ght for the glory
attendant upon braving the perils of Polar Seas. From A.D. 860 to 982,
from the sea-rover Naddod's discovery of Iceland, to Eirek "of the Red
Hand's" landing on Greenland, near Hergolf's Ness, neither wreck,
disaster, nor tempest, checked the steady, onward march of their
explorations; robbing, as they eventually did a century afterwards, the
immortal Genoese of one half his honours, by actually landing, under
the pirate Biarni, on the new continent south of the river St.
Lawrence.

In Greenland, a hardy race, the descendants of the Northland warriors,
appear to have multiplied; for, in A.D. 1400, a flourishing colony
stood on this threshold of the new world; converted to Christianity,
the cathedral of Garda had been constructed, and the archives in
Iceland proved it to have been successively held by no less than
seventeen bishops; the colonies were known under the general terms of
East and West Bygd (Bight), and numbered in all sixteen parishes, and
two hundred and eighty farms, numerously populated.

[Headnote: _NORTH-WEST DISCOVERY._]

Strict commercial monopoly, and the naturally secluded position of the
Scandinavian colony in Greenland, seemed to have occasioned its perfect
decadence, or, otherwise, as traditions tell us, a sudden hostile
inroad of the Esquimaux swept off the isolated Europeans: from either
cause there remained, after the lapse of two centuries, but the
moss-covered ruins of a few churches, some Runic inscriptions, and the
legends of the Esquimaux, who talked of a tall, fair-haired race, their
giants of old.

The heirloom of the northern pirates, the dominion of the sea, passed,
however, into England's hands, and with it that same daring love of the
difficult and unknown, which had led the Viking from conquest to
conquest: and whilst southern Europe sought for the wealth of the
Indies in the more genial regions of the south, English seamen pushed
their barks to the west, in the boisterous seas of high northern
latitudes. Confining myself purely to those who essayed the passage to
Cathay Cipango, and the Indies, by the north-west, first on the
glorious scroll stands Frobisher. That sturdy seaman of Elizabeth's
gallant navy, on the 11th of July, 1576, with three craft, whose united
burden only amounted to _seventy-five tons_,--this "proud admiral"
sighted the east coast of Greenland, in 61 deg. north latitude. Unable to
approach it for ice, which then, as now, hampers the whole