56 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. 
a new bishop and a fresh supply of priests. At the 
commencement, however, of the next century, this 
colony of Greenland, with its bishops, priests, and 
people, its one hundred and ninety townships, its 
cathedral, its churches, its monasteries, suddenly fades 
into oblivion, like the fabric of a dream. The memory 
of its existence perishes, and the allusions made to 
it in the old Scandinavian Sagas gradually come 
to be considered poetical inventions or pious frauds. 
At last, after a lapse of four hundred years, some 
Danish missionaries set out to convert the Esquimaux; 
and there, far within Davis’ Straits, are discovered 
vestiges of the ancient settlement,—remains of houses, 
paths, walls, churches, tombstones, and inscriptions.* 
* On one tombstone there was written in Runic, “ Yigdis M. D. 
Hvilir Her; Glwde Gude Sal Hennar.” “ Vigdessa rests here; God 
gladden her soul.” But the most interesting of these inscriptions 
is one discovered, in 1824, in an island in Baffin’s Bay, in latitude 
72° 55', as it shows how boldly these Northmen must have pene¬ 
trated into regions supposed to have been unvisited by man before 
the voyages of our modern navigators :—“ Erling Sighvatson and 
Biomo Thordarson, and Eindrid Oddson, on Saturday before 
Ascension-week, raised these marks and cleared ground, 1135.” 
This date of Ascension-week implies that these three men wintered 
here, which must lead us to imagine that at that time, seven hundred 
years ago, the climate was less inclement than it is now. 
