In 1012 the survivors sailed for Greenland in the vessel of the murdered brothers, which was the larger of the two. The evil woman, Freydis, who had caused all this trouble, pretended that the other party had been left in Vinland, and that ships had merely been exchanged. She threatened her men, that, if any told on her, they would be murdered, but words were let fall which came to the ears of Leif the Lucky. Three of those who had just returned were put to the torture, until they told the whole story of murder and death in the peaceful country of Vinland.
Leif was greatly affected by the news, but said with great show of magnanimity: “I have no heart to punish my wicked sister Freydis as she deserves. But this I do say to Freydis and Thorwald,—that their posterity will never thrive.”
“And”—says an old Viking—“so it went that no one thought anything but evil of them from that time on.”
This is the last that we hear of Leif the Lucky. That little rosy-cheeked boy, who dreamed that one day he would be a great adventurer, had accomplished his purpose. He had found a new country, he had lived to see it explored by other Vikings, and he had opened the eyes of Europeans to the fact that, far away there was a land which was richer in furs and in timber than anything which they had about them.
The citizens of Boston, Massachusetts, have erected a bronze statue to this navigator, upon Commonwealth Avenue; where, with hand shading his keen eyes, the staunch Norwegian is going out upon the Charles River;—that river, upon the banks of which in the year 1000 a.d., he and his followers spent a peaceful winter in the land of the Skraelings, the beaver, the bear, and the pink-fleshed salmon. Skoal, then, to Leif the Lucky! And remember that it was he, and not Columbus, who first trod upon the shores of America as an adventurer from the European world.
VINLAND
’Neath the scent of the green hemlock forests, near the sands of the storm-driven sea,
Lies a land which is good, filled with balsamy wood, and a voice there is calling to me;
There the grapes grow in reddening clusters, there the salmon jump clear of the falls,