Some time around the year 1540, a ship full of Norwegian sailors made the dangerous

voyage to Iceland, a frozen island in the middle of the North Atlantic. It was a notoriously

dangerous voyage, and when they saw dark storm clouds begin to brew on the horizon, they

knew they were in trouble. Their boat was lashed by wind and rain and tossed around like

a cork on the towering waves. The storm went on for days, blowing them far off their course

with no idea where they were heading. Finally, when all seemed lost, the storm

lessened a little, and they sighted land in the distance. They managed to beach their

boats through the rough waters in a small cove choked with ice, and there they waited for

the remainder of the storm to blow over. They didn't know it then, but the storm had

blown them right across the Atlantic Ocean, and the coast they now sheltered on was in

Greenland, a bleak and icy waste on the north of the American continent. In these days,

Greenland was an icy tundra where no sensible European would ever think to venture. But

as the man waited for the storm to die down, they spotted something not far from their

boat. It was a man face down dead in the snow. They saw his clothes made from seal skins

and the fur in his hood, and they thought he must be an inuit, one of the indigenous inhabitants

of Greenland. But as they approached, something didn't look right. They turned the man over

and saw with surprise that he had red hair and pale skin. He was a Norseman just like

them, but he was dressed in the clothes of an inuit hunter. On his head was a hood well

made, and otherwise clothes of freeze cloth and of seal skin near him was a sheath knife,

bent and much worn and eaten away. They thought he must have wondered through the wilderness

in these clothes to the coast, perhaps trying to find a ship to carry him away, and then

he died right there on the beach, all alone at the edge of the world. Moved by the sight

...