HELI.ULAND THE MODERN LABUADOR. 2J 



four days. But we have seen that with fresh breezes a 

 modern schooner, at least three times as large as a 

 Viking's ship, required eight or nine days to run from a 

 point but a few miles from northern Newfoundland, i.e.y 

 Belle Isle, to southern Greenland. The distance from 

 St. John's, Newfoundland, to the Norsemen's colonies in 

 southern Greenland is not less than 1,500 miles. To 

 perform a voyage of this length in four days would be 

 an impossibility for a modern yacht. It is not impossible, 

 however, that Biarne sailed from southern Newfound- 

 land to Greenland in a period of about nine days. But a 

 voyage from Cape Cod to Greenland by an ordinary 

 schooner requires at least three weeks, or from twenty 

 to thirty days at the most. 



Instead then of accepting Kohl's summary of Biarne's 

 voyage stated on p. 63 of his work, we should be in- 

 clined to believe, as the results of the expedition, that 

 Biarne was the first European to sight the coast of 

 Newfoundland, possibly the eastern extremity of Nova 

 Scotia, while he also saw the mountainous, desolate, tree- 

 less, rocky coast of Labrador. 



The next Norse adventurer, Leif, the son of Erik, 

 not only sighted the Labrador coast but landed on it. 

 To this country he gave the name of stony land, or 

 " Helluland," a name perpetuated in an Iceland map of 

 1570 by Sigurd Stephanius. 



The records tell us that Leif, the son of Erik the 

 Red, the first settler in Greenland, having bought 

 Biarne's ship in the year 1000, manned her with a crew 

 of thirty-five men, among whom was Biarne himself, and 

 followed Biarne's track towards the southwest. Kohl 

 then says: "They came first lo that land which Biarne 



