Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/72



HE Arctic continent of Greenland stretches down from Peary Land, which is the most northerly land known to exist, more than sixteen hundred miles to the south to Cape Farewell, which has been known to white men longer than any other land in the western half of the world.

More than a thousand years ago—the exact date is 872—King Harold, The Fairhair, of Norway, fought in the fiord of Hafurs one of the great decisive naval battles. He fought the jarls, or independent princes of his land, in a battle of viking against viking, at a time when the flaxen-haired men of the North were the mightiest warriors of Europe, when they harried at will the coasts of France, England and the Baltic and held broad duchies and kingdoms under tribute, and when they sailed their shield-sided ships into the Mediterranean and 58