Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/74

60 took his ship and his followers and fled to find Gunnbiorn's land in the West. He rounded that southern cape now called Farewell, and as it was summer he found the grass green and the land sunny and smiling. He settled and sent for more bold men, who came with their families and household goods and their cattle and founded the colony of Brattahlid on the west coast of Greenland which looks toward Baffin Land. Four hundred miles further north they established another settlement. The ships of these men were the first to find the shores of the continent of America. In the year 986, one Bjarni sailed from Greenland to Iceland to spend the Yuletide with his father; but his father had gone to Greenland. Bjarni, returning, found foggy weather and when he sighted land it was a wooded shore well to the west and south of his home. In the year 1000 Leif, the son of Eric the Red, sailed to that wooded coast and returned to Greenland with a cargo of timber. Seven years later the Greenland colony was strong enough to send four ships bearing one hundred and sixty men, many women and a cargo of cattle to colonise