, 877-8, at the very time of the farthest Danish
advance in England, when Guthrum had driven the English King into the
Isle of Athelney, the Norsemen reached their farthest point of northern
advance in Europe; Gunnbiorn sighted a new land to the north-west, which
he called "White Shirt," from its snow-fields, and which Red Eric a
century later re-named Greenland--"for there is nothing like a good name
to attract settlers." By this the Old World had come nearer than ever
before to the discovery of a new one.

Geographically, this side of the Arctic Continent falls to the share of
North America, and once its fiords had been made in their turn centres
of colonisation and of further progress, the actual reaching of
Newfoundland and Cape Cod was natural enough. The real voyage lay
between Cape Farewell and the European mainland; it was a stormy and
dangerous passage from the Greenland Bays to Labrador, but not a long
one, and, as far as can be judged from scanty records, neither so cold
nor so icebound as at present.

But exploration had outrun settlement. It was not till 986, more than
one hundred years after Gunnbiorn's discovery, that Eric the Red, one of
the chiefs of the Iceland colonists, led a band of followers and
friends into a permanent exile in the unknown land. The beginnings of
several villages were made in the next few years, and the first American
discoveries followed at once. About 989 one Bjarni Herjulfson, following
his father from Iceland to Eric's Fiord in Greenland, was driven west by
storms first to a flat, well-wooded country, then to a mountainous
island, covered with glaciers. He bore away with a fresh breeze and
reached his home in Eric's Fiord in four days.

But his report aroused great interest; the time had come, and the men,
and Norse rovers, who after so much in the past were ready to dare
anything in the future, eagerly volunteered to follow up the new route;
Bjarni himself visiting Norway and telling his story, was blamed for his
slackness, and when he went back to Greenland there was "much talk of
finding unknown lands." In the year 1000 Leif, a son of Red Eric,
started with a definite purpose of discovery. He bought Bjarni's ship,
manned it with five and twenty men and put out. First they came to the
land Bjarni had sighted last, and went on shore. There was no grass to
be seen, but great snowy ridges far inland, "and all the way from the
coast to these mountains was one field of snow, an