Note. An important Christian colony existed in Greenland for nearly 400 years—from some time in the tenth to near the end of the fourteenth century,—a colony in which, in the fourteenth century, there were 190 townships and a town called Garda, in which were a cathedral, bishop’s seat, and twelve or thirteen churches, besides other Christian establishments, with a regular succession of bishops for their superintendence, of whom seventeen are named in the sagas. This colony, strange to say, was obliterated, no one knew how or when, and its very existence was forgotten by the civilised world. It was chronicled, however, in the Icelandic sagas and brought to light by antiquaries of the highest authority. The statistical details given by the sagas have been corroborated by the actual discovery in Greenland, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of vast ecclesiastical and other buildings. These are facts which do not admit of reasonable doubt—so writes Samuel Laing in his translation of “The Heimskringla, or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway,” volume one, page 141.
| [Chapter 1] | | [Chapter 2] | | [Chapter 3] | | [Chapter 4] | | [Chapter 5] | | [Chapter 6] | | [Chapter 7] | | [Chapter 8] | | [Chapter 9] | | [Chapter 10] | | [Chapter 11] | | [Chapter 12] | | [Chapter 13] | | [Chapter 14] | | [Chapter 15] | | [Chapter 16] | | [Chapter 17] | | [Chapter 18] | | [Chapter 19] | | [Chapter 20] | | [Chapter 21] | | [Chapter 22] | | [Chapter 23] | | [Chapter 24] | | [Chapter 25] | | [Chapter 26] | | [Chapter 27] |