22 



TRANSACTIONS iSqq-'oO 



I may remark here that it is quite a common happening for 

 a place-name originally applied to a small section of country to be 

 given, in process of time, a wider range so as to become the dis- 

 tinguishing geographical term for a much larger area, and this 

 happened in the case of Greenland, the whole peninsula receiv- 

 ing its name from Eric's fiord. Our own place-name " Canada " 

 is "an example to the purpose quite." It was originally, ac- 

 cording to Jacques Cartier, the name an Indian tribe gave to their 

 movable, easily transplanted collection of wigwams. It became 

 in time the name of two great Provinces. It is the designation 

 of a country extending west and east from Cabot and Belleisle 

 Straits to Mount St. Elias and Queen Charlotte Islands, and north 

 and south from Pelee Island to Grinnell Eand, with an area nearly 

 one third of the whole area of the British Empire, not including 

 the Transvaal and the Trans-Orange Provinces. No doubt the 

 humor of it has kept the original Norse name of Greenland from 

 displacement. 



Eric was so pleased with his Greenland that he returned to 

 Iceland and gathering together a number of his fellow-islanders, 

 set out for his emerald fiord with a fleet of 25 vessels, like the one 

 Froude has described from a specimen ' 'which he saw and saw 

 again" at Christiania, exhumed from its peaty grave where it had 

 rested nigh unto a thousand years. But ruthless ice-bergs and 

 angiy winds destroyed and greedy waves swallowed up eleven of 

 Eric's vessels with their human cargoes of 300 or 400 souls — the 

 first recorded body of emigrants to come to North American shores ■ 

 — the first great loss of life on our coasts which have since wit- 

 nessed so many terrible wrecks. 



The other vessels succeeded in reaching the desired haven 

 with 400 or 450 persons who began housekeeping on the west 

 coast just north of the island we know as Cape Farewell. In 

 course of time these first settlers and others who joined them 

 branched out to the next fiord and then to the next and then be- 

 gan another settlement 400 miles further north in just about the 

 same latitude as our youngest city, Dawson City, in far famed 

 Klondike. 



After an existence of more than 400 years the Greenland 

 settlements were given their coup de grace by the Eskimos, and all 

 that now remains as evidences of the 300 farmsteads, the two 



