[521] The Westribygd, or western colony, had in the fourteenth century 90 settlements and 4 churches; the Eystribygd had 190 settlements, a cathedral and eleven churches, with two large towns and three or four monasteries.
[522] R. G. Haliburton, in the Popular Science Monthly, May, 1885, p. 40, gives a map in which Bjarni’s course is marked as entering the St. Lawrence Gulf by the south, and emerging by the Straits of Belle Isle.
[523] Dated 1135, and discovered in 1824.
[524] Distinctly shown in the diverse identifications of these landmarks which have been made.
[525] On the probabilities of the Vinland voyages, see Worsaae’s Danes and Norwegians in England, etc., p. 109.
[526] Grönland’s Hist. Mindesmaeker, iii. 9.
[527] The popular confidence in this view is doubtless helped by Montgomery, who has made it a point in his poem on Greenland, canto v. De Courcy (Hist. of the Church in America, p. 12) is cited by Howley (Newfoundland) as asserting that the eastern colony was destroyed by “a physical cataclysm, which accumulated the ice.” On the question of a change of climate in Greenland, see J. D. Whitney’s Climatic Changes (Mus. Comp. Zoöl. Mem., 1882, vii. 238).
[528] Rink (Danish Greenland, 22) is not inclined to believe that there has been any material climatic change in Greenland since the Norse days, and favors the supposition that some portion of the finally remaining Norse became amalgamated with the Eskimo and disappeared. If the reader wants circumstantial details of the misfortunes of their “last man,” he can see how they can be made out of what are held to be Eskimo traditions in a chapter of Dr. Hayes’s Land of Desolation.
Nordenskjöld (Voyage of the Vega) holds, such is the rapid assimilation of a foreign stock by a native stock, that it is not unlikely that what descendants may exist of the lost colonists of Greenland may be now indistinguishable from the Eskimo.
Tylor (Early Hist. Mankind, p. 208), speaking of the Eskimo, says: “It is indeed very strange that there should be no traces found among them of knowledge of metal-work and of other arts, which one would expect a race so receptive of foreign knowledge would have got from contact with the Northmen.”