'
Corte-Real called it from its verdure 'the Green Land,'
but the similarity of name with the place that we call
Greenland is only an accident. In reality the Portuguese
captain was on the coast of Newfoundland. He saw a number
of natives. They appeared to the Portuguese a barbarous
people, who dressed in skins, and lived in caves. They
used bows and arrows, and had wooden spears, the points
of which they hardened with fire.
Corte-Real directed his course northward, until he found
himself off the coast of Greenland. He sailed for some
distance along those rugged and forbidding shores, a land
of desolation, with jagged mountains and furrowed cliffs,
wrapped in snow and ice. No trace of the lost civilization
of the Norsemen met his eyes. The Portuguese pilot
considered Greenland at its southern point to be an
outstanding promontory of Asia, and he struggled hard to
pass beyond it westward to a more favoured region. But
his path was blocked by 'enormous masses of frozen snow
floating on the sea, and moving under the influence of
the waves.' It is clear that he was met not merely by
the field ice of the Arctic ocean, but also by great
icebergs moving slowly with the polar current.
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