Greenland was again known to Europe.

This whole story of the Greenland settlement is historical
fact which cannot be doubted. Partly by accident and
partly by design, the Norsemen had been carried from
Norway to the Orkneys and the Hebrides and Iceland, and
from there to Greenland. This having happened, it was
natural that their ships should go beyond Greenland
itself. During the four hundred years in which the Norse
ships went from Europe to Greenland, their navigators
had neither chart nor compass, and they sailed huge open
boats, carrying only a great square sail. It is evident
that in stress of weather and in fog they must again and
again have been driven past the foot of Greenland, and
must have landed somewhere in what is now Labrador. It
would be inconceivable that in four centuries of voyages
this never happened. In most cases, no doubt, the
storm-tossed and battered ships, like the fourteen vessels
that Eric lost, were never heard of again. But in other
cases survivors must have returned to Greenland or Iceland
to tell of what they had seen.

This is exactly what happened to a bold sailor called
Bjarne, the son of Herjulf, a few years after the Greenland
colony was founded. In 986 he put out from Iceland to
join his father, who was in Greenland, the purpose being
that, after the good old Norse custom, they might drink
their Christmas ale together. Neither Bjarne nor his men
had ever sailed the Greenland sea before, but, like bold
mariners, they relied upon their seafaring instinct to