A GENOESE SKIPPER OF THE 15TH CENTURY. 57 
What could have been the calamity which suddenly 
annihilated this Christian people, it is impossible to 
say; whether they were massacred by some warlike 
tribe of natives, or swept off to the last man by the 
terrible pestilence of 1349, called “The Black Death,” 
or,—most horrible conjecture of all,—beleaguered by 
vast masses of ice setting down from the Polar Sea 
along the eastern coast of Greenland, and thus miser¬ 
ably frozen,—we are never likely to know—so utterly 
did they perish, so mysterious has been their doom. 
On the other hand, certain traditions, with regard 
to the discovery of a vast continent by their fore¬ 
fathers away in the south-west, seem never entirely 
to have died out of the memory of the Icelanders; 
and in the month of February, 1477, there arrives 
at Reykjavik, in a barque belonging to the port 
of Bristol, a certain long-visaged, grey-eyed Genoese 
mariner, who was observed to take an amazing in¬ 
terest in hunting up whatever was known on the 
subject. Whether Columbus—for it was no less a 
personage than he—really learned anything to confirm 
him in his noble resolutions, is uncertain; but we have 
still extant an historical manuscript, written certainly 
