Norsemen in America

...He found them all extinct and no one about but a few nomad Eskimos...

...A burial at sea, recorded in the grave, perhaps, of her husband...

...He started from Iceland, which island became Christianized in 1000, its example being later followed by the Greenlanders...

...These names will be remembered by readers of Kipling's The Greatest Story in the World, and there has been much discussion as to the localities to which they refer...

...Of course the Icelanders would not have known that fruit by sight...

...These people might have colonized the land but they did not do so, sailing back again to Greenland...

...And one cherishes the hope that some kindly Eskimo was at hand to lay his bones, also, to rest when the end mercifully came...

...He was never heard of again, and whether his boat failed to reach the shores of our continent or whether having reached them, he was murdered by the skraelings, no one knows...

...By the twelfth century it appears that the kingdom was a flourishing one with a cathedral, monasteries and numerous churches...

...Furdustrands he considers to have been the beaches south of Cape Cod...

...Eric may well have been the protomartyr of America...

...The incident of the grapes is proof that it could not be much further north than that...

...This became one of the chief spots in Eric's kingdom, for kingdom it was for 250 years until the king of Norway took it under his dominion...

...64 THE COMMONWEAL November 25, 1925 NORSEMEN IN AMERICA THAT there was a Scandinavian discovery of Greenland there is no doubt, but little was known of the fate of the early colonists until the recent excavations carried out under the direction of the National Museum of Copenhagen by Dr...

...then low-lying white shores with woods, his Markland...

...Its trade at the end of the thirteenth century had greatly diminished, and in the fifteenth century came to an end...

...Over fifty of these crosses were found...

...That the graves examined were not Eskimo, is sufficiently evident, first from the hair found in some of the coffins, and still more clearly from the fact that the bones, in most cases, were accompanied by a cross, often with a pious inscription, which had been laid on the breast of the dead—an eloquent testimony of their adherence to the ancient faith...

...Even the site of Herjolfness was lost and not re-discovered until 1830, when a missionary working in those parts found an old tombstone in use as part of an Eskimo hut...

...In 1002, Leif, one of the same colonization, sailed past the coasts of our continent, passing first a land of flat rocks which he called Helluland...

...Eric the Red, a gentleman whose native country seems to have been made too hot for him, sailed over the western ocean in 982 and reached Greenland...

...This place he called Vineland...

...Bjarni Herjulfson, four years after the settlement of Greenland, was the first to see the shores of America, though he did not land upon them...

...and Hop somewhere near the mouth of the Hudson...

...One pictures the last survivor, waiting for death, his only comfort such traditions of a better world as must have lingered from his perished kin, already at /rest—the cross upon their breasts...

...The immediate cause of their extermination was undoubtedly a change in climate...

...finally a spot where grapes were found and recognized by a German in the crew...

...Imagination cannot but brood over the fate of these people, as much cut off from the world as though they had been colonists in Mars, and speculation busies itself wondering under just what circumstances the end came...

...When they first went to Herjolfness there was open harborage all summer, and the Eskimos had left, following the ice and the seals further north...

...It was eighteen years later that Karlsefni saw these sites again and further recorded his discovery of Furdustrands—the Wonderful Beaches—of Stromsfiord and of Hop, where he met with the skraelings or savages, and where a child, the offspring of one of the women with the expedition, was born—the first European birth on our continent...

...Norlund and his companions, which are attracting attention in scientific circles and which revealed the tragic tale recounted in Meddelelser om Gronland...

...Herjolf Bardson followed Eric the Red to Greenland in 986 and was the founder of the town of Herjolfness which has recently been excavated...

...A Danish Lutheran minister, one Hans Egede, made a voyage to these parts in 1721 to ascertain what the Greenlanders were doing...

...Since that time no fresh light has been thrown upon the fate of the Greenlanders...

...In one of the coffins was a piece of wood on which was inscribed—"This woman was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea, who was called Gudweg...

...The recent excavations have revealed for us what sort of people these ill-fated settlers were, and what happened to them...

...Stromsfiord, Long Island Sound...

...It shortly began to decline...

...The excavations show that the people were fervent Catholics and it is known that in 1221 another Eric, then Bishop of Greenland, set out from his diocese to sail to America and convert the skraelings...

...The period when all this happened was the zenith of Greenland...

...Then came a time, which we cannot locate with precision, when the harbor was ice-locked all the year round, when food became difficult to obtain, and the population gradually shrank in size—its members became stunted in growth and obviously afflicted with tuberculosis and other diseases...

...In the end, the race died out in the darkness and cold...

...Gathorne Hardy would seem to have made out his case, and he claims that Helluland is Newfoundland and Labrador, taken to be one country, as might well have been imagined from a small ship some distance from land...

...Markland is Nova Scotia...

...The story of the Greenland colonists is surely one of the most tragic incidents in the history of man...

...and Vineland, New England—the landing having been made in the neighborhood of Chatham Harbor...