On the bleak shores of the North Sea, where the fiords and creek-mouths of Scandinavia gave shelter not only from foreign enemies, but from each other, there had grown up a seafaring race of men, of Gothic ancestry, who had settled on the coasts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They styled themselves Norsemen, or men of the North, and did not object to the title Vikings, or Fiord-men; but their enemies called them pirates, and with much reason, for they ravaged and ruled all the coasts both north and south of the Baltic, voyaging northward to the “land of the midnight sun,” colonizing northern France in the tenth century, and taking practical possession of all they pleased of the British Isles—Ireland and northern Scotland in particular. Here these Norsemen met equally fierce foes, or found congenial partners, as the case might be, in the Scottish and Irish seamen of that day, who were themselves bold freebooters and wide voyagers; and when, in the middle of the ninth century, the Northmen had discovered, as they supposed, the Faroe Islands and Iceland, a little exploration soon showed them that the Irish _culdees_, or priests of the Christian church planted in Ireland by St. Patrick, had been there before them—first in 725, according to the Irish chronicles of Dicuilus, who seems worthy of credence. Indeed, it is believed by some antiquarians that these Irish sea-wanderers had colonized Iceland at the same early age; had reached Newfoundland, and regularly resorted to its banks for fishing and whaling (five hundred years before Cabot); and were even acquainted with the coast of the North American continent, where traditions assert that their colonies were planted on what are now the shores of Virginia and the Carolinas, which they called New Ireland. These are entertaining old stories, and may have some truth in them, for it seems certain that the Irish reached Iceland, at least, in the eighth century. Icelandic history, however, begins with the visits of Norsemen in 850, followed by others, who, a few years later, took colonies there and set up an island population which before a century had elapsed numbered more than fifty thousand people. They had a republican form of government, and were quite independent of the King of Norway (Harold the Fair-haired, great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror), from whom the earlier colonists had fled because of his oppression; but they kept up acquaintance with the mother-country, and merchants and adventurers were continually voyaging between Iceland and all the islands and coasts of that region, using stanch vessels sometimes one hundred feet in length, and eminently seaworthy; yet their only guides were the stars and such signs as seafaring men read in the water and weather about them. [Illustration: A WAR EXPEDITION OF THE VIKINGS.]