that Jón, Jonas, or John Eirikson, surnamed Skalle, and often called John III., directly succeeded Arnius as bishop of Gardar, and was consecrated at Drontheim by Archbishop Paul in the year 1343.1

At the time of his election he was an abbot of one of the Norwegian monasteries."

Was the error in regard to Arnius's death detected before the time that his successor should have gone to take possession of the see of Gardar? In fact, it seems that John III. never entered into his Greenland diocese. When Gyrder Ivarson was consecrated bishop of Skalholt in the year 1349,3 and Gisbert, bishop of Bergen either the same or the following year, the bishop of Osloe, Salomon, who performed the sacred rites, was assisted by Orm, the prelate of Holar, and John Skalle of Gardar, these being the only three bishops in the whole province of Drontheim who had escaped the Black Death raging at the time. In 1351 we meet again with the Greenland bishop in Norway, where he assists at a provincial council of Drontheim under the presidency of Archbishop Olaf. Here he subscribes, together with the metropolitan and the bishops of Bergen and Hammeren, to a series of most important decrees enforcing priestly celibacy," the duty of residence on the part of clergymen having care of souls, the wearing of the clerical costume, and the train

1 Gams, p. 334; Torfæus, Hist. Rerum Norveg., t. iv. lib. ix. cap. vi. p. 473; Baumgartner, S. 281; Wetzer und Welte, art. Grönland. He is called John Calvus by Torfæus, Gronl. Ant., cap. xxx. p. 248, and by Gravier, p. 237.

2 Baumgartner, S. 281. Or 1348 or 1352.

4 Supra, pp. 137, 139; Torfæus, Hist. Rerum Norveg., t. iv. lib. ix.

cap. viii. p. 478; Gronl. Ant., cap. xxx. p. 248; Moosmüller, S. 65.

5 Wherein it is stated that "Plures Noricanæ provinciæ presbyteri non solum sibi focarias simpliciter adjungunt et in curiis suis publice detinent, verum etiam convocatis ad hoc earum consanguineis, adinstar laicorum sibi impudenter associant."

1

ing of the younger clergy by the older. Further regulations were also made on this occasion in regard to the clausure of nuns, the authority of ecclesiastical tribunals, ecclesiastical immunity, clandestine marriages, etc.2 "Brother John, by the patience of God bishop of Gardar," was in Norway yet in the year 1354, when he signed in Osloe a "vidimus" or official inspection of the appointment brief of Giurd as bishop of Stavanger.3

His presence in Greenland would, however, have been very useful and encouraging during all these years, for at this time the impoverished colonists underwent more severe trials than at any other in all their history.

1 Because "his temporibus, quod dolenter referimus, defectu personarum exigente, ad regimen animarum simpliciores et ignari plerumque assumuntur."

2 Wetzer und Welte, art. Grönland.

3 Ibid.

CHAPTER XX.

RUIN OF THE SETTLEMENTS OF GREENLAND.

THE chroniclers report in terms of dismay that, in A.D. 1347 or, rather, 1348, the most frightful plague that ever was heard of, called the Black Death, after desolating Asia, rapidly spread over Europe, striking down hundreds and thousands all along its wild destructive course, until it finally reached the Scandinavian countries of the North, where, enraged for not finding other nations to mow down, it did its deadly work with redoubled violence. Florence in Italy lost forty thousand inhabitants. Clement VI. gave orders to bless the Rhone as a cemetery, and, as there were not people enough to bury the dead, the corpses were dragged into the river. The compassionate Pontiff gave all possible assistance to the suffering victims, while he published two severe edicts against the persecutors of the Jews, whom the frenzy of the populace made responsible for the terrible scourge. Sixteen thousand people died in Strasburg, and the small town of Lubeck lost nine thousand of its population. England was visited with such fearful effect that in the city of London only fourteen persons survived. Nor was the ocean spared: ships were floating about or cast upon the shores after the last man of their crew had succumbed. One of these vessels was driven into the port of Bergen in Norway, and the people, seeing that every man on board was dead, carried its cargo into the town. They had led the dreadful foe within their walls; and from this place the plague spread all

over Norway with such fury that scarcely one-third part of the population, and, in some districts, only one man in a hundred, remained alive. All but one of the Norwegian bishops and all but one canon of the metropolitan chapter of Drontheim fell victims to the epidemic. The fatal disease assailed the children first, the youths afterwards, and finally the grown and older people. Before two days after the first symptoms appeared the sufferers threw up, with their heart's blood, their last dying breath.1

The few vessels that sailed to Iceland and Greenland carried the dread plague among the poor colonists of these islands, where also it made a great number of victims. The scourge lasted till the year 1351.3

It had been, for some time, the custom of Norway to send every year a fleet of vessels to the distant provinces. Government ships, together with private merchantmen, had been wont to bring every year new recruits, arms, tools, and provisions in exchange for the produce of Greenland's hunting and fishing; but the mother country had now been so much reduced, and so many of its sailors had perished, that the yearly solemn navigation took place no longer; and the weakened and suffering colonies were now, in their distress, almost completely abandoned and deprived of the muchneeded support and assistance of the Eastern Continent.* When, in the year 1355, King Magnus Ericsson sent out a trading-vessel to Greenland, he said, "We do this for the glory of God, for the sake of our soul, and for

1 Wouters, t. ii. p. 342; Torfæus, Hist. Rerum Norveg., t. iv. lib. ix. cap. viii. p. 478; Langebek, t. i. p. 171; Pontanus, lib. vii., ad an. 1348.

2 Gravier, p. 217; Amer. Cath. Quar. Rev., vol. xiii. p. 232; Maltebrun, t. i. p. 362.

3 Von Humboldt, Kosmos, S. 459; Gravier, p. 217.

* Hornius, lib. iii. cap. viii. p. 166; Torfæus, Hist. Rerum Norveg., t. iv. lib. ix. cap. viii. p. 478; von Humboldt, Examen, t. ii. p. 103; Pontanus, lib. vii., ad an. 1348; Moosmüller, S. 65.

the honor of our ancestors who have founded and kept up to our time Christianity and colonization in Greenland, and we cannot let their work become useless today." These sad words clearly tell to what straits the poor Greenlanders were already then reduced. We should not wonder, as we remarked before, if the Greenland vessel that returned from Markland in the year 1347 was perhaps the last to set sail from the island's fjords for the Scandinavian settlements of continental America.

To fill the cup of Greenland's misfortunes, war was adding its horrors to the ravages of the plague. The Skraelings or Esquimaux had been driven northward again by other savage tribes of our continent; 2 and here they met, towards the middle of the fourteenth century, with the Scandinavian people, whose colonists they had more than once assailed and perhaps exterminated on the northeastern coasts of the American main-land. The exact date of their most pernicious attack on the Greenland shores is not recorded, but we know that Ivar Bardson, who was sent from Norway to Greenland in the year 1341, was afterwards one of the principal men of an expedition organized for the relief of the settlers in Vestrebygd. The help came, however, too late. Bardson tells us that, when they arrived in the northern province, they saw a great number of the sheep and cattle of their countrymen roaming about on the verdant meadows, but they found no people, whether Christian or heathen. The Scandinavians of Vestrebygd had been exterminated or taken along as slaves to the other side of Davis' Strait, or farther north. All that the expedition could do was to kill as many of the animals as their ships would carry and to return with 2 See supra, vol. i. p. 234; vol. ii.

1 Wetzer und Welte, art. Grönland.

p. 256.