It is very acid to the taste, but from all these grapes it is easy to make a delicious, refreshing drink.

Champlain, however, says that the wild grapes were often quite large in size, and his men found them delicious to eat.] This brings us down to the year 1008.

The Icelandic Norsemen then ceased their investigations of the North-American Continent, and were too ignorant to realize the value of their discoveries.

Their colonies on the coasts of Nova Scotia ("Vinland") and Newfoundland ("Estotiland") were attacked probably by Eskimos, at any rate by a short, thick-set, yellow-skinned ugly people whom the Norsemen called "Skraeling",[4] who overcame the unfortunate settlers, murdered some, and carried off others into the interior.
[Footnote 4: Perhaps from the Eastern Eskimo national name _Karalit_.] But about this period, when Europe was going through that dismal era, the Dark Age which followed the downfall of the Roman Empire of the west, various impulses were already directing the attention of European adventurers to the Western Ocean, the Atlantic.

One cause was the increased hold of Roman and Greek Christianity over the peoples of Europe.