252 THE OCEAN RIVER 



The English nailed it down in the north more slowly. Theirs 

 was the hard way, but it stuck. Just when the first fishing barks 

 came to the new continent and found the cod swarming the 

 Grand Banks and the Gulf of Maine, we do not yet know. 

 Sailing north and west of the Ocean River was a fogg}' and 

 mysterious business, but a business well established long before 

 either Columbus or Cabot officially made landfall and history. 

 Over against the difficulty of bucking the prevailing westerly 

 winds and the turbulent waters, the opening of a way to the 

 northern continent was broken by landfall of no greater inter- 

 val than a moderate two days' sailing. The Norse in their rela- 

 tively small but seaworthy craft discovered this, as we know, 

 about the year 1000. The hardest stretch from Norway to 

 Newfoundland was possibly the reach from Norway itself to 

 Iceland. In those days, as we have explained, the weather was 

 a good deal more moderate in northern waters, and there is no 

 report of floe ice blocking the small craft that made their way 

 from Iceland to Greenland and thence to Labrador and prob- 

 ably as far south as Cape Cod. 



From Norse days onward the tradition of the northern voy- 

 ages was largely founded on a desire to trade in lumber and 

 naval supplies and fish, and not the wild adventure after pearls 

 and silver and gold. But at both ends of the North Atlantic a 

 common search for a passage to India also drove men west- 

 ward. After the Norse voyages were cut off, how long a lapse 

 there was before other fishing or trading vessels pierced the 

 foggy curtain of the northeast coasts, no man knows for sure. 

 There are many ships' logs and no doubt other unexplored 

 documents, possibly of Bristol, or St. Malo or Dieppe or Hon- 

 fleur or the Basque ports in the Bay of Biscay, that may hold 

 the key to our knowledge of pre-Columbian discoveries; noth- 

 ing new has yet been read. But we do know that in 1480 an 

 expedition captained by John Lloyd left Bristol looking for 

 Hi-Brazil and western lands and was gone nine weeks. Again 



