The North Atlantic, as Seen by the Norse 



The people we call the Norse were Central Asiatic landsmen and did 

 not really understand boats or the open oceans. They arrived in western 

 Europe only about the beginning of the Christian Era. All their saiUng 

 was done for them by the descendants of the ancient Stone Age peoples 

 of Scandinavia. To the latter, vikingism was a matter of thousands of 

 years of island hopping, but, although they seem to have already reached 

 the Faeroes, Britain, Portugal, and even Africa, by this procedure, they 

 had not had reason to expand further. Norse population pressure, land 

 hunger, and food shortages, combined with the fishing enterprises of 

 these neolithic peoples, forced them far beyond. 



While Norse vikings went in all directions, even east up great rivers 

 to found Russia, or R0ssland, and although they circumnavigated Europe 

 and finally arrived in Byzantium on the Black Sea, the major expansion 

 was to what we call the "west," which was to them "straight ahead." 

 Thus, they hopped to Iceland and thence to Greenland, and from there 

 they made voyages to the right in pursuit of whales and fish, to the left 

 to New England, and probably also straight ahead into Hudson's Bay. 

 Nothing came of the last two efforts, probably because of the waning of 

 the population pressure behind them, which made these trips almost 

 voyages of exploration. The farthest advance may have been to Min- 

 nesota, as shown, but this could at best have been just what the famous 

 "Kensington Stone" states it was — a search party looking for Greenland 

 colonists who had disappeared west long before in search of wood and 

 a place where they could grow foodstuffs. 



There is nothing inexpUcable about these Norse voyages. They simply 

 island-hopped straight ahead and seldom had to cross a hundred miles of 

 open water, while the winds and tides helped them. 



