It continually happened, however, that they were driven far out of their courses, in such a region of gales, currents, and fogs as is the North Atlantic. In one such adventure, in the year 876, a sea-captain named Gunnbjörn Ulfkragesson was driven far to the west of Iceland, and when he got back to port told his friends that he had seen land. Probably he also told them Showing build, steering-oar, and rig (colored lug-sail), of Scandinavian exploring ships in the North Atlantic. that so far as he could see there was nothing but icy mountains, of which they already had enough, for no one seems to have investigated the matter further until more than a century later, when a turbulent viking of the rebellious house of Erik, called Erik the Red, was banished from Norway and fled to Iceland with his followers. He was soon convicted there also of manslaughter in a neighborhood quarrel, and again condemned to banishment. Iceland wanted to get rid of him and his brawlers, and Europe would not let him return. Whither should he go? Then his thoughts turned toward the strange land in the west that tradition said Gunnbjörn had sighted. It is believed by the most careful students that Gunnbjörn’s “rocks” were volcanic islets, which have now disappeared, and are represented only by certain shoals; but it would not be incredible that he had caught a glimpse of the Greenland coast itself. At any rate, Erik had little hesitation in starting out to rediscover them. Why should he? Those rough-riders of the sea were used to voyages of equal length. It is about 200 miles from the Norwegian coast at Bergen to the Shetland Islands; 200 miles from the Shetlands, or 225 from the Hebrides, to the Faroes; and 275 miles thence to the nearest coast of Iceland,—reckoning all in straight lines, shorter than any ship could actually follow. If his viking boat and viking crew could span those stretches of sea unguided, what hindered his crossing the little further space whose tempests had no terrors for this wild sea-king? In that unpossessed land, could he find it, he might be free to riot at his will (but one cannot help thinking there was more in the man than that!); and if he could open to his people a new country, what wealth and power might not come with it to him, for the humbling of his rivals at the court of Norway. So Red Erik sailed away to the west in 984, and two years later returned to Iceland and reported that he had met first a far-extending icy coast, along whose front he had sailed southward until he could turn to the west and then northward, thus rounding its narrow southern extremity (Cape Farewell); and there he had found a habitable region, which he called Greenland, in order, as he said, to attract settlers by a pleasant name. Thus this wicked old Norseman was the first of American “real-estate boomers.”