land.1 Eric the Red returned to the dwelling which he had erected, to Brattalidha on Eiriksfjord, while his cousin, Thorkell Farserkr, took up several tracts of land along Hvalseyarfjord and between the Eiriksand Einarsfjords, and located his new home on the Hvalsey inlet.

More Scandinavians both from Iceland and Norway landed in Greenland, and the colony seems to have prospered and flourished from its very beginning.

This statement may be somewhat surprising to those who have heard Greenland designated under the name of Land of Desolation. Nor could we object to this appellation as a misnomer when we look at that barren region of the frigid North.

Greenland is, indeed, almost entirely covered with glaciers and snow, situated as it is in close proximity to the Pole, its southernmost point or Cape Farewell being at 59° 49′, while its boreal wastes penetrate the frozen seas up to the eighty-seventh degree of northern latitude.

The island is bounded on the northeast and east by the Arctic Ocean; on the southeast by the Strait of Denmark, which separates it from Iceland; on the south by that portion of the Atlantic Ocean which the Northmen called "Graenlandz Haf." Its western boundaries are Davis' Strait, Baffin's Bay, Smith's Sound, Kane Basin, and Kennedy Channel,-all narrow, mostly frozen waters, which terminate, it is said, in an open sea that washes Greenland's northwestern coast, and is named after Captain Robert Lincoln.*

The location of this arctic island sufficiently explains

1 Rafn, Antiq. Amer., pp. 15, 189; Beamish, Discovery, p. 49; Moosmüller, S. 25.

'Rafn, Antiq. Amer., p. 189. 'Hayes.

4

Cf. von Humboldt, Examen, t. ii. p. 93; Hayes, La Terra, p. 6 ; Sadlier's Excelsior Geography, No. 3, p. 16.

its dreadful climate, and gives us to understand the great irregularity of its days and nights. As in Godhavn on the island of Disco there are summer days uninterrupted by nocturnal darkness, so in the northern parts of Greenland the dreary winter nights last for weeks and months at a time. We may readily imagine the feelings of a Greenlander when on a belated autumn morning he watches in vain to see the smallest portion of the sun's golden disk reappear on the low southern horizon, when twilight and dawn grow weaker, and even the soft rays of the faithful moon are waning. Yet, then he is a witness of the most brilliant exhibitions of one of nature's most majestic and grandest phenomena, of which Peyrère already wrote in his quaint Relation of Greenland. "Nature," he says, "then produces such a wonder that I should not have dared to write it to you had it not been mentioned by the Icelandic chronicle as a miracle. There rises in Greenland a light with the night, when the moon is new or on the point of becoming so, which lights up all the country, as if the moon were full; and the darker the night the brighter this light shines. It takes its course on the north coast, on account of which it is called the Northern Light. It looks like flying fire, and stretches up into the sky like a high and long palisade. It passes from one place to another, and leaves smoke in the places it leaves. None but those who have seen it could give any idea of the quickness and agility of its movements. It lasts all night and disappears at sunrise [?]. I leave it to those learned men who are better versed than I in natural philosophy to discover the cause of this meteor."

It is well known to-day that the Northern Lights or

1 P. 206.

Aurora Borealis are an effect of the earth's magnetism, but it may yet be doubted whether the polar magnetic storms are productive of heat as they are of light. If they be, it is certain, however, that their heat affects but a small region around their local origin, for the northern parts of Greenland have at all times been considered as uninhabitable on account of their severe climate, and were known to the Norwegians by the name of "Graenlandz Óbygdhir" or Greenland's deserts. The ancient Scandinavian settlers objected, however, to this appellation, because of the following reasons. They said that, among the numerous articles which the waves in their southern course had thrown on Greenland's western borders, they had noticed pieces of wood carved by man's hand; and, again, that they had found stray sheep and goats, bearing horn- and ear-marks, grazing in their pasturages after coming down from northern tracts. As a proof of this singular fact they had sent to Norway the heads of two such animals which, as a curiosity, had been publicly exposed,-the one at Drontheim and the other at Bergen. They consequently concluded that some part, at least, of north western Greenland was inhabited at the time. They also thought that the driftwood which they eagerly caught in Baffin's Bay was coming down from some islands of that same region, to which, therefore, they gave the name of "Furustrandir" or Fir-tree shores. Such is the testimony of Abbot Arngrim, who wrote about the middle of the fourteenth century.1 Maltebrun likewise asserts that Greenland natives are found roaming far away to the north of the present town of Upernavik, and their statements have prepared us to accept the late information in regard to Lincoln's open sea.

1 Torfæus, Gronl. Ant., cap. v. p. 2 T. v. p. 255.

At the extreme limit of his perilous expedition Kane also discovered an immense sheet of water completely free of ice, immediately to the north of Smith's Sound, where the mingled fragments of glaciers and floes form a labyrinth difficult to traverse. It is a curious fact that Halley, nearly two centuries ago, made calculations according to which the summer mean temperature must increase from the sixtieth degree of latitude to the North Pole in the proportion of nine to ten.1

The immoderate cold produced in southwestern Greenland by the northeastern winds leads us to suspect that the regions which they cross are buried under everlasting ice. The central elevated districts of the vast island are inaccessible to either settler or native. They form one immense glacier that slowly travels down in every direction and breaks on the water's edge into gigantic shapeless blocks, which, under the name of icebergs, become the terror of northern mariners.2

It seems, however, that in olden times the eastern and the southeastern coasts of Greenland have offered to man some habitable spots. Scoresby has found, due north of Iceland as high as the seventieth degree of latitude, some grassy places and vacant dwellings similar to those of the Esquimaux; and it is believed by many that a flourishing monastery called after St. Thomas was, though more to the South, situated on this same coast, frozen and barren to-day.3

We will hear it related, farther on, how St. Thomas's monastery was heated, its gardens made fertile, and its

2

1 Elisée Reclus, pp. 343, 344.

' Maltebrun, t. i. p. 360; Cooley,

Histoire Générale, t. i. p. 215; Aa. passim.

3 Gravier, p. 200, from Maltebrun, Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, t. i. p. 95; t. xx. p. 421.

bay kept open with the waters of a boiling fountain; and it is, indeed, generally admitted that, while the surface is of ice, the bowels of Greenland are of fire in various places. On the 11th of June, A.D. 1783, three immense columns of fire were seen in Iceland to sally forth from the Greenland coast, and whalers have on several occasions met with floating pumice-stone, that seemed to indicate the existence of volcanoes at about seventy-five degrees of northern latitude.1 Hot-springs, usually found in volcanic regions, exist also in Greenland. Besides the one just spoken of, there are three others mentioned by Maltebrun,' and located on the islands of Ounartok by Charles Rafn, who adds that on this account its Eskimaic name signifies the Boiling Isle. These springs were, in the year 1828, found to possess from eighty to one hundred degrees of heat, Fahrenheit, and are probably the thermal waters of which Björn of Skardza already said that in Rumpeyarfjord there were several homesteads on which emerged a great number of springs, so hot in winter as to prevent close access, while temperate in summer, and frequented by numerous bathers, who were, in their waters, cured of various ailments.*

Another phenomenon of the western coast of Greenland is undoubtedly caused also by latent volcanic action, namely, the gradual sinking of the land all along the water's edge from Igalikko Firth to Disco's bay. Ruins of buildings on the former's shore are now covered by the waves, and even to-day the Moravian Brethren are obliged to replace on higher land the submerged posts to which they used to fasten their boats. This

1 Gravier, p. 200, from Maltebrun; cf. Peyrère, p. 205.

'T. v. p. 256.

Mémoires des Antiquaires, 1845 -49, p. 130.

Torfæus, Gronl. Ant., cap. vii.