When Leif reached Greenland again, the next spring, every one was vastly interested in his discoveries, and emigrants from Greenland, Iceland, and even from Europe went out to colonize the new lands; but the attempts, though spasmodically continued for a long time, seem never to have been really successful, so that no undisputed trace of the presence of these sea-wanderers on the mainland of North America is known to exist. That they knew the coast fairly well from Disco Island (70° N. lat.) southward to Virginia, is generally believed; but where Leif Erikson spent that first winter, or where the Vinland settlement of subsequent times was, is thus far a matter of conjecture. Some students of the sagas place it in New York harbor, others in Narragansett or Buzzard’s bay, near Boston, or in Nova Scotia. Formerly the general belief was that Newport, R. I., or the shore above there, was surely the site; but this was based, first, on the supposed European inscriptions on a rock in the Somerset River, at Dighton, just above Fall River, which were in reality only Indian markings; and, second, upon the “old round tower” at Newport, which few persons now believe was built prior to the coming of the English colonists with Roger Williams. The late Professor E. H. Horsford believed that he had found the site of the principal Norse settlement of the tenth century, called Norumbega, at Watertown, on the Charles River, a few miles west of Boston; and he made an argument from old maps, etc., to support his assertion that the ancient river-walls, etc., there were really the remains of a town; but historians generally do not attach any importance to Professor Horsford’s theory. Perhaps we shall never know where this “Vinland” was that Leif discovered, and where the queenly Gudrid dwelt and her son Schnorr—the first white child in America—was born; nor is it of much consequence that we should, for the settlements were few and transitory. That they existed, however, and that the shores of Canada and New England were occasionally visited from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries by Norsemen, cannot be gainsaid. That the Greenlanders did not all migrate to the warmer, well-timbered, and fruitful region in the south was probably due to the fact that it was so remote from their kindred, and so open to attack by the native red men, whom they called _skrellings_. [Illustration: A VIKING GALLEY.]