Читать книгу Tales of an Old Sea Port онлайн

8 страница из 47

From this time expeditions to Vinland to procure grapes and timber became frequent. Because they had lost their novelty they ceased to be chronicled. As the saga puts it, “they were esteemed both lucrative and honorable.” One noteworthy one is given in the “Antiquitates Americanae,” that of Freydis and her husband Thorvald. The tale of Freydis is a grewsome one. She seems to have been entirely lacking in human sensibilities. Her husband murdered in cold blood all the men of a party that had opposed him but he spared their five women. Freydis seized an axe and brained them all. Possibly their mangled remains may have been buried at the foot of Mount Hope.

Other mention of Vinland is found apart from the Icelandic chronicles. Adam of Bremen in his “Historia Ecclesiastica,” published in 1073, describes Iceland and Greenland and then goes on to say that there is another country far out in the ocean which has been visited by many persons, and which is called Vinland because of the grapes found there. In Vinland, he says, corn grows without cultivation, as he learns from trustworthy Norse sources. This must of course have been the Indian corn, a grain that is hardly possible of cultivation in Europe north of the Alps.