88 THE OCEAN RIVER 



ing trouble at home, helped to scatter the Norse vessels far 

 and wide to the south and west. Like the Phoenicians of earlier 

 times, the Norsemen were traders and explorers rather than 

 the agents of a new civilization. The best of the Norse tradi- 

 tion of democratic and law abiding organization ripened in 

 remote Iceland. But only at second hand and later, through 

 the Normans, did the Scandinavian north exert any influence 

 on the peoples to the south, and that influence was not great. 

 The Norse explorations, nevertheless, were great steps forward 

 in the revealing of the unknown Atlantic world; and they illus- 

 trated once more how bold and skillful men, careless of time, 

 could defy distance in long sea wanderings beyond the charted 

 limits of the world. 



First swarming down around the British Isles in the tenth 

 century they settled Dublin, and took over Scotland and the 

 western islands and most of Ireland. Others settled the Nor- 

 man country of France; and some went still farther south 

 through the Straits of Gibraltar, reversing the Phoenician 

 quest, and hired out to the Byzantine emperor as his Varan- 

 gian guard. The Ultima Thule of the Phoenicians thus came 

 to the Mediterranean. 



So it happened that the western world of North America 

 was made known to the Norse. Eric the Red, the father of Leif 

 Ericson, was a hot-tempered man who became outlawed. He 

 first went from Norway to Iceland. But after a while he got 

 into trouble even there, and set out once more westward look- 

 ing for asylum. He found a good harbor in southern Green- 

 land in 982, and four years later, with twenty-five ships con- 

 taining his first colonists, he sailed from Iceland. Fourteen of 

 these ships arrived safely on the Greenland coast. Men had 

 heard rumors of lands still farther west, and these rumors 

 became fact when Biarni Herulfson, a merchant, blown off 

 his course from Ireland, coasted along the rocky wooded 



