undecayed; and the shipwrecked men had left a record behind them, written in runes upon wax, of their sufferings. The chronicler regarded Ingimund's preservation from decay as a special mark of God's favour, a testimony to the holiness of the priest. About the same time, a man named Asmund reached Iceland from Greenland. In the building of his ship wooden pegs had been used instead of nails, and the parts of the ship were bound together with the sinews of whales and other creatures. It was shipwrecked the following year.

The annals speak of a Bishop of Greenland, Eirik by name, who preceded the Arnald already mentioned; but all we are told of him is that he went to Wineland. Arnald seems to have remained twenty-five years in Greenland, for his successor was consecrated in A.D. 1150, and he himself became Bishop of Hamar, in Norway, A.D. 1152. The list of successive bishops is full, if not complete, down to the year A.D. 1391; but the settlement was already becoming more and more neglected by the people of Iceland and Norway; for in an entry of A.D. 1383, we are told that "a ship returned to Norway from Greenland after an absence of two years, and on board were some persons saved from a wreck, who brought news of the death of Bishop Alf, six years before." Among other scattered notices there is a list, dating from about A.D. 1300, of twelve churches in the eastern settlement, and three in the western. Also, that there were one hundred and ninety dwellings in the eastern settlement, and ninety in the western. As an ordinary Icelandic farm at the present day may contain any number of persons, from two to twenty or more, we may probably estimate the population of the Greenland colony, at the height of its prosperity, as approaching three thousand. The last note of the colony, preceding utter oblivion, appears under the date A.D. 1410

of the Icelandic annals. We are there told that an Icelandic lady, whose husband, Snorri, had sailed to Greenland four years before, was tired of waiting for his return, and took to herself another husband.

In speculating on the fate of the colony, considerable light is afforded by a small treatise on the Geography of Greenland, probably known to some of you, for it is given in a well-known English work, Purchas, His Pilgrims, published at London in A.D. 1625. It is there described as "A Treatise of Iver Boty, a Gronlander, translated out of the Norsk Language into High Dutch in the yeare 1560. And after, out of the High Dutch into Low Dutch, and out of Low Dutch" into English. Several copies of the Norse work still exist, written in language of the early part of the sixteenth century; and it seems from internal evidence to be founded on an earlier work now lost, but which cannot be dated much later than A.D. 1400, for we have the authority of a Papal Brief of 1492, which says that there had been no communication with Greenland for eighty years. The following passage appears in the Norse work :—“All this which has been said was told us by a Greenlander, Ivar Bardson, who was steward to the Bishop of Garda, in Greenland, for many years, and was an eyewitness of what has been related. Not only so, but he was one of the men chosen by the governor to go on an expedition, sent north to the western settlement, to drive away the Eskimo. When the expedition reached the western settlement, they did not find a single human creature, either Christian or heathen, only cattle and sheep grown wild; with these they filled their ships and returned home."

The years 1402-1404 were a terrible time in Iceland on account of the plague, and we can scarcely suppose that the epidemic failed to visit Greenland, as communica

tion still existed between the two countries. The fate of the western settlement might easily become that of the eastern settlement if it were first weakened and wasted by disease. Possibly a final remnant was absorbed by the Eskimo. Nansen, quite lately, when in Greenland, came to the conclusion that there are two distinct races of natives, a tall one and a short one. But we can found no certain theory upon this, because the mixed race may have arisen since the early part of the last century, when the existing Danish colonies were founded.

A very interesting collateral question arises. When the Northmen settled in Greenland, did they find the Eskimo there? The oldest Icelandic historian, Ari, who wrote about A.D. 1100, says expressly, when speaking of the founders of the colony:-"They found human habitations east and west in the land, fragments of hide canoes, and articles made of stone." We may conclude, therefore, that the people called Skrælings [Eskimo], whom the Norsemen met with in Wineland, had visited Greenland. Again, in the University Library at Copenhagen there is a collection of documents relating to Greenland, made in the seventeenth century by Biorn, of Skardsa, in Iceland, who had access to old Icelandic MSS. now lost in whole or in part. From these documents we find that the Greenlanders were great hunters, and for hunting purposes founded a summer settlement in Baffin's Bay; and this fact was confirmed by the discovery, in 1824, of a Runic stone as far north as 72° 55', 150 miles north of Disco Island. So far as these hunters and travellers penetrated, they found traces of Eskimo, but not the Eskimo themselves. In the above stories from the sagas, there is not a trace of the presence of Eskimo. We may conclude, therefore, that from A.D. 985 to the close of the fourteenth century the Eskimo had no permanent habitation in

Greenland, and that their permanent residence there in modern times does not date earlier than the destruction of the Norse colony in the first part of the fifteenth century, about which time, probably, they were driven north by the advance of the Red Indian.

The discovery of America by Columbus revived the interest of Northmen in their forgotten colony. Nidaros, now Drontheim, was the metropolitan see of the ancient bishopricks of Iceland, Greenland, Sodor and Man, Orkneys and the Faroes. And it was an archbishop of Nidaros, Eric Walkendorf, who, at the beginning of the sixteeth century, sought to revive the memory of Greenland. He projected an expedition for the discovery of the colony, and though his endeavours lacked completion, many expeditions were sent out for the purpose somewhat later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And here appears a strange matter in this renewed interest. The scholars, who deciphered the old documents, imagined that eastern settlement meant a settlement on the east coast of Greenland, and effort upon effort was made to explore the icebound eastern coast. The error lived until the close of last century. The English reader will find a succinct account of these expeditions in Nansen's great work The First Crossing of Greenland. It was only in A.D. 1830 that Lieutenant Graah, of the Danish Naval Service, proved conclusively that there were no remains of any settlement on the eastern coast. Abundant remains have been found on the west coast in mounds and stone heaps, the debris of houses and churches, along the sides and at the heads of the fiords; and these mound heaps are now being explored by the Danish government.

It is no small testimony to the courage of the early people of Norway that it formed the Greenland settlements, and maintained them, without external aid, for

more than 400 years. What vigour there must have been in that early Scandinavian race in spite of the paucity of its numbers. To have become the ruling power in the north of France, in Ireland, in England, in Sicily, in Russia, is a testimony to its high personal qualities, moral and physical. To have sent its ships, before the loadstone was known, to every quarter of Europe; to have discovered Iceland, Greenland, and America, is a testimony to its hardihood, and love of the sea. But to have settled in Iceland and produced in such a climate an undying literature, to have colonized Greenland, fighting nature face to face in her sternest and most inhospitable mood, wringing from her a livelihood against her will, are achievements which the indomitable Northman alone of all men may claim as unique in the history of man.