Chesapeake Bay was called _Wine Land_ (wild grapes still grow in Rhode
Island, and more luxuriantly further south). _White Man's Land_,
called also _Great Ireland_, is supposed to mean the two Carolinas,
down to the Southern Cape of Florida. In Dahlmann's opinion, the
Irish themselves might even pretend to have probably been the first
discoverers of America; they had evidently got to Iceland itself
before the Norse exiles found it out. It appears to be certain that,
from the end of the tenth century to the early part of the fourteenth,
there was a dim knowledge of those distant shores extant in the Norse
mind, and even some straggling series of visits thither by roving
Norsemen; though, as only danger, difficulty, and no profit resulted,
the visits ceased, and the whole matter sank into oblivion, and, but
for the Icelandic talent of writing in the long winter nights, would
never have been heard of by posterity at all.



CHAPTER VII.

REIGN OF OLAF TRYGGVESON.

Olaf Tryggveson (A.D. 995-1000) also makes a great figure in the
_Faroer Saga_, and recounts there his early troubles, which were
strange and many. He is still reckoned a grand hero of the North,
though his _vates_ now is only Snorro Sturleson of Iceland.
Tryggveson had indeed many adventures in the world. His poor mother,
Astrid, was obliged to fly, on murder of her husband by Gunhild,--to
fly for life, three months before he, her little Olaf, was born. She
lay concealed in reedy islands, fled through trackless forests;
reached her father's with the little baby in her arms, and lay