, with thirty staunch adventurers, he was preparing to load his ship with sufficient provisions to last for the journey to that strange country of which Bjarni had brought news. It took several weeks to gather provisions and men, but at length everything was ready. The sail was hoisted, the great oaken oars were dipped into the water, and the sharp bow of the Viking ship was turned toward the open sea. “Huzzah! Huzzah!” shouted the Norsemen. “Huzzah!”
The Viking ship, which had a huge dragon’s head at the prow, was such a tiny affair, when compared with the massive ocean liners of to-day, that one can well imagine how she must have been tossed about by the great, surging waves; but she kept on and on, ever steering westward, until a land was discovered which seemed to be filled with flat stones, so they called it Helluland, or flat-stone land. This was the Newfoundland of our maps, to-day.
Leaving this behind them, the Vikings kept on steering southward and westward, until they saw a low-lying and heavily wooded shore. This was Nova Scotia, and they coasted along it, for many days, occasionally coming to anchor in one of the deep bays, and heaving overboard their fishing lines, so as to catch some of the many fish which seemed to abound in these waters.
They sailed on towards the south, and at last reached a place where a beautiful river flowed through a sort of an inland lake into the sea. Many islands were near the mouth of this stream, and, as salmon seemed to abound in the waters of this blue and clear-flowing estuary of the Atlantic, Leif decided that this was a good place in which to spend the winter. So down went the anchor, the Viking ship was moored near the shore, and the men scrambled to the beach in order to erect huts in which to spend the cold season. Thus the dream of the little boy, as he had stood upon the shore of Greenland, years before, had come true, and Leif had reached a new world, to which he had been led by his daring and his love of adventure.
You see, that, although it was long supposed that Columbus was the first white man from Europe to ever set his foot upon the shore of America, such is not the case.
The real discoverer of America, of whom we have any definite record, was Bjarni, the son of Herjulf, who, in the midst of fog and murk, coasted along the shore of Nova Scotia in 986 a.d.
