The voyage from Greenland, or even from Iceland, to the New England shores was not more difficult than from the native fiords of the Northmen to the Atlantic seaboard, or to the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean. Everywhere they left their record in graven runes. At Maeshowe in the Orkneys, on Holy Island in the Firth of Clyde, and at Kirk Michael, Kirk Andreas, and Kirk Braddon, on the Isle of Man; or as the relic of a more ancient past, on the marble lion of the Piræus, now at the arsenal of Venice: their runic records are to be seen graven in the same characters as those which have been recovered during the present century from their early settlements beyond the Atlantic. Numerous similar inscriptions from the homes of the Northmen are furnished in Professor George Stephens’ _Old Northern Runic Monuments_, which perpetuate memorials of the love of adventure of those daring rovers, and the pride they took in their expeditions to remote and strange lands. Intensified at a later stage by religious fervour, the same spirit emboldened them as leaders in the Crusades; and some of their runic inscriptions tell of adventurous pilgrimages to the Holy Land. An Icelandic rover is designated on his rune-stone _Rafn Hlmrckfari_ as a successful voyager to Ireland. Norwegian and Danish bautastein frequently preserve the epithet of _Englandsfari_ for the leaders of expeditions to the British Isles, or more vaguely refer to their adventures in “the western parts.” King Sigurd of Norway proudly blazoned the title of _Jórsolafari_ as one who had achieved the pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and the literate memorials of the Northmen of Orkney, recovered in 1861, on the opening of the famous Maeshowe Tumulus, include those of a band of Crusaders, or Jerusalem-farers, who, in 1153, followed Earl Ragnvald to the Holy Land. The inscribed rune-stones brought from the sites of the ancient Norse colonies in Greenland, and now deposited in the Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities, at Copenhagen, are simple personal or sepulchral inscriptions. But they are graven in the northern runes, and as such constitute monuments of great historical value: furnishing indisputable evidence of the presence of European colonists beyond the Atlantic centuries before that memorable 12th of October 1492, on which the eyes of the wistful gazers from the deck of the “Santa Maria” were gladdened with their first glimpse of what they believed to be the India of the far east: the Cipango in search of which they had entered on their adventurous voyage.