mainder of the story as we find it in our Icelandic sources of
information, and afterwards it will be proper to inquire into the
credibility of these sources.

[Sidenote: Voyage of Bjarni Herjulfson, 986.]

One of the men who accompanied Eric to Greenland was named Herjulf,
whose son Bjarni, after roving the seas for some years, came home to
Iceland in 986 to drink the Yuletide ale with his father. Finding him
gone, he weighed anchor and started after him to Greenland, but
encountered foggy weather, and sailed on for many days by guess-work
without seeing sun or stars. When at length he sighted land it was a
shore without mountains, showing only small heights covered with dense
woods. It was evidently not the land of fiords and glaciers for which
Bjarni was looking. So without stopping to make explorations he turned
his prow to the north and kept on. The sky was now fair, and after
scudding nine or ten days with a brisk breeze astern, Bjarni saw the
icy crags of Greenland looming up before him, and after some further
searching found his way to his father's new home.[181] On the route he
more than once sighted land on the larboard.

[Footnote 181: In Herjulfsfiord, at the entrance to which the
modern Friedrichsthal is situated. Across the fiord from
Friedrichsthal a ruined church stands upon the cape formerly
known as Herjulfsness. See map.]

[Sidenote: Conversion of the Northmen to Christianity.]

This adventure of Bjarni's seems not to have excited general curiosity
or to have awakened speculation. Indeed, in the dense geographical
ignorance of those times there is no reason why it should have done so.
About 994 Bjarni was in Norway, and one or two people expressed some
surprise that he did not take more pains to learn something about the
country he had seen; but nothing came of such talk till it reached the
ears of Leif, the famous son of Eric the Red. This wise and stately
man[182] spent a year or two in Norway about 998. Roman missionary
priests were then preaching up and down the land, and had converted the
king, Olaf Tryggvesson, great-grandson of Harold Fairhair. Leif became a
Christian and was baptised, and when he returned to Greenland he took
priests with him who converted many people, though old Eric, it is said,
preferred to go in the way of his fathers, and deemed boisterous
Valhalla, with its cups of wassail, a place of better cheer than the New
Jerusalem, with its