CHEISTOrHER COLUMBUS. 457 



front the mountain-billows and furious gales foaming or roaring 

 round that stormy headland, he was obliged, sore against his 

 will, to give up the attempt to double the Cape of Tempests, 

 Cabo tormentoso, as he called it, but to which the king gave the 

 more inviting name of the Cape of Good Hope. Yet before 

 Vasco de Gama set sail from Lisbon to accomplish the great 

 work (1498) and win the prize to, which so many navigators 

 had gradually paved the way, the astounding intelligence had 

 flashed through Europe that on the 12th of October, 1492, 

 Columbus had discovered a new world in the west. The history 

 of this most famous, and most important in its results, of all 

 sea-voyages, is so well known that I may well refrain from 

 entering into any details on the subject : at all events the reader 

 will be much more interested by a short account of the intrepid 

 navigators who, long before the great Genoese, found their way 

 to the shores of the new continent. 



While Tropical America is separated from Europe and Africa 

 by a vast tract of intervening ocean, and even the advanced 

 posts of the Azores and Cape de Verd Islands are far distant 

 from the western shores of the Atlantic, Iceland and Greenland 

 appear to us in the north as stations linking at comparatively 

 easy distances the Old World and the New. It is, therefore, by 

 no means surprising that the discovery of Iceland by the Nor- 

 wegian Vilcing or pirate Nadod, and the somewhat later coloni- 

 sation of the island by Ingolf, in the year 875, should in the 

 following century have led the Norsemen to the discovery of 

 America, particularly when we consider that no people ever 

 equalled them in daring and romantic love of adventure : 



" Kings of the main their leaders brave, • 

 Their barks the dragons of the wave." 



Greenland, discovered by Gunnbjorn in the year 876 or 877, 

 was indeed not colonised by the Icelanders before 983 ; a delay 

 excusable enough when we consider the uninviting climate of 

 that dreary peninsula or island, but three years after the latter 

 date, we already find Bjorne Herjulfson undertaking a cruise 

 from the new settlement to the south-west, and successively 

 discovering Nantucket, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, though 

 without making any attempts to land. Bjorne was followed 



