But at the same time there was certainly a physiological factor involved. For the healthy nourishment of a European cereals (hydro-carbons) are necessary, and there can be no doubt that a prolonged exclusive diet of meat and fat will in the case of most Europeans reduce the vital force, and not least the powers of reproduction. This agrees with my own experience and observation under various conditions, as, for instance, during ten consecutive months’ exclusive diet of meat and fat. It is also confirmed by physiological experiments on omnivorous animals. The Greenlanders were reduced to living by sealing, fishing, and keeping cattle; milk, with its sugar of milk, was their chief substitute for the hydro-carbons in cereals; besides this, they no doubt collected crowberries, angelica and other vegetables; but even during the short summer this cannot have been sufficient to counterbalance the want of flour. It is therefore probable that their powers of reproduction underwent a marked decrease, and they became a people of small fecundity. The Eskimo have had thousands of years for adapting themselves through natural selection to their monotonous flesh-diet, since those among them who were best fitted for it had the better chance of producing offspring; there is certainly a great difference between individuals in this respect; some of us are by nature more vegetarian, while others are more carnivorous. It is therefore natural that the present-day Eskimo should be better suited for this diet; but it is none the less striking that the rate of productiveness among them is also low.
As, then, the Greenlanders’ communications with Norway fell off more and more, their imports of corn and flour finally ceased altogether. Their cattle-keeping must then have declined as well, since they would have little opportunity of renewing their stock or getting other kinds of supplies, when bad years intervened and the greater part of the stock had to be slaughtered or died of hunger. Consequently the people became still more dependent on sealing; and thereby the cattle must have been neglected. In this way their diet would become even less varied, since milk would be lacking, and their reproduction would be further restricted. Add to this that their average proficiency in sealing, at first in any case, was doubtless not to be compared with that of the Eskimo, and that they were without salt for preserving their catch, which therefore had to be dried or frozen. They were thus not able to lay up a large provision, and were always more and more dependent on occasional catches. It is easy to understand that their power of resistance was not great, when bad seasons for sealing occurred, or when they were ravaged by disease, and it is not surprising if the population decreased.
Cessation of communication with Europe
The cessation of the communication of Greenland with Iceland and Norway came about in the following way: between 1247 and 1261, during the reign of Håkon Håkonsson, Greenland voluntarily became subject to the Norwegian crown, whilst before this it had been a free State like Iceland. In 1294, trade with the tributary countries of Norway, Greenland among them, was declared a sort of royal monopoly or privilege, which the king could farm out to Norwegian subjects. The result of this was that only the king’s ships—and of these there was as a rule only one, called “Knarren,” for the Greenland traffic—were permitted to sail there for the purposes of trade,[74] and this was the beginning of the end. Even before that time communication with Greenland was rare. Thus we read in the “King’s Mirror” that people seldom went there. But now, when the royal trading ship was practically the only one that made the voyage, things were to be much worse. Frequently several years were occupied on one trip. As some time elapsed also between each voyage, it will be understood that, at the best, the communication was not lively. But when it occasionally happened that “Knarren” was wrecked, things were still worse. That the communication may have been defective as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century is seen from a letter from Bishop Arne, of Bergen, to Bishop Tord in Greenland, of June 22, 1308, wherein it is taken for granted that the death of King Eric nine years before, in 1299, was not yet known in Greenland. In the middle of the fourteenth century, for instance, “Knarren” returned to Bergen in 1346 safe and sound and with a very great quantity of goods; but perhaps did not sail again until 1355, and we hear nothing of her return before 1363 (?). In 1366 we hear that “Knarren” was again fitted out; but she was wrecked north of Bergen in the following year, probably on the outward voyage. In the year following a new trading ship must actually have arrived with the new bishop, Alf; but it is stated that Greenland had then been without a bishop for nineteen years. In 1369 the Greenland ship seems again to have been sunk off Norway.[75]
It looks as if these voyages of “Knarren” became rarer and rarer, until at the beginning of the fifteenth century (1410) they presumably ceased altogether; in any case, we hear no more of them. Even though the Greenland traffic may have paid, it cost money to fit out “Knarren,” and when there was so much doing in other quarters, it was not always easy to procure the necessary funds. Another reason for the decline was the growing influence and power of the Hanseatic League over trade and navigation in Norway. Together with the Victualien Brethren and the adherents of the captive King Albrekt of Sweden, the Leaguers took and sacked Bergen in 1393. In 1428 the town was again taken by the Hanseatic League. It may easily be understood that events of this kind had a disturbing and perhaps entirely paralysing effect on the Greenland traffic, which had its headquarters in this town. Moreover, Norway had before this been much weakened by the Black Death, which visited the country in 1349. It raged with special virulence in Bergen; but there is no notice of the disease having spread to Greenland; perhaps that country was spared through “Knarren” not having sailed there before 1355, and probably no other ship having made the voyage in the interval. In 1392 there was again a severe pestilence throughout Norway, and many people died. In that year too a great many ships were wrecked. There were thus a number of misfortunes at that time, and the people of Norway had enough to occupy them in their own affairs. Another circumstance unfavourable to the communication with Greenland was the union of Norway with Denmark, and for a time with Sweden. The seat of government was thereby removed to Copenhagen, and interest in Norway, and especially in its so-called tributary countries, was further greatly diminished by the larger claims of Denmark and Sweden.
It is reasonable to suppose that under such conditions the settlements in Greenland, which were almost entirely cut off, must have decayed; comparatively few, perhaps, were able to get a passage, and left the country by degrees; but the people declined in numbers; they adopted an entirely Eskimo mode of living, and mixed with the Eskimo, who perhaps at the same time spread southwards in greater numbers along the west coast of Greenland. It was remarked in the last chapter that the Norsemen, when they arrived in the country, evidently looked down upon the stone-age, troll-like Skrælings, whom they could hunt and ill-use with impunity; with their iron weapons, their warlike propensities, and their larger vessels, they may perhaps have been able to maintain this imaginary superiority in the early days, so long as they still had some kind of supplies from abroad. But it is obvious that these relations must have been fundamentally changed when this communication gradually ceased, and they were reduced, without any support from Europe, to make the best of the country’s resources; then the real superiority of the Eskimo in these surroundings asserted its full rights, and the Greenlanders had to begin to look upon them in a very different light. It is therefore perfectly natural that from this very fourteenth century a fundamental change in the relations between Norsemen and Skrælings set in. And that such was the case seems to result in many ways from the meagre information we possess.
Gisle Oddsson’s annals on the decline of the Greenlanders
In the Annals of Bishop Gisle Oddsson, written in Iceland in Latin before 1637, we read under the year 1342 [G. Storm, 1890a, pp. 355, f.; Grönl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 459]:
“The inhabitants of Greenland voluntarily forsook the true faith and the religion of the Christians, and after having abandoned all good morals and true virtues turned to the people of America (‘ad Americæ populos se converterunt’); some also think that Greenland lies very near to the western lands of the world. From this it came about that the Christians began to refrain from the voyage to Greenland.”
It is not known from whence Gisle Oddsson took this statement. As the expression “the people of America” (“Americæ populi”) is a curious one, and as the statements in the bishop’s annals following that quoted above are entirely myths and inventions taken from Lyschander’s “Grönlands Chronica” (but originally derived from Saxo and Adam of Bremen), Storm regarded the whole account as spurious and lacking any mediæval authority. Interpreting, curiously enough, “ad Americæ populos se converterunt” to mean that the Greenlanders had emigrated to America, Storm supposes that this may be a hypothesis “formed to explain the disappearance from Greenland of the old Norwegian-Icelandic colony.” But the meaning of the passage can scarcely be interpreted otherwise than as translated above, that the Greenlanders had forsaken Christianity, given up good morals and virtues, and had been converted to the belief and customs of the American people (i.e., the Skrælings). The people of America must be a strained expression the bishop has used to denote the heathen Skrælings (who inhabited Greenland and the American lands) in contradistinction to the Christian Europeans. Greenland was frequently regarded in Iceland in those times as a part of America (cf. the map, [p. 7]). Hans Egede, for example, thought the natives of Greenland were “Americans.” In other words, the statement simply means that in 1342 a report came that the Greenlanders were associating amicably with the heathen Skrælings (which was forbidden by the ecclesiastical law of that time), and had begun to adopt their mode of life; which, in fact, is extremely probable.