234 THE SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE 



Europe in dread and turmoil. Direct descendants of these bold 

 navigators are Nansen, one of the leaders in polar research; 

 Amundsen, the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, and 

 Andree, who daringly ventured in a balloon into the unknown 

 North. These men are of the type of the Vikings of old, who in 

 their single-masted, many-oared galleys dared the storms of the 

 Atlantic, sailing without compass or chart many leagues into the 

 trackless seas. 



In the year 860 Noddoddr, one of these reckless mariners, 

 ventured so far from land that he was caught in a gale and blown 

 on the shores of an island in the northern seas, which, from its 

 frozen aspect, he named Iceland. This discovery, more than a 1 

 thousand years ago, was the first made by European navigators in 

 the Arctic waters. The next came in 876, when a second Viking 

 sailor, driven far beyond Iceland by a storm, saw in the distance 

 the coast of an unknown land, on which, however, he did not land. 



Though this discovery was reported to his countrymen, more 

 than a century elapsed before an expedition was made to the un- 

 known land thus seen. Then, about the year 981, Eric the Red, 

 outlawed in Iceland for the then very ordinary offense of killing 1 

 one of his foes, took to the seas and sailed west in search of this 

 untrodden shore. He reached it in due time, discovered a country 

 still more ice-clad than Iceland, but named it Greenland as an induce- 

 ment to his countrymen to settle there. The settlement made by 

 Eric existed for some five centuries, and was the basis of the first 

 discovery of America. The continent was first seen in 985 by a 

 vessel blown out of its course by a gale, and in 1000 it was visited 

 by Leif, son of Eric the Red, at a place named by him Vineland 

 (wine-land), but no permanent settlement was made. 



This discovery of Greenland is of much interest, since the 

 Danish settlements in that island have been very useful as the basis 

 of modern exnlorations. The early Norse settlement was abandoned 

 about the period of the discovery of America by Columbus, it being 



