606 COSMOS. 



Certain accounts of the intercourse maintained between 

 the extreme north of Europe or between Greenland and Ice- 

 land with the American Continent, properly so called, do not 

 extend 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 

 Christian Rafn, and of the Royal Society of Northern Antiqui- 

 ties at Copenhagen, the sagas and narratives of the voyages 



According 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 observations, and 

 where there is a very dreary cape bearing my name. Eafn, (Antiquit. 

 Amer., p. 303, and Aperqu de I'ancienne Geographic des Regions 

 arctiques de VAmerique, 1847, p. 6.) 



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

 453. The settlements on the west coast of Greenland, which, until the 

 middle of the fourteenth century, were in a very flourishing condition, 

 fell gradually to decay, from the ruinous operation of commercial 

 monopolies, 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 attached to the meteorological myth of a sudden alteration of 

 climate, and of the formation of a barrier of ice, which was immediately 

 followed 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 cannot be 

 possible that a Bishop of Skalholt, in 1540, should have seen " shep- 

 herds feeding 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 neighbourhood 

 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 cannot be solely referred to the close of the fourteenth or the be- 

 ginning of the fifteenth century. As Sir John Barrow has very 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, 1846, pp. 2-6.) Pope Nicholas V. appointed a 

 bishop for Greenland as late as 1448. 



