50 
their mother country. How came the black death to Greenland ? 
And would not the Greenlanders have been more exposed to such a 
disease on account of their uncleanliness? Another opinion is, that 
they perished of famine by the sudden setting in of the polar ice; 
which covers the sea from time to time, and which cut off their con- 
nection with their native country. Is it forgotten, that the settlers 
subsisted from their cattle, and from their inland salmon fisheries ? 
I may now be permitted to deliver my own opinion in a 
few words. All the houses of the Norwegians were built differently, 
and on different places from those of the Esquimaux. The 
Norwegians lived in Fiords, and mostly at their ends; they 
looked for grass, fresh water, and shelter for their cattle, and for 
salmon-fishery : the Esquimaux live from the spoils of the sea, and 
place their houses as near to the rocky shores as possible. 
All the ruins of Norwegian houses, and there were more than 
fifty which I examined, were surrounded by immense masses of 
rocks, probably precipitated from the summits of the adjacent 
mountains, and heaped together in the most fantastic groups, the 
places of fracture being sometimes so fresh, that the points from 
which they are broken are distinctly observable. Places of desola- 
tion of this kind are frequently met with in the mountains, connected 
with the sea by waterfalls, which are precipitated, with tremendous 
noise and destructive velocity headlong from the rocks, covered with 
glaciers. I have no doubt but that such a revolution, caused by 
bursting glaciers and following inundations, has effected this dread- 
ful chaos; and that perhaps the Norwegian settlers perished, and 
were buried with their cattle in the ruins. All that I found near 
the ruins of their churches were scattered fragments of bells. It is 
singular enough that I could not find any trace of Runic stones, 
which must have existed in the vicinity of their churches and monas- 
