CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE I A. D. 984 THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA A reverent study of heroes in novels, also in operas and melodramas, where one may see them for half-a-crown, has convinced me that they must be very trying to live with. They get on people’s nerves. Hence the villains. Now Harold of the Fair Hair was a hero, and he fell in love with a lady, but she would not marry him unless he made himself king of Norway. So he made himself the first king of all Norway, and she had to marry him, which served her right. But then there were the gentlemen of his majesty’s opposition who did not want him to be king, who felt that there was altogether too much Harold in Norway. They left, and went to Iceland to get away from the hero. Iceland had been shown on the map since the year A. D. 115, and when the vikings arrived they found a colony of Irish monks who said they had come there “because they desired for the love of God to be in a state of pilgrimage, they recked not where.” Perhaps the vikings sent them to Heaven. Later on it seems they found a little Irish settlement on the New England coast, and heard of great Ireland, a colony farther south. That is the first rumor we have about America. The Norsemen settled down, pagans in Christian Iceland. They earned a living with fish and cattle, and made an honest penny raiding the Mediterranean. They had internecine sports of their own, and on the whole were reasonably happy. Then in course of trade Captain Gunbjorn sighted an unknown land two hundred fifty miles to the westward. That made the Icelanders restless, for there is always something which calls to Northern blood from beyond the sea line. Most restless of all was Red Eric, hysterical because he hated a humdrum respectable life; indeed, he committed so many murders that he had to be deported as a public nuisance. He set off exultant to find Gunbjorn’s unknown land. So any natural born adventurer commits little errors of taste unless he can find an outlet. It is too much dog-chain that makes biting dogs. When he found the new land it was all green, with swaths of wild flowers. I know that land and its bright lowlands, backed by sheer walled mountains, with splintered pinnacles robed in the splendors of the inland ice. The trees were knee high, no crops could possibly ripen, but Eric was so pleased that after two winters he went back to Iceland advertising for settlers to fill his colony. Greenland he called the place, because “Many will go there if the place has a fair name.” They did, and when the sea had wiped out most of the twenty-five ships, the surviving colonists found Greenland commodious and residential as the heart could wish.