VI.] THE OLD GREENLAND COLONY. 33 



to his beloved children of Greenland, in consideration of 

 their having erected many sacred buildings and a splendid 

 cathedral," — a new bishop and a fresh supply of priests. 

 At the commencement, however, of the next century, this 

 colony of Greenland, with its bishops, priests and people, 

 its one hundred and ninety townships, its cathedral, its 

 churches, its monasteries, suddenly fades into oblivion, like 

 the fabric of a dream. The memory of its existence perishes, 

 and the allusions made to it in the old Scandinavian Sagas 

 gradually come to be considered poetical inventions or 

 pious frauds. At last, after a lapse of four hundred years, 

 some Danish missionaries set out to convert the Esquimaux; 

 and there, far within Davis' Straits, are discovered vestiges 

 of the ancient settlement, — remains of houses, paths, walls, 

 churches, tombstones, and inscriptions. 1 



What could have been the calamity which suddenly 

 annihilated this Christian people, it is impossible to 

 say ; whether they were massacred by some warlike tribe 

 of natives, or swept off to the last man by the terrible 

 pestilence of 1349, called "The Black Death," or, — most 

 horrible conjecture of all, — beleaguered by vast masses of 

 ice setting down from the Polar Sea along the eastern coast 

 of Greenland, and thus miserably frozen, — we are never 

 likely to know— so utterly did ihey perish, so mysterious 

 has been their doom. 



On the other hand, certain traditions, with regard to the 



1 On one tombstone there was written in Runic, " Vigdis M. D. 

 Hvilir Her ; Glwde Gude Sal Hennar." " Vigdessa rests here ; God 

 gladden her soul." But the most interesting -of these inscriptions is one 

 discovered, in 1824, in an island in Baffin's Bay, in latitude 72 55', as it 

 shows how boldly these Northmen must have penetrated into regions 

 supposed to have been unvisited by man before the voyages of our 

 modem navigators : — " Erling Sighvatson and Biomo Thordarson, and 

 Eindrid Oddson, on Saturday before Ascension-week, raised these 

 marks and cleared ground, 1135." This date of Ascension- week 

 implies that these three men wintered here, which must lead us to 

 imagine that at that time, seven hundred years ago, the climate was 

 less inclement than it is now. 



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