Half-Light over Cold Seas 93 



swimmers and are said to make a number of strange noises. Oc- 

 casionally they gurgle, and sometimes they give a shrill whistle, but 

 this is believed to be made by the air being evicted from the blow- 

 hole and is a sound common to several other whales. A deep roar or 

 short, low-pitched blast is, however, definitely produced by the 

 mouth and may be the mother calling her young. 



One case of twins is recorded. The narwhal has never been known 

 to attack man or ships, or to attempt to pierce canoes with its tusk 

 as does the swordfish. The blubber oil of narwhals is much superior 

 in quahty to that of all other whales, and this, combined with the 

 tusks, made them valuable to the Greenlanders above all other prod- 

 ucts of the sea. At the same time, the meat is very palatable, and a 

 great delicacy, a mattak, is made by boiling the skin until it is re- 

 duced to a jelly. 



The lonely Greenland colonies, distant as they may appear to us, 

 were not the ultimate outposts of the Norsemen. They made trips 

 far to the west and south. These were not attempts to colonize but 

 merely to search for timber for shipbuilding. The most notable oc- 

 currence during these efforts was probably the birth by the wife of 

 one Thorfinn Karlsefni of a male child who was named Snorri — 

 the first European known definitely to have been born in America 

 and who saw the Hght of day almost exactly five hundred years be- 

 fore Cristoforo Colombo reached the West Indies. Only one definite 

 attempt at colonization on the mainland of America was made by 

 the Greenland Norse, and this was doomed to failure by the very 

 character of its leader, an atrocious woman named Freydis, a daugh- 

 ter of old Eric the Red. She murdered half her crew in cold blood 

 and antagonized the Amerindians. After that, there is a prolonged 

 silence of nine hundred years but for one dim glimmer that was 

 brought to light at the end of the last century and which has even 

 now not been fully accepted as an historical record. This is the so- 

 called "Kensington Stone," found by a distant descendant of the 

 early Norse, one Olaf Ohman, under an ancient aspen stump in 

 Minnesota, in 1898. On this, in crude runic script but in a very dis- 

 tinct later form of the Norse language which could hardly have been 

 forged, it is recorded that a mixed band of Scandinavians, searching 

 for the lost Greenland colonists under instructions from King Mag- 

 nus Ericson of Norway, met disaster there in the year 1362 a.d. 



