CHAPTER II. 



WHO FIRST SAW THE LABRADOR COAST ? 



Those rovers of the northern seas, the Norsemen, 

 pushing out from the fiords of Greenland in their one- 

 rnasted craft, no larger than our coasters or mackerel 

 boats, without doubt sighted and coasted along " the 

 Labrador," nearly five centuries before John Cabot made 

 his first landfall of the American Continent. 



The Labrador coast was not, however, the first Ameri- 

 can land visited by the Norsemen.* 



Kohl states that New England was first discovered 

 by Biarne, in 990. It appears that Heriulf, one of the 

 earliest colonists of Greenland, had a son, Biarne, "who, 

 at the time his father went over from Iceland to Green- 

 land, had been absent on a trading voyage in Norway. 

 Returning to Iceland in 990, and finding that his father, 

 with Eric the Red, had gone to the west, he resolved 

 to follow him and to spend the next winter with him in 

 Greenland. 



" They boldly set sail to the southwest, but havipg 



* We should acknowledge that, not having access to the primitive sources in 

 vifhich the voyages of the Norsemen to the American shores are described, we 

 have placed our dependence on the account given by a learned German geogra- 

 pher, J. G. Kohl, in his History of the Discovery of Maine, as the most authori- 

 tative exposition of early voyages and discoveries in northwestern America,. 

 Kohl's views are based on Rafn's Antiquitates Americanae. (Documentary 

 History of the State of Maine. Collections of the Maine Historical Society. 

 .■Second Series, Vol. r. i86g). 



