broke their keel and stayed long to
repair, and called the place Keel-Ness (Kjalarness) from this." Then
they sailed away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded,
till at one place Thorwald drew up his ships to the land and laid out
gangways to the shore, saying, "I would gladly set up my farm here."

But now they came upon the first traces of other men; far off upon the
white sandy beach three specks were sighted--three skin boats of the
Skraelings or Esquimaux, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men
captured and killed eight of them, but one escaped "to where within the
fiord were several dwellings like little lumps on the ground." A heavy
drowsiness now fell upon the Norsemen, in the Saga, till a "sudden
scream came to them, and a countless host from up the fiord came in skin
boats and laid themselves alongside."

The Vikings put up their shield-wall along the gunwale and kept off the
arrows of the Esquimaux till they had shot them all away, and "fled off
as fast as they could," leaving Thorwald with a mortal wound under the
arm. He had time just to bid his men "carry him to the point he had
wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there awhile, but
with a cross at head and feet; and so died and was buried as he had
said." The place was called Crossness from the dead chief, but the crew
stayed all the winter and loaded the ship with vines and grapes, and in
the spring came back to Eric in Greenland.

And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious--not to
be undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that
checked the expansion of these Arctic colonies; at their best they were
too small to do more than hold their own against nature and the Skraeling
savages in their tiny settlements along the coast, where the ice-fields
have long since pushed man slowly but surely into the sea, with his
painfully won patches of hay and corn and pasturage.

But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out;
now they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found,
and found disputed.

First a third son of Red Eric, Thorstein, bethought him to go to Vinland
for his brother Thorwald's body. He put to sea and lost all sight of
land, beating about in the ocean the whole summer, till he came back to
Greenland in the first week of winter. (1004-6.)

He was followed by the greatest of the Vinland sailors, Thorfinn
Karlsefne, who re