trader," and of Are Frode, his great-great-grandson, who
called the unknown land Great Ireland.[17] True or untrue, in whatever
way, this would be a later discovery than those of Eric and his sons, if
the news of it did not come into Iceland or Norway till after Thorfinn
Karlsefne's voyage, as is generally supposed. Again, the length of the
voyage is a difficulty, and the whole matter has a doubtful look--an
attempt to start a rival to the Eric Saga, by a far more brilliant
success a few years earlier.

[Footnote 17: By some supposed to be S. Carolina, by others the
Canaries.]

We seem to be on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of
Viking exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of
Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century,
and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland
settlements of the western and the eastern Bays.

We hear, for instance, of Bishop Eric going over from Eric's Fiord to
Vinland in 1121; of clergy from the Eastern Bay diocese of Gardar
sailing to lands in the West, far north of Vinland, in 1266; of the two
Helgasons discovering a country west of Iceland in 1285; of a voyage
from Greenland to Markland in 1347 by a crew of seventeen men, recorded
in 1354.

Unless these are pure fabrications, they would seem to prove something
of constant intercourse between the mother and daughter colonies of
north-west Europe and north-east America, and something of a permanent
Christian settlement of Northmen in the New Continent is made probable
by assuming such intercourse. Between 981-1000, both Iceland and
Greenland had become "Catholic in name and Christian in surname"; in
1126 the line of Bishops of Gardar begins with Arnold, and the clergy
would hardly have ventured on the Vinland voyage to convert Skraelings in
an almost deserted country.

The later story of the Greenland colonies, interesting as it is, and
traceable to the year 1418, is not part of the expansion but of the
contraction of Europe and Christendom. And the voyages of the Zeni in
1380-95 to Greenland and the Western islands Estotiland and Drogeo,
belong to another part; they are the last achievements of mediaeval
discovery before Henry of Portugal begins his work, and form the natural
end of an introduction to that work.

But it is curious to notice that just as the ice and the Esquimaux
between them were bringing to an end the last traces of Norse settlement
in