Farther south, in the Vinland area, Norsemen were active as late as 1347, probably in the lumber trade. Says the Flateyjarbók: “Came a ship from Greenland that had been to Markland, eighteen men on board.” With a bit more detail this same ship is reported in the Skálholt annals: “Also there came a ship from Greenland, smaller than the small Icelandic boats, which put in at the outer Straumfjord and had no anchor. There were seventeen men on board. They had made a voyage to Markland but were afterwards storm-driven here.”
Chests found by archaeologists at Herjolfsnes are made of pine, deal, and larch. Some of this wood might have come from Norway, but the larch did not. It may have been driftwood, though this seems unlikely, not with Canada’s tremendous forests just below the horizon.
Indeed, there is a possibility that the entire western settlement, or what was left of it—perhaps several hundred people—emigrated to America, because in 1350, plus or minus a year or two or three, a cleric named Ivar Bárdarsson was chosen “to goe with Ships to the Westland, to drive away their Enemies the Skerlengers. But hee comming there, found no people neither Christian nor Heathen, but found there many Sheepe running being wilde, of which Sheepe they took with them as many as they could carrie, and with them returned to their Houses.”
Bárdarsson saw no indication of a struggle with Eskimos, which means the people must have left voluntarily. Eskimos may or may not have plundered the empty houses; his report suggests that they did. Yet the presence of livestock—not only Sheepe but goats, horses, and cattle—implies that Eskimos had not been near the place because they would have slaughtered the animals for food. If the Vikings did emigrate they must have crossed the strait to Canada.
A dozen theories have been offered to explain the disappearance of these people; each answers certain questions but fails to answer others.
The revolving centuries fought against them, says Gwyn Jones. The climate grew colder, glaciers crept down. And ahead of the ice came the skraelings. Events in Europe also weakened the colony: an increasing preference for English and Dutch cloth rather than Greenland woolens. African elephant ivory instead of walrus ivory. Commerce with Russia. In short, business. It became less profitable for Europeans to trade with those distant colonists. The immediate causes, though, beyond doubt, were skraeling attacks and the encroaching ice.
Gisle Oddsson, Bishop of Iceland at about the time of Ivar Bárdarsson’s voyage, thought the colonists had emigrated: “The settlers of Greenland lapsed of their own free will from the true faith and the Christian religion; having abandoned all good conduct and true virtues they turned to the people of America. Some people believe that Greenland lies very near to the westerly countries of the world.”
The mystery of this deserted Christian outpost seems to have troubled King Magnus Smek, who directed Poul Knudsson to take a look at that faraway place. Knudsson sailed in 1355: “in honor of God, for the deliverance of our souls, and for those ancestors of ours who brought Christianity to Greenland. . . .”
Nine years later several of Knudsson’s men returned to Norway. What news they brought—if any—concerning Vestribyggd, the western settlement, has not been preserved.
In 1379 the small “middle settlement” near Ivigtut was attacked by Eskimos who killed eighteen colonists and carried off two boys.
The last merchant ship to visit the colonies departed in 1383.
A ship bound from Norway to Iceland in 1406 was driven west by gales and made port in Eystribyggd, where it lay at anchor four years. During this time a crewman named Thorstein Olafson married a local girl, Sigrid Bjornsdatter. Their wedding was celebrated in Hvalsey church on September 16, 1408, “on the Sunday after the Exaltation of the Cross.” With the newlyweds aboard, this ship sailed to Iceland in 1410, the last European vessel known to have reached either settlement.
A letter dated 1448—which might possibly be spurious—from Pope Nicholas V to the two bishops of Iceland laments the misfortunes of Greenland colonists: “Thirty years ago, from the adjacent coasts of the heathen, the barbarians came with a fleet, attacked the inhabitants of Greenland most cruelly, and so devastated the mother-country and the holy buildings with fire and sword that there remained on that island no more than nine parish churches. . . .”
A few English ships, mostly from Bristol, might have visited Eystribyggd during this century. And perhaps a joint Portuguese-Danish expedition in 1473, because there is a letter dated March 3, 1551, from the burgomaster of Kiel, one Karsten Grip, addressed to Christian III. Burgomaster Grip reports that “two admirals of Your grandfather, His Royal Majesty Christian I, Pining and Pothurst, on the instructions of His Royal Majesty the King of Portugal, etc., were sent with several ships on a voyage to the new islands and the continents in the north. . . .” But we can only surmise the state of the colonies at that time.
A letter written by Pope Alexander VI in 1492 observes that there has been no priest resident in Greenland for eighty years and the people have nothing to remind them of Christianity except one altar cloth. Alexander fears that they have lost sight of the true faith, and he comments on a Benedictine monk named Mathias who is prepared to live and work as a missionary in Greenland.
About fifty years later a German merchant ship was blown by strong winds into a Greenland fjord. Buildings were visible, so the crew went ashore. They saw a dead European lying on the frozen ground. He was dressed in sealskin and frieze—which is a coarse woolen cloth with a shaggy nap. Beside his body lay a dagger, very thin from constant whetting. Evidently this was the corpse of the last Viking in the New World. There being no one left alive to bury him, he lay on the earth rather than in it.
A resident of Bergen, Absalon Pedersson, writes in 1567 that “many of the nobility hold the deeds of estates in Greenland yet of the country and properties they know nothing. . . .”
Martin Frobisher, who landed on Greenland’s west coast in 1578, observed that some of the Eskimos used iron spearheads and bronze buttons and were able to recognize gold, which meant they had dealt with Europeans.
In 1721 a Norwegian missionary, Hans Egede, saw the ruins of a church and the crumbling walls of houses. He asked about them, and described the Christian services, but the Eskimos indicated that they had never heard of such a religion, nor could they tell him anything about the people who built these houses. Despite this rather convincing testimony, as well as the ruins, Egede maintained that Eystribyggd still flourished: “I believe beyond a doubt that it survives and is inhabited by people of pure Norwegian Extraction, which by God’s help in due Time and when Occasion offers, may be discovered. . . .”
Hans Egede had a son named Niels who grew up in Greenland and recorded in his diary a curious legend. An Eskimo shaman who camped among the ruins of the lower settlement, “south by the hot baths,” told him that in the old days Eskimos and Norwegians had lived together until they were attacked by men who came from the southwest in ships. At first there had been three ships. Then more ships arrived, with much killing and plundering. When these ships came back again the Eskimos fled, taking several Norwegian women and children with them up the fjord. Months later the Eskimos returned, but saw that the houses had been burned and everything taken away. Then they left the settlement forever and the Norwegian women married into the tribe.
The identity of these marauders cannot be established, but German and English pirates often raided Iceland during the fifteenth century. Perhaps they curled westward looking for fresh victims and delivered the coup de grâce to a moribund culture.
In our century, following the Great War that would end all wars, the Danish government dispatched some archaeologists to Greenland. They located the remnants of buildings and of farms—the fields now smothered by weeds and horsehair oats—and many graves.
In the northeast chapel of Gardar cathedral, which was the episcopal seat of Eystribyggd, lay the skeleton of a sturdy middle-aged man who still wore his shoes, though not much else. For some inexplicable reason part of his right foot was gone. He held a crozier made