There were yet other directions toward which the Norse viking-hosts had already turned their eyes. Not far out from the coasts of Norway lay the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and beyond them again the Faröe Isles rose bleak and treeless from the waters of the northern sea. The shallow boats of the Norsemen, though they dreaded the open waters of the Atlantic, were yet able, in favourable weather, to push their way from one set of islands to another, and from the earliest times of which we know anything about them they had already made some settlements on these rocky shores. To the Norseman, accustomed to a hardy life and brought up to wring a scanty livelihood almost out of the barren cliff itself, even the Orkney and Shetland Isles had attractions. Those who have seen the tiny steadings of the Norwegian farmer to-day, perched up on what appears from below to be a perfectly inaccessible cliff, with only a few feet of soil on which to raise his scanty crop, solitary all the year round save for the occasional visit of a coasting steamer, will the less wonder that the islands on the Scottish coast proved attractive to his viking forefathers. Often, in crossing that stormy sea, the adventurous crew found a watery grave, or encountered such tempests that the viking boat was almost knocked to pieces; but on the whole these hardy seamen passed and repassed over the North Sea with a frequency that surprises us, especially when we remember that their single-sailed boats were open, covered in only at the stem or stern,[12] and rowed with oars. We hear of these settlers on our coasts before Norwegian history can be said to have begun; and from early times, also, they carried on a trade with Ireland; we hear of a merchant in the Icelandic “Book of the Settlements” named Hrafn, who was known as the “Limerick trader,” because he carried on a flourishing business with that town, which later grew into importance under the sons of Ivar, who settled there and built the chief part of the city.