﻿40 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



sailing of a new bishop, who never seems to have reached the colony 

 or even Iceland. An effort was, however, made to reopen communi- 

 cations about 1492, but nothing came of it. 1 After that, there is noth- 

 ing except the hints and rumors gathered by the loving care of Hans 

 Egede, 2 while he was hoping against hope that some remnants might 

 survive behind the ice-barrier of the eastern Greenland coast in deep 

 fiords, which have since been explored by Lieutenant (later Com- 

 modore) Holm 3 of the Danish navy and others, yielding nothing. 

 Admittedly the most nearly authentic of these reports, as well as the 

 most thrilling experience, was that of the sixteenth century Iceland 

 Bishop, Amund of Skalholt, who was driven by rough weather so 

 close to Heriulfsness that he heard, or thought he heard, the lost 

 people driving home their cattle and sheep in the twilight. 



Probably we shall never know just when the last flicker of civilized 

 life died out of Norse Greenland ; but it may well have been some- 

 where between the middle and the end of the fifteenth century. 

 Darkness falls, and there is an end ; but the uncertainty and the 

 marked pathos of this chapter of old history makes any item very 

 welcome, even if distorted (see note 8, p. 177). 



Major's skill in clearing away the fogs from the adventures of 

 the Zeni among the island clusters and in Greenland has natur- 

 ally been less available for America. The fisherman who caused the 

 memorable western expedition died before it started ; but the regions 

 called by them Estotiland and Drogeo appear on their map as roughly 

 corresponding to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Kohl 4 has 

 suggested East-outland as a derivation of the name, with reference 

 to the eastward protrusion of that great insular mass of land ; but 

 there seems a difficulty in accounting for the adoption of this English 

 form. Lucas 5 rather improbably derives Estotiland, by not very 

 confident conjecture, from the beginning of an old motto. Beauvois 6 

 has an interesting suggestion that Estotiland is a misreading of 

 Escociland (Scotland), perhaps not clearly written in the original 

 letter ; the name having been transferred to America as Great Ireland 

 had been long before, and as Nova Scotia and Cape Breton were 

 also in later times. This seems probable. 



X J. Fischer: The Discoveries of the Northmen in America, p. 51. 

 2 H. Egede: A Description of Greenland, pp. 14-22. 



3 G. Holm: Explorations of the East Coast of Greenland. Meddelelser om 

 Gronland, vol. 9. 

 4 The Discovery of Maine, p. 105. 

 5 Voyages of the Zeno Brothers, before cited. 

 6 La Decouverte du Nouveau Monde par les Irlandais, p. 90. 



