= 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 persone 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 coast, 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 
