OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 233 



Certain accounts of the intercourse maintained between the 

 extreme north of Europe, or between Greenland and Iceland 

 with the American Continent, properly so called, do not ex- 

 tend beyond the fourteenth century. In the year 1347, a. 

 ship was sent from Greenland to Markland (Nova Scotia) to 

 collect building timber and other necessary articles. On the 

 return voyage the ship encountered heavy storms, and was 

 obliged to take refuge at Straumfjord in the west of Iceland. 

 These are the latest accounts preserved to us by ancient Scan- 

 dinavian authorities of the visits of Northmen to America.* 



We have hitherto kept strictly on historical ground. By 

 means of the critical and highly praiseworthy efforts of Chris* 

 tian Rafn, and of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquities 

 at Copenhagen, the sagas and narratives of the voyages of the 

 Northmen to Helluland (Newfoundland), to Markland (the 

 mouth of the St. Lawrence and Nova Scotia), and to Vinland 

 (Massachusetts), have been separately printed, accompanied 



and, Hvitramannaland, Greenland, und Vinland, s. 117-121). Accord- 

 ing to a very ancient saga, the most northern part of the east coast of 

 Greenland was also visited in 1194, under the name of Svalbard, at a 

 part which corresponds to Scoresby's Land, near the point 73 16', 

 where my friend Col., then Capt. Sabine, made his pendulum observ- 

 ations, and where there is a very dreary cape bearing my name. (Rafn, 

 Antiquit. Amer., p. 303, and Aper$u de V Ancienne Geographic dcs Re 

 gions Arctiques de V Amerique, 1847, p. 6.) 



* Wilhelmi, op. cit., s. 226; Rafn, Antiquit. Amer., p. 264 and 453. 

 The settlements on the west coast of Greenland, which, until the mid- 

 dle of the fourteenth century, were in a very flourishing condition, fell 

 gradually to decay, from the ruinous operation of commercial monopo- 

 lies, from the attacks of Esquimaux (Skralinger), the " black death," 

 which, according to Hecker, depopulated the north during the years 

 1347 to 1351, and from the invasion of a hostile fleet, regarding whose 

 course nothing is known. At the present day no faith is any longer at- 

 tached to the meteorological myth of a sudden alteration of climate, 

 and of the formation of a barrier of ice, which was immediately follow- 

 ed by the entire separation from their mother country of the colonies 

 established in Greenland. As these colonies were only on the more 

 temperate district of the west coast of Greenland, it can not be possible 

 that a bishop of Skalholt, in 1540, should have seen " shepherds feed- 

 ing their flocks" on the east coast of Greenland, beyond the icy wall. 

 The accumulation of masses of ice on the east coast opposite to Iceland 

 depends on the configuration of the land, the neighborhood of a chain 

 of mountains having glaciers and running parallel to the coast line, and 

 on the direction of the oceanic current. This state of things can not be 

 solely referred to the close of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fit' 

 teeuth century. As Sir John Barrow has veiy justly shown, it has been 

 subject to many accidental alterations, particularly in the years 1815- 

 1817. (See Barrow, Voyages of Discovery within the Arctic Regions, 

 184G, p. 2-6.) Pope Nicholas V. appointed a bishop for Greenland as 

 late as 1 448. 



