The most distinguished explorer was Thorfinn Karlsefne, the Hopeful, an Icelander whose genealogy runs back in the old Northern annals, through Danish, Swedish, and even Scotch and Irish ancestors, some of whom were of royal blood. In the year 1006 he went to Greenland, where he met Gudrid, widow of Thorstein, whom he married. Accompanied by his wife, who urged him to the undertaking, he sailed to Vinland in the spring of 1007, with three vessels and 160 men, where he remained three years. Here his son Snorre was born. He afterwards became the founder of a great family in Iceland, which gave the island several of its first bishops. Thorfinn finally left Vinland because he found it difficult to sustain himself against the attacks of the natives. The next to undertake a voyage was a wicked woman named Freydis, a sister to Leif Ericson, who went to Vinland in 1011, where she lived for a time with her two ships, in the same places occupied by Leif and Thorfinn. Before she returned, she caused the crew of one ship to be cruelly murdered, assisting in the butchery with her own hands. After this we have what are called the Minor Narratives, which are not essential. _B. F. De Costa, Pre-Columban Discovery of America, General Introduction._ By those who accept fully the claims made for the Northmen, as discoverers of the American continent in the voyages believed to be authentically narrated in these sagas, the Helluland of Leif is commonly identified with Newfoundland, Markland with Nova Scotia, and Vinland with various parts of New England. Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod, Nantucket Island, Martha's Vineyard, Buzzard's Bay, Narragansett Bay, Mount Hope Bay, Long Island Sound, and New York Bay are among the localities supposed to be recognized in the Norse narratives, or marked by some traces of the presence of the Viking explorers. Professor Gustav Storm, the most recent of the Scandinavian investigators of this subject, finds the Helluland of the sagas in Labrador or Northern Newfoundland, Markland in Newfoundland, and Vinland in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. _G. Storm, Studies of the Vineland Voyages._ {48}