CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 457 
front the mountain-billows and furious gales foaming or roaring 
round that stormy headland, he was obliged, sore against his 
will, to give up the attempt to double the Cape of Tempests, 
Cabo tormentoso, as he called it, but to which the king gave the 
more inviting name of the Cape of Good Hope. Yet before 
Vasco de Gama set sail from Lisbon to accomplish the great 
work (1498) and win the prize to which so many navigators 
had gradually paved the way, the astounding intelligence had 
flashed through Europe that on the 12th of October, 1492, 
Columbus had discovered a new world in the west. The history 
of this most famous, and most important in its results, of all 
sea-voyages, 1s so well known that I may well refrain from 
entering into any details on the subject: at all events the reader 
will be much more interested by a short account of the intrepid 
~ navigators who, long before the great Genoese, found their way 
to the shores of the new continent. 
While Tropical America is separated from Europe and Africa 
by a vast tract of intervening ocean, and even the advanced 
posts of the Azores and Cape de Verd Islands are far distant 
from the western shores of the Atlantic, Iceland and Greenland 
appear to us in the north as stations linking at comparatively 
easy distances the Old World and the New. It is, therefore, by 
no means surprising that the discovery of Iceland by the Nor- 
wegian Viking or pirate Nadod, and the somewhat later coloni- 
sation of the island by Ingolf, in the year 875, should in the 
following century have led the Norsemen to the discovery of 
America, particularly when we consider that no people ever 
equalled them in daring and romantic love of adventure: 
“ Kings of the main their leaders brave, 
Their barks the dragons of the wave.” 
Greenland, discovered by Gunnbjorn in the year 876 or 877, 
was indeed not colonised by the Icelanders before 983; a delay 
excusable enough when we consider the uninviting climate of 
that dreary peninsula or island, but three years after the latter 
date, we already find Bjorne Herjulfson undertaking a cruise 
from the new settlement to the south-west, and successively 
discovering Nantucket, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, though 
without making any attempts to land. Bjorne was followed 
