Page:Columbus and other heroes of American discovery; (IA columbusotherher00bell).pdf/26

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beauty, but to have been swallowed up by the sea in pre-historic times. Some modern authors are of opinion that the Canaries are the only existing remains of this Atlantis; others that the so-called island was in reality the mainland of America. Leaving this question to those now studying it with the aid of the recent discoveries in the New World, we pass on to find trustworthy accounts in the old sagas—of which the principal, recently discovered in an Icelandic monastery, are preserved in the Royal Library at Copenhagen—of the presence of Danish settlers in Greenland as early as 982 A. D. These were led thither by the great Eric the Red, who is supposed, however, merely to have acted on information left behind by an early settler of Iceland, named Gunnbiorn, a century before. Gunnbiorn was the true discoverer of Greenland, which he had sighted—though not visited—naming it Hvidsaerk, or the "White Shirt," because of the perpetual covering of snow worn by its highlands.

THE GLACIERS OF GREENLAND.

In a voyage from Iceland to Greenland, four years after the visit of Eric the Red to the latter country, a Danish navigator named Bjarni Herjulfson was driven far out of his course to the South, and saw land stretching away on the West; but he returned home without making