This strange man whom they found at the head of the Skraellings proved to be Biorn Asbrandson, a native of Bredifiord, in Iceland, and who had once been a famous viking, or sea-rover, and had drifted to America, no one knew how. Doubtless it was even before Lief’s time. He had left Iceland, and was never heard of until Karlsefne returned, when, from certain articles which this chief of the savages gave him, with directions how to dispose of them, and from a message which was to be delivered to Biorn’s former sweetheart, the identity was established. The man himself would give no explanation of who he was, or how he came there. Biorn was therefore probably the first white man to land on the shores of America, if we may except some Irish monks and others whose adventurous enterprises originated the idea of a “white man’s land” far away across the sea. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, basing his observations on Rafn’s “_Antiquitates Americanæ_,” declares that Biorn undertook the voyage to the southward from Greenland in 986, the year following Eric’s colonization of Ericsfiord. There is, however, a discrepancy between his statement and those of others concerning the course of Lief, “who,” as Humboldt says, “first saw land one degree south of Boston, at the island of Nantucket, then Nova Scotia, and lastly Newfoundland, which was subsequently called Libla Helluland, but never ‘Vinland.’ The gulf which divides Newfoundland from the mouth of the great river St. Lawrence was called by the Northmen, who had settled in Iceland and Greenland, Markland’s Gulf.” Nova Scotia was called Markland. The Eric family did not, however, altogether abandon the idea of reaping some profit from America, even with the death of Thorstein, for a sister named Freydis went to Vinland in 1011, and for some time lived in the same place where her brothers had lived before. More unfortunate than their predecessors, they fell not only to fighting the natives, but each other, being instigated thereto by Freydis, who caused a great number of the party to be treacherously murdered in order that she might get control and reap all the profit; yet no good came of it after all. Other expeditions followed some years later; but, so far as we know, there were no actual settlements made by these Northmen in America. Yet Bishop Eric went to Vinland in 1121, during his Greenland mission (which would make it appear as if people were there to visit), in his ministerial capacity. Occasional voyages were, however, made to the country, at least as far as Nova Scotia. As late as 1347, we have written accounts of Greenlanders going from Ericsfiord to Markland to cut timber.