The natives Thorvald met on his voyage were surprised whenever possible and liquidated without quarter. Skraelings, he called them, meaning shriekers or war-whoopers. No doubt the rough treatment afforded the wild Skraelings was an approved medieval means of taking possession of their fur skins with the least bother. In any case it ended in Thorvald’s own death. One day hundreds of Skraelings in their canoes suddenly attacked the Viking ship. Although the Norsemen drove them off with much slaughter Thorvald was mortally wounded in his armpit by an arrow. He was buried ashore that same day. His men returned to Greenland the following year, in 1007. It has been claimed that the encounter in which Thorvald was slain took place at Mount Desert Island on the Maine coast. Somes Sound does seem to fit the site of the battle as related in the saga. Certainly, great numbers of natives could have been in the habit of congregating there with their canoes during fur trapping season, for Mount Desert Island was a favorite haunt of beavers and other fur bearers in past centuries. In 1010 wealthy Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, who had urged the project upon him, took something over 160 colonists from Greenland to establish a permanent Norse trading settlement in the western land. They went in dragon ships and round-bottomed cargo vessels loaded with “all kinds of livestock,” including a bull. The men had headgear adorned with horns, antlers or ravens’ wings. They wore short breeches and were clad with leather armor. Pelts were wrapped about their legs. The women wore girdled tunics. Heavy fur coats and lambskin hoods lined with cat fur protected the voyagers, men and women alike, when the seas were icy and the winds biting. Most of them survived to reach Vinland, where Gudrid bore her husband a son, Snorri, the first autumn they spent at Leif’s old house. Snorri, who was to become the ancestor of a number of distinguished men including three Icelandic bishops, appears to have been the first European of record born in America. At Vinland the Skraelings came with “packs wherein were grey furs, sables, and all kind of peltries.” The bull having greatly frightened them, it was some time before they loosened their bundles and offered their pelts in trade. They wanted to exchange them for Norse weapons. Karlsefni rejected this proposition. But the saga relates that he gave them some milk, whereupon the red men wanted nothing else and barter forthwith got under way. In such manner was the first fur trade of record joined in America, although one cannot resist wondering if the milk was spirituous. Experienced Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had gained his fortune in other parts of the world as a seafaring trader, may well have been the first white man to practice this ancient trick of the trade on the naïve native Americans.