Nine against the unknown

32 NINE AGAINST THE UNKNOWN
—Tysker. Tyrker was small and swart and given to jolly living
and shrewd planning, and was greatly devoted to Leif. His
devotion to yet other things was to prove the name for the
unknown land. Neither Thorstein nor Thorvald, Leif’s
brothers, appear to have been invited on the expedition.
Eric himself, however, was so invited, and at first refused.
But he was accounted lucky in his findings, and still remem¬
bered as a great explorer. Under pressure from his son—he
appears to have had considerable affection for Leif in spite of
the fact that the latter had inflicted Christianity upon the
Settlements—he at last agreed to accompany the ship. Fare¬
wells were said at Brattalid on a summer morning and the
shipmen set out for the strand where the longship lay. Eric
rode on a pony, and had gone but a little way when an accident
occurred—he fell from the horse and broke his ribs and hurt
his shoulder. His only comment on the accident, tells his
Saga, was “Ah, Yes!”
The expedition does not seem to have delayed. It embarked
and hoisted the great square sail and slowly took the wind
and held out from Eiriksfjord. Here a good south-westerning
wind was found and the Greenland coasts vanished in the
summer haze from the Jokull.
For two or perhaps three days they ran before that wind,
caught in the great coasting current that sweeps down towards
Labrador. Then at last there appeared hull down a long stretch
of coastland, towering in the sky great icy mountains. The
Northmen, resolved to have done with such cravenness as
Biarni’s, shortened sail and put into shore.
It was no Fortunate Island. The shore was covered with
great rounded stones, the land stretched bleak and barren
back to the edge of the unfrequented, snow-tipped hills.
Leif and his companions appear to have regarded it without
enthusiasm but also undespondently. This was not the land
they sought.
They christened it Helluland, glumly, the Land of the
Flat Stones, that portion of modern Labrador, and re¬
embarked and put to sea again. Soon Helluland sank behind ;
next day brought a new country—undoubtedly the country
that Biarni had sighted.
For it was wooded down to the shore, the Nova Scotia
of that day, with a foreshore of white sand such as the Norse¬
men had never seen before and stared at in amaze. Leif and