afterward died. He was buried within sight of the Atlantic, on what is now Massachusetts Bay, and his sorrowing followers returned home with the terrible tidings in the ensuing spring.
Undaunted by the fate of his brother, another son of Eric, Thorstein by name, set out for Vinland in 1005, but he failed to find it, and returned home, stricken with mortal sickness, in the same year. On his deathbed, however, he prophesied that his widow, Gudrid, would marry again, and hinted that a great career of discovery and conquest was before her future children. He was right in the first part at least of his speech, for two years later we find Gudrid, as the wife of a sturdy Icelander named Karlsefne, forming part of the largest expedition yet sent out from Greenland to Vinland—an expedition consisting of no less than three ships, and one hundred and forty men and women.
That an important colony was founded by the new adventurers there appears no reason to doubt, although it is impossible to fix its exact locality. Booths were erected, stores were laid in for the winter, and amicable relations were opened with the Skrællings, who came in great numbers, first to stare at the intruders, and then to trade with them, exchanging valuable furs for red cloth, etc.
A slight and almost ludicrous incident was the first thing to break up what had appeared to be the beginning of a long course of successful colonization. A bull belonging to one of the leaders of the expedition rushed suddenly among the buyers and sellers, so terrifying the natives, who had never before seen an animal of that description, that they fled to their kayaks, or skin-boats, in the greatest confusion, returning some weeks later in greatly increased numbers, and armed with bows and arrows, to revenge themselves for what they took to be an intentional insult.
Fierce indeed was the struggle in which they were now involved, and, overwhelmed by superior numbers, the colonists seemed likely to be exterminated, when the tide was turned by the courage of Freydis, a daughter of Eric the Red, who, imbued with the brave spirit of her father, suddenly faced the savages, and brandishing a sword which she had taken from a dead warrior of her own race, she invited the enemy to come and slay her if they would, even tearing open her dress to make clear her meaning.
The Skrællings, perhaps taking these strange gestures for the signs of superhuman agency, gazed for a moment in awe-struck silence at the lonely figure standing thus unprotected among the slain, and then, with cries as
