Note (return) — Chapter XI

Not only did the Viking brain invent our modern ship, but it was the Viking spirit that impelled us as a nation to use the ocean as a highway. The Norseman had discovered America and West Africa many centuries before Columbus or Vasco di Gama. The Norse colonised19 Greenland, Labrador, and possibly even Massachusetts, and it was on a voyage to Iceland that Jean Cabot heard of America, on whose continent he was the first modern sailor to land, and it is said that it was through him that Columbus, after he had discovered the West Indian Islands, first heard that North America had been proved to be a continent by Cabot's coasting voyage along its shore from Maine to Florida. The Vikings, too, taught us the discipline without which no ship can live through an ocean storm. Their spirit, too, when piracy had died out, led us into trade; for, as we have seen, the Viking was no mere pirate, but ever a trader as well.20 Their sea-fights live in story, though their traders found no skald or bard, and it is thus that we hear less of their trading or of their civic or domestic life.