At any rate, Erik had little hesitation in starting out to rediscover them. Why should he? Those rough-riders of the sea were used to voyages of equal length. It is about 200 miles from the Norwegian coast at Bergen to the Shetland Islands; 200 miles from the Shetlands, or 225 from the Hebrides, to the Faroes; and 275 miles thence to the nearest coast of Iceland,—reckoning all in straight lines, shorter than any ship could actually follow.
If his viking boat and viking crew could span those stretches of sea unguided, what hindered his crossing the little further space whose tempests had no terrors for this wild sea-king? In that unpossessed land, could he find it, he might be free to riot at his will (but one cannot help thinking there was more in the man than that!); and if he could open to his people a new country, what wealth and power might not come with it to him, for the humbling of his rivals at the court of Norway.
So Red Erik sailed away to the west in 984, and two years later returned to Iceland and reported that he had met first a far-extending icy coast, along whose front he had sailed southward until he could turn to the west and then northward, thus rounding its narrow southern extremity (Cape Farewell); and there he had found a habitable region, which he called Greenland, in order, as he said, to attract settlers by a pleasant name. Thus this wicked old Norseman was the first of American “real-estate boomers.”
Attracted by his story, a band of adventurers went back with him in 986, and established a settlement near the site of the present Danish town Julianshaab, just inside the cape, on an inlet that they named Eriksfiord.
Among these emigrants was one named Herjulf, whose son Bjarne[2] was a merchant captain who owned his own ship, and was then absent in Norway. Returning to Iceland shortly after Erik’s departure, he concluded at once to follow his father, and, with a willing crew and still loaded ship, set sail for the west. But incessant bad weather drove them they knew not whither during many days. At last the wind fell, the sun shone out, and they saw land; but its appearance did not agree with the description of Greenland, and knowing they were too far south, Bjarne turned north, and kept on, occasionally sighting the coast, until finally he reached Eriksfiord in safety. No one knows what headlands he looked upon; but if the Icelandic versified chronicles called sagas may be believed,—and the wisest students of history put faith in them,—he was the first European to see America of whom we have definite knowledge.
Several years passed by, however, before any one tried to profit by this accident and seek the lands that had been seen southward. Then Leif, the eldest son of old Red Erik, resolved to do so. He had talked with Bjarne and his men until he knew all the details of their story, and then he bought the same good old ship, and enlisted a crew of thirty-five men. This happened in Norway, where Leif then was, and it is said by some that the king aided and authorized the expedition. At any rate, after a public farewell they sailed away, and seem to have gone straight across the ocean; but whether they did this, or sailed by way of Iceland and Greenland, they easily found the unknown coasts Bjarne had described, and landed in Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, in the last of which they built huts and spent the winter of the year 1000.
The identification of these places has caused much discussion. That “Helluland” was Newfoundland and “Markland” Nova Scotia seems tolerably certain; but historians are not agreed as to where that winter was spent in “Vinland,” so called (meaning “Wineland”) because a German member of the crew gathered grapes there, from which wine could be made. When, in 1602, Gosnold discovered a fruitful island south of Cape Cod, he named it Martha’s Vineyard, believing that he had found the place.
When Leif reached Greenland again, the next spring, every one was vastly interested in his discoveries, and emigrants from Greenland, Iceland, and even from Europe went out to colonize the new lands; but the attempts, though spasmodically continued for a long time, seem never to have been really successful, so that no undisputed trace of the presence of these sea-wanderers on the mainland of North America is known to exist. That they knew the coast fairly well from Disco Island (70° N. lat.) southward to Virginia, is generally believed; but where Leif Erikson spent that first winter, or where the Vinland settlement of subsequent times was, is thus far a matter of conjecture. Some students of the sagas place it in New York harbor, others in Narragansett or Buzzard’s bay, near Boston, or in Nova Scotia. Formerly the general belief was that Newport, R. I., or the shore above there, was surely the site; but this was based, first, on the supposed European inscriptions on a rock in the Somerset River, at Dighton, just above Fall River, which were in reality only Indian markings; and, second, upon the “old round tower” at Newport, which few persons now believe was built prior to the coming of the English colonists with Roger Williams. The late Professor E. H. Horsford believed that he had found the site of the principal Norse settlement of the tenth century, called Norumbega, at Watertown, on the Charles River, a few miles west of Boston; and he made an argument from old maps, etc., to support his assertion that the ancient river-walls, etc., there were really the remains of a town; but historians generally do not attach any importance to Professor Horsford’s theory.
Perhaps we shall never know where this “Vinland” was that Leif discovered, and where the queenly Gudrid dwelt and her son Schnorr—the first white child in America—was born; nor is it of much consequence that we should, for the settlements were few and transitory. That they existed, however, and that the shores of Canada and New England were occasionally visited from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries by Norsemen, cannot be gainsaid. That the Greenlanders did not all migrate to the warmer, well-timbered, and fruitful region in the south was probably due to the fact that it was so remote from their kindred, and so open to attack by the native red men, whom they called skrellings.