2 LABRADOR 



the strange figure of an English staff-officer;) American 

 privateers in 1778, French warships in 1796; the Hud- 

 son's Bay Company; Acadian refugees from the Magdalen 

 Islands; and the devoted figures of the Moravian mis- 

 sionaries. The dramatis persona are numerous, but the 

 play has little plot or sequence; it is more a pageant than 

 a drama. 



The story begins in the year 986 in Iceland. Bjarni 

 Herjulfson in that year, after a long absence on the high 

 seas, came home to drink the Yuletide ale with his father. 

 Finding that his father had gone with Eric the Red to 

 Greenland, to found there that colony of which the ruins 

 still stand upon the bleak and desolate coasl^ Bjarni 

 weighed anchor and started off to Greenland after him. 

 On the way he encountered foggy weather, and sailed on 

 for many days without seeing sun or stars. When at 

 length he sighted land, he was in waters of which he had 

 never heard. 



" He was the first who ever burst 

 Into that silent sea." 



The land was not the coast of fiords and glaciers for which 

 he was looking; it was a shore without mountains, show- 

 ing only small heights covered with dense woods. Bjarni 

 put about and sailed to the north. The sky was now fair, 

 and after sailing for five or six days he saw land again on 

 the larboard, "but that land was high, mountainous, and 

 covered with glaciers." Then the wind rose, and they 

 sailed four days to Herjulfsness. There is no doubt that 

 the high, mountainous land, covered with glaciers, was the 

 coast of Labrador. 



Nothing came of Bjarni Herjulfson's adventure till the 



