Africa; he had succoured the Icelanders in famine and lived as a
prince in Russia and Northumberland; by his own songs he boasts that he
had sailed all round Europe; but he fell, the prototype of sea-kings
like Drake or Magellan, without one discovery. Men of his own nation and
time had been before him everywhere, but he united in himself the work
and adventures, the conquests and discoveries of many. He was the
incarnation of Northern spirit, and it was through the lives and records
of such as he that Europe became filled with that new energy of thought
and action, that new life and knowledge, which was the ground and
impulse of the movement led by Henry the Navigator, by Columbus, and the
Cabots.

Harold's wars kept him from becoming a great explorer, but Norse
captains who took service under peaceful kings did something of what he
aimed at doing.

We must retrace our steps to the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan under
King Alfred about the year 890, about the time when a Norse King, Harold
Fair-hair, was first seen in the Scotch and Irish seas. Their discovery
of the White Sea, the North Cape, and the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland
was followed up by many Norsemen, such as Thorer Hund under St. Olaf, in
the next one hundred and fifty years,[21] but Ohthere's voyage was the
first and chief of these adventures both in motive and result.

[Footnote 21: And a certain number of Viking sailors seem to have
preceded Ohthere on his voyage to the Dwina.]

"He told his lord King Alfred that he dwelt northmost of all Northmen on
the land by the Western Sea and he wished to find how far the land lay
right north, or whether any man dwelt north of the waste. So he went
right north near the land;--for three days he left the waste land on the
right and the wide sea on the left, as far as the whale hunters ever
go"; and still he kept north three days more (to the North Cape of
Europe).

"Then the land bent right east, and with a west wind he sailed four days
till the land bent south, and he sailed by it five days more to a great
river--the Dwina--that lay up into the land, and where beyond the river
it was all inhabited"--the modern country of Perm and Archangel.

Here he trafficked with the people, the first he had met, except the
Finn hunters, since leaving his fiord. Besides his wish to see the
country, he was looking for walrus-ivory and hides.

The Finns and Biarma-men (men of Archangel), it seemed to him, spoke
nearly the