Beyond the Greenlanders toward the north their hunters came across a kind of small people called Skraelings. When they are wounded alive their wound becomes white without issue of blood; but the blood scarcely ceases to stream out of them when they are dead.
Whatever may be thought of this magical oddity of surgery, it at least seems to imply authentically some experiments in piercing or slashing the living. Whether such collision was a matter of the thirteenth century only or had first occurred in the twelfth or still earlier we cannot say. The Eskimo race was the ominous shadow of the Norse colonist from the beginning, though long unrecognized as a menace. Apparently there had been a temporary movement of these people down the western coast about the tenth century, withdrawing before the first white men appeared. After that for generations, perhaps centuries, the weaker heathen wisely kept out of sight, either beyond the water or at hunting grounds far up the Greenland coast. At last they moved nearer, and there was occasional contact while still the Norsemen were formidable. But by the fourteenth century Norse Greenland had begun to dwindle in power and population, with diminishing aid and reinforcement from Europe, and the danger drew nearer. Perhaps there was some special impulsion of the uncivilized people which resulted in the obliteration of the Western Norse Settlement, always relatively feeble. Some rumor of its need having reached the Eastern Settlement, an expedition of relief was dispatched about 1337, or perhaps a little later, accompanied by Ivar Bardsen, then or afterward steward of the Bishop, who tells the tale. Only a few stray cattle were found; presumably the colonists had been killed or carried away.
The ground thus lost could not be regained. On the contrary, we may suppose the Eskimos to be getting stronger and drawing nearer. In 1355 an expedition under Paul Knutson came out to reinforce the Norsemen; but it returned home in or before 1364 and can have made only a temporary lightening of the load. In 1379 there seems to have been an Eskimo attack, costing the Norsemen 18 of their few men. But peace may have reigned as a rule. At any rate, the ordinary functions of life went on, for it is of record that a young Icelander, visiting Greenland, was married by the Bishop at Gardar in 1409; and the last visit of the Norwegian knorr, or supply ship, occurred by way of Iceland in 1410.
After that nothing is certainly known. There are two papal letters at different periods of the century, based on very questionable hearsay information and indicating confusion and general falling away. There was even a futile effort to reopen communication in 1492. Probably by that time the Norsemen and Norse women were all dead or married to the Eskimos. That particular form of primitive heathendom seems to have absorbed them.
Greenland was to be rediscovered and repeopled in due season; but for the time being it had become in European knowledge only a half-forgotten figure on certain maps, sometimes given with fair accuracy of outline but sometimes also as an oceanic Green Island of only indirect relation to reality and passing its name on to little islands and even fancied rocks far at sea, which owned nothing in common with the far northern region except a part of its name.
CHAPTER VIII
MARKLAND, OTHERWISE NEWFOUNDLAND
The name Markland, meaning Forest Land, must be, in one language or another, among the oldest geographical designations known among men. Nothing could be more natural to even the most primitive people than to distinguish in this way any heavily overgrown region which especially challenged attention, perhaps as a refuge or as a barrier. Its appearance in any form of record was, of course, very much later. As to Atlantic regions, the earliest instance other than Norse may be the “Insula de Legname” of certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century portolan charts,[198] evidently given by some Genoese or other Italian navigator to Madeira, the latter name being a translation of the former, substituted by the Portuguese[199] after their rediscovery. Thus we might say that this island was the original western Markland, but for the fact that certain Greenland Norsemen had affixed the name long before to a region much farther west.
First Norse Account, In Hauk’s Book
The earliest manuscript of the first distinct account of the Norse Markland is included in the compilation known as Hauk’s Book,[200] from Hauk Erlendsson, for whom and partly by whom it was prepared, necessarily before his death in 1334, but probably after he was given a certain title in 1305. Perhaps 1330 may mark the time of its completion. Along with divers other documents, it copies from some unknown original the saga of Eric the Red, sometimes called the saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni, an ancestor of the compiler, whose adventures as an early explorer of northeastern North America constitute a conspicuous feature of the narrative. Some parts of the saga of Eric the Red as thus transcribed, especially toward its ending, cannot be much older than the time of transcription, but verses embedded in other parts have been identified as necessarily of the eleventh century; and the body of the tale is, for the greater part, manifestly archaic.