land colony had at one time a
population of about two thousand people. Its inhabitants embraced
Christianity when their kinsfolk in other places did so, and the ruins
of their stone churches still exist. The settlers raised cattle and
sheep, and sent ox hides and seal skins and walrus ivory to Europe in
trade for supplies. But as there was no timber in Greenland they could
not build ships, and thus their communication with the outside world
was more or less precarious. In spite of this, the colony lasted for
about four hundred years. It seems to have come to an end at about the
beginning of the fifteenth century. The scanty records of its history
can be traced no later than the year 1409. What happened to terminate
its existence is not known. Some writers, misled by the name
'Greenland,' have thought that there must have been a change of climate
by which the country lost its original warmth and verdure and turned
into an arctic region. There is no ground for this belief. The name
'Greenland' did not imply a country of trees and luxuriant vegetation,
but only referred to the bright carpet of grass still seen in the short
Greenland summer in the warmer hollows of the hillsides. It may have
been that the settlement, never strong in numbers, was overwhelmed by
the Eskimos, who are known to have often attacked the colony: very
likely, too, it suffered from the great plague, the Black Death, that
swept over all Europe in the fourteenth century. Whatever the cause,
the colony came to an end, and centuries elapsed before Greenland was
again known to Europe.

This whole story of the Greenland settlement is historical fact which
cannot be doubted. Partly by accident and partly by design, the
Norsemen had been carried from Norway to the Orkneys and the Hebrides
and Iceland, and from there to Greenland. This having happened, it was
natural that their ships should go beyond Greenland itself. During the
four hundred years in which the Norse ships went from Europe to
Greenland, their navigators had neither chart nor compass, and they
sailed huge open boats, carrying only a great square sail. It is
evident that in stress of weather and in fog they must again and again
have been driven past the foot of Greenland, and must have landed
somewhere in what is now Labrador. It would be inconceivable that in
four centuries of voyages this never happened. In most cases, no doubt,
the storm-tossed and battered ships, like the fourteen vessels th