THE MEDITERRANEAN LOOKS WEST 87 



city-states of Genoa and Venice, in developing a European 

 commerce, broke open again the doors of inquiry. At long last 

 the learning and freedom of early Greek and Eastern thought 

 was set free in the Mediterranean, and the heritage of the 

 Phoenicians was taken up by new and equally bold seafarers 

 along the shores of the great Atlantic Ocean. The western 

 world of our own time was ready for creation. 



The pathfinders came in the tenth century from the fjords 

 of Norway. The Norsemen took to sea for much the same 

 reasons as the practical Phoenicians. They sought trade, plun- 

 der, and renown, and on occasion had to find new lands for 

 their individualistic local governments because of trouble and 

 tyranny at home. In 865 a.d. a group of Norse landowners 

 escaping from the power of Harald Harfarger, the new king, 

 came to Iceland with their families and goods and made a set- 

 tlement. They found a country not too cold or infertile, with 

 good fishing, and no inhabitants except a few Irish monks. In 

 those days for a period of several centuries the climate created 

 in the north by the Gulf Stream was in one of its periodic 

 warmer spells, as it has been in the Greenland area for the past 

 twenty-five years of our time. There was little or no floe ice to 

 contend with at sea, and the great Greenland icecap was 

 apparently in temporary retreat. Today students of long-range 

 climatic changes believe it possible that the warm period after 

 the last glacial retreat from Europe held on into modern his- 

 torical times. At any rate the Norse in large numbers crossed 

 the Norwegian Sea and came to Iceland and Greenland in 

 their open vessels. In both these places they picked up foreign 

 woods and drifting seeds and vegetation that came from some- 

 where over the horizon to the west and south. They did not 

 know of the Gulf Stream as a carrier but they observed its 

 effect, and this no doubt excited their curiosity about unknown 

 lands to the west of the ocean sea. 



This advantageous period of climate, coupled with the ris- 



