Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/38

18 their door-posts toward the Icelandic shores," and made permanent settlements on that island. More adventurous spirits sailed further westward and discovered and made permanent settlement on the eastern and southern shores of Greenland, where their descendants dwell today. The tenth century witnessed maritime adventures and discoveries extended still further to the west and south, and in the year 1000 A. D., or thereabouts, a land was found where grapes and other fruits grew in abundance in a wild state, where the climate was milder than that already occupied by their countrymen, to which the name of "Vineland the Good," was given. This much is well authenticated history and the names of Lief Ericsson, Thorfinn, and Gudrid his wife, are connected with the first attempts to make a settlement in Vineland. The part of the eastern shores of America visited by these bold seamen is not easily determined, but it is claimed by those who are most familiar with the Norse sagas that brief settlements were made on the coast, at points between the mouth of the St. Lawrence river on the north and Long Island on the south. Some Maine historians locate Norumbega, a traditional Norse settlement, near the Penobscot River. Professor E. N. Horsford, late of Cambridge, Mass., fixed the site of Norumbega on the Charles River, and has erected at considerable expense a tower at Watertown, on or near what he regards old Norse fortifications. In "The Problem of the Northmen," the scholarly professor writes of Lief's land-fall and the site of his houses as follows: "He came, so we conceive, upon the northern extremity of Cape Cod, and set up his dwellings somewhere on an indentation of the shore of Massachusetts Bay," which he declares to be on the Charles River, near Longfellow's house in Cambridge. Speaking of Gudrid, the wife of Thorfinn, he says, "I may not fail to mention that this Gudrid was the lady who, after the death of her husband, made a pious pilgrimage to Rome (from Iceland), where she was received with much distinction, and where she told the Pope of the beautiful new country in the far