The direct cause of the final extinction of the Greenland colonies is involved in obscurity, though a variety of causes, easily presumable, would have been sufficient, when we take into consideration the moribund condition into which they naturally fell after commercial restriction had put a stop to free intercourse with the home government.
The Eskimos are said to have appeared in Greenland about the middle of the fourteenth century, and to have manifested hostility to such a degree that about 1342 the imperilled western colony was abandoned. The eastern colony survived perhaps seventy years longer, or possibly to a still later period. We know they had a new bishop in 1387, but before the end of that century the voyages to their relief were conducted only after long intervals.
Before communication was wholly cut off, the attacks of the Skrælings, and possibly famine and the black death, had carried the struggling colonists to the verge of destruction. Bergen, in Norway, upon which they depended for succor, had at one time been almost depopulated by the same virulent disease, and again had been ravaged by a Hanseatic fleet. Thus such intercourse as the royal monopoly permitted had become precarious, and the marauding of freebooters, then prevalent in northern waters, still further served to impede the communications, till at last they wholly ceased, during the early years of the fifteenth century.
It has sometimes been maintained that the closing in of ice-packs was the final stroke which extinguished the last hopes of the expiring colonists.[527] This view, however, meets with little favor among the more enlightened students of climatic changes, like Humboldt.[528]
There has been published what purports to be a bull of Pope Nicholas V,[529] directing the Bishop of Iceland to learn what he could of the condition of the Greenland colonies, and in this document it is stated that part of the colonists had been destroyed by barbarians thirty years before,—the bull bearing date in 1448. There is no record that any expedition followed upon this urging, and there is some question as to the authenticity of the document.[530] In the Relation of La Peyrère there is a story of some sailors visiting Greenland so late as 1484; but it is open to question.
Early in the sixteenth century fitful efforts to learn the fate of the colonies began, and these were continued, without result, well into the seventeenth century; but nothing explicable was ascertained till, in 1721, Hans Egede, a Norwegian priest, prevailed upon the Danish government to send him on a mission to the Eskimos. He went, accompanied by wife and children; and the colony of Godthaab, and the later history of the missions, and the revival of trade with Europe, attest the constancy of his purpose and the fruits of his earnestness. In a year he began to report upon certain remains which indicated the former occupation of the country by people who built such buildings as was the habit in Europe. He and his son Paul Egede, and their successors in the missions, gathered for us, first among modern searchers, the threads of the history of this former people; and, as time went on, the researches of Graah, Nordenskjöld, and other explorers, and the studious habits of Major, Rink, and the rest among the investigators, have enabled us to read the old sagas of the colonization of Greenland with renewed interest and with the light of corroborating evidence.[531]
We are told that it was one result of these Northman voyages that the fame of them spread to other countries, and became known among the Welsh, at a time when, upon the death of Owen Gwynedd, who ruled in the northern parts of that country, the people were embroiled in civil strife. That chieftain’s son, Prince Madoc, a man bred to the sea, was discontented with the unstable state of society, and resolved to lead a colony to these western lands, where they could live more in peace.
