VINLAND, or WINELAND, the chief settlement of ' the qaTty Norsemen in North' America, represented in modern dales by part of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The first voyager to see the north coast was Bjarne Herjulfson, who was driven thither by a storm in the summer of 986 A.D., when mak ing a voyage from Iceland to Greenland, of which country his father, Herjulf, and Eric the Red, were the earliest colonists. But Bjarne did not touch the land, which was first visited by Leif the Lucky, a son of Eric the Red, about 1000 A.D. One part of the country he named Helluland, "Stoneland"; another Markla.nd, °Woodland," the modern gewfoundland and Nova Scotia. A German in his company h.av ing found the grape (most probably the Vitus vu/pina) growing wild, as it, his native country, Leif called the region Vinland. The natives from their dwarfish size they called skraelings. Two years after Lcif's brother, Thorwald, arrived, and in the summer of 1003 led an expedition alcng the coast of New England south, but was killed in the year following in an encounter with the natives. The most famous of the Norse explorers, however, was Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, who had married Gudrid, widow of Thorstein, a son of Eric the Red, and who in 1007 sailed from Greenland to Vinland with a crew of 160 men, Ishere he remained for three years, and then returned, after which no further attempts at colonization were made. Rafn, in his (Antiqui
tates Americanae,) published the first full col lection of the .evidence which proves the pre Columbian colonization of America. Both he and Finn Magnusen labor to show that Colum bus derived his first hints of a new world from the accounts of these old Icelandic expeditions. Finn Magnusen is believed to have established the fact that Columbus did visit Iceland in 1477, 15 years before he undertook his expedi tion across the Atlantic, and so may have heard something of the long-abandoned Vinland. Consult de Costa, 'Pre-Columbian Discovery of America> (1901); Rafn, 'Antiquitates Ameri canz> (1837) ; Reeves, 'Finding of Wineland the Good> (1890); Hovgaard, W., (Voyages of the Norseman to America> (New York 1914).