father, Eric, now lived in Greenland, and Leif asked him
to take command of the expedition. He thought, the saga
says, that, since Eric had found Greenland, he would
bring good luck to the new venture. For the time, Eric
consented, but when all was ready, and he was riding down
to the shore to embark, his horse stumbled and he fell
from the saddle and hurt his foot. Eric took this as an
omen of evil, and would not go; but Leif and his crew of
thirty-five set sail towards the south-west. This was in
the year 1000 A.D., or four hundred and ninety-two years
before Columbus landed in the West Indies.

Leif and his men sailed on, the saga tells us, till they
came to the last land which Bjarne had discovered. Here
they cast anchor, lowered a boat, and rowed ashore. They
found no grass, but only a great field of snow stretching
from the sea to the mountains farther inland; and these
mountains, too, glistened with snow. It seemed to the
Norsemen a forbidding place, and Leif christened it
Helluland, or the country of slate or flat stones. They
did not linger, but sailed away at once. The description
of the snow-covered hills, the great slabs of stone, and
the desolate aspect of the coast conveys at least a very
strong probability that the land was Labrador.

Leif and his men sailed away, and soon they discovered
another land. The chronicle does not say how many days
they were at sea, so that we cannot judge of the distance
of this new country from the Land of Stones. But evidently
it was entirely different in aspect, and was situated in