8 INTRODUCTION. 



Accounts thus far considered may, in a great degree, 

 establish the fact of the NorAvegians and Icelanders 

 having been the first Europeans who can claim the dis- 

 covery of Greenland. Yet it must be admitted, that others 

 had the merit of discovering it before them ; for the former 

 visitors aound a people of small stature already in posses- 

 sion. The Norwegian relations go no higher than the sixty- 

 fourth degree, which is about the entrance to Baal's River on 

 the Avest side, and the promontory of Herjolf's Ness, in the 

 sixty-third degree on the eastern side. The former was the 

 principal place of the colony ; and between these two points 

 were situate numerous little settlements, at present said to 

 be indicated by their ruins, the largest of which are visible 

 on the south-eastern extremity of the country between 

 Staten Hook and Frobisher's Straits. These ruins, of 

 churches and large dwellings, are a further support to the 

 foregoing; statement ; but the natives about Baal's River, 

 when asked for the explanation of the name of a particular 

 place there, describe it as the place Avhere men shot arrows 

 at one another. Here then it appears the extirpation of 

 the Europeans began, which was carried round the settle- 

 ments in savage fury by the Skrsellings, until the country 

 became their own again ; or if any survived the massacre, 

 cold, privations and despair, must have eftected their 

 destruction. 



In the fourteenth century, the Skroellings suddenly made 



