The next spring Thorwald went eastwards, and "towards the north along the land they drove upon a cape and broke their keel and stayed long to repair, and called the place Keel-Ness (Kjalarness) from this." Then they sailed away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded, till at one place Thorwald drew up his ships to the land and laid out gangways to the shore, saying, "I would gladly set up my farm here."
But now they came upon the first traces of other men; far off upon the white sandy beach three specks were sighted--three skin boats of the Skrælings or Esquimaux, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men captured and killed eight of them, but one escaped "to where within the fiord were several dwellings like little lumps on the ground." A heavy drowsiness now fell upon the Norsemen, in the Saga, till a "sudden scream came to them, and a countless host from up the fiord came in skin boats and laid themselves alongside."
The Vikings put up their shield-wall along the gunwale and kept off the arrows of the Esquimaux till they had shot them all away, and "fled off as fast as they could," leaving Thorwald with a mortal wound under the arm. He had time just to bid his men "carry him to the point he had wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there awhile, but with a cross at head and feet; and so died and was buried as he had said." The place was called Crossness from the dead chief, but the crew stayed all the winter and loaded the ship with vines and grapes, and in the spring came back to Eric in Greenland.
And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious--not to be undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that checked the expansion of these Arctic colonies; at their best they were too small to do more than hold their own against nature and the Skræling savages in their tiny settlements along the coast, where the ice-fields have long since pushed man slowly but surely into the sea, with his painfully won patches of hay and corn and pasturage.
But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out; now they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found, and found disputed.