THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

Let me begin this lecture {1} with a scene in the North Atlantic 863 years since.

“Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into the Irish Ocean; and there came worms and the ship began to sink under them.  They had a boat which they had payed with seals’ blubber, for that the sea-worms will not hurt.  But when they got into the boat they saw that it would not hold them all.  Then said Bjarne, ’As the boat will only hold the half of us, my advice is that we should draw lots who shall go in her; for that will not be unworthy of our manhood.’  This advice seemed so good that none gainsaid it; and they drew lots.  And the lot fell to Bjarne that he should go in the boat with half his crew.  But as he got into the boat, there spake an Icelander who was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from Iceland, ‘Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?’ Quoth Bjarne, ’So it must be.’  Then said the man, ’Another thing didst thou promise my father, when I sailed with thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus.  For thou saidst that we both should share the same lot.’  Bjarne said, ’And that we will not do.  Get thou down into the boat, and I will get up into the ship, now I see that thou art so greedy after life.’  So Bjarne went up into the ship, and the man went down into the boat; and the boat went on its voyage till they came to Dublin in Ireland.  Most men say that Bjarne and his comrades perished among the worms; for they were never heard of after.”

This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture.  Not only does it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman.  It belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian peoples had their great times; when the old fierceness of the worshippers of Thor and Odin was tempered, without being effeminated, by the Faith of the “White Christ,” till the very men who had been the destroyers of Western Europe became its civilisers.

It should have, moreover, a special interest to Americans.  For—­as American antiquaries are well aware—­Bjarne was on his voyage home from the coast of New England; possibly from that very Mount Hope Bay which seems to have borne the same name in the time of those old Norsemen, as afterwards in the days of King Philip, the last sachem of the Wampanong Indians.  He was going back to Greenland, perhaps for reinforcements, finding, he and his fellow-captain, Thorfinn, the Esquimaux who then dwelt in that land too strong for them.  For the Norsemen were then on the very edge of discovery, which might have changed the history not only of this continent but of Europe likewise.  They had found and colonised Iceland and Greenland.  They had found Labrador, and called it Helluland, from its