A document to which much weight has been attached is a papal letter which has been preserved, from Nicholas V. in 1448 to the two bishops of Iceland. It is there said of Greenland, amongst other things [Grönl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 170]:
“From the neighbouring coasts of the heathens the barbarians came thirty years ago with a fleet, attacked the people living there [in Greenland] with a cruel assault, and so destroyed the land of their fathers and the sacred edifices with fire and sword that only nine parish churches were left in the whole island [Greenland], and these are said to be the most remote, which they could not reach on account of the steep mountains. They carried the miserable inhabitants of both sexes as prisoners to their own country, especially those whom they regarded as strong and capable of bearing constant burdens of slavery, as was fitting for their tyranny. But since, as the same complaint adds,[86] in the course of time most of them have returned from the said imprisonment to their own homes, and have here and there repaired the ruins of their dwellings, they long to establish and extend divine service again, as far as possible....” Then follows a lengthy discourse on their religious needs, and what might be done to relieve them, without costing the rich Papacy anything.
As the barbarians here must undoubtedly mean the Eskimo, it has been regarded as a historical fact that the latter about 1418 made a devastating attack on the Eastern Settlement, and this document has thus lent weighty support to the general opinion that the Greenland settlements perished as the result of an Eskimo war of extermination. But the letter itself shows such obvious ignorance of conditions in Greenland, especially with regard to the Eskimo, that there must be some doubt about the complaint on which it is based. To begin with, it is in itself unlikely that the peaceful and unwarlike Eskimo, who can have had no practice in warfare, since they had previously had no one to fight with, except walruses and bears, should have come with a “fleet” and made an organised attack in large masses, and destroyed people and houses and churches in the Eastern Settlement. Even if they might have been provoked to resistance or even revenge by ill-usage on the part of the Greenlanders, or perhaps have coveted their iron implements, it is an impossibility that they should have organised themselves for a campaign. But it is added that they carried off the inhabitants of both sexes to use them as slaves; for what work?—in sealing they were themselves superior, in preparing skins and food their women were superior; and other work they had none. To a Greenland Eskimo it would be an utterly absurd idea to feed unnecessary slaves, and it betrays itself as of wholly European origin. The statement that after the incursion only nine parish churches were left also betrays ignorance; as pointed out by Storm, there were never more than twelve, even in the flourishing period of the Settlement, and by about 1418 there were certainly not nine in all. Furthermore, the letter is not addressed to the two bishops really officiating in Iceland, but to the two impostors, the German Marcellus and his confederate Mathæus, who by means of false representations had induced Pope Nicholas V. to consecrate them bishops of Iceland [cf. G. Storm, 1892, p. 399]. The probability is that the two impostors themselves composed the complaint from Greenland which was the cause of the papal letter, and which thus did not reach the Pope until thirty years after the alleged incursion; their object must have been to obtain further advantages. The papal document of 1448 must therefore be entirely discarded as historical evidence so far as its statements about Greenland are concerned.
Eskimo legends of fighting with Norsemen
Consequently the only possibly historical statement left to us, to prove that the Eskimo took the offensive, is that of their “harrying” in 1379; but from this we can doubtless only conclude that at the most there was a collision between Eskimo and Greenlanders. It has also been adduced that the Eskimo of Greenland have a few legends of fighting with the ancient Norsemen, and one which tells how the last of the Norsemen was slain. It must, however, be remembered that these legends were taken down in the last century, when the Eskimo had again been in contact with Europeans for several hundred years, and when Norwegians and Danes had been living in the country for over a hundred years. Some of the legends certainly refer to recent collisions with Europeans, and it is not easy to say what value can be attached to the others as evidence of an extermination of the last Norsemen. It is also to be remarked that the Norsemen, or Long-Beards, are not spoken of with ill-will in these legends, but rather with sympathy, which is difficult to understand if there had been such hatred as would account for a war of extermination. Add to this that the particular encounter which led to the last Long-Beard being pursued and slain arose, according to the tale, quite accidentally, which is difficult to imagine if it was the conclusion of a lengthy war of extermination, in which homestead after homestead and district after district had been harried and laid waste. The legends of the Eskimo cannot therefore be cited as evidence of the probability of any such war.
Unwarlike disposition of the Eskimo
It has been said that even if such warlike proceedings would be entirely incompatible with the present nature, disposition and way of thinking of the Greenland Eskimo, it may formerly have been otherwise. But in any case no long time can have elapsed between the alleged final overthrow of the Eastern Settlement, perhaps about 1500, and the rediscovery of Greenland in the sixteenth century. It is not likely that the Eskimo should have so completely changed their nature in the few intervening years; those whom the discoverers then found seem, from the accounts, to have strikingly resembled those we find later. And if one reads Hans Egede’s description of the Eskimo among whom he lived and worked, it appears absolutely impossible that the same people two hundred years earlier should have waged a cruel war of extermination against the last of the Norsemen.
There is, it is true, a possibility, as Dr. Björnbo has pointed out to me, that the mixture of race which gradually took place between Eskimo and Norsemen may for a time have produced a mixed type, which possessed a more quarrelsome disposition than the pure Eskimo, and may have inherited the not very peaceful habits of the Norsemen, and that in this way, for instance, a possible attack in 1379 may be explained. But this can only have been the case at the beginning of the period of intermixture, and the type must have changed again in proportion as the Eskimo element in race and culture became preponderant.[87]
No tradition of a war of extermination can be proved
The allusion to the Pygmies of Greenland in the letter to Nicholas V., quoted above ([p. 86]), gives us the Eskimo as we are accustomed to see them; and the description of these small men, a cubit high, who fly in a body at the sight of strangers, gives a surer and truer picture of the Skrælings than when they are represented as warlike and dangerous barbarians. The statements about the Pygmies in Claudius Clavus also enable us to see how the Norsemen sometimes treated the Eskimo, when they caught them