rays of the sun must have a freer access to warm the earth. The same thing has happened in North America since the Europeans have carried there their accustomed industry. The history of the north leaves us no room to doubt that there have been vast forests cut down, and, by this single means, extensive marshes have been dried up and converted into land fit for cultivation. Without mentioning the general causes which insensibly effect the destruction of forests, it was common to set these on fire in order to procure fertile fields. A king of Sweden was surnamed the wood-cutter, for having grubbed up and cleared vast provinces, and felled the trees with which it was all covered *. Nor were they less cleared away in Norway and Denmark. Thus a change in the climate must long have preceded that in the manners.

What conclusion ought we to draw from all this? If for these fifteen or sixteen centuries, the arts, sciences, industry and politeness have been incessantly advancing in the north of Europe, we cannot but evidently discover three causes of this, which, though different in their natures, have yet been productive of the same effect. The first, is that restlessness natural to the people of all nations, but which acts more forcibly on the inhabitants of Europe, and is ever urging them to exchange their present condition in hopes of a better the second, slower but equally sure, is the change of climate: the third, more sensible, more expeditious, but more accidental, is that communication formed between mankind by commerce and religion, and cemented by a thousand new relations; which has, in a short time, transported from the south into the north new arts, manners, and opinions. These three causes have continually operated, and the face of Scandinavia changes daily. It already shines with somewhat more than borrowed lights. Time produces strange revolutions! Who knows whether the sun will not one day rise in the north?

* M. Mallet alludes to the Olaf Tretelgia of the Ynglinga-saga, and the reader will find by referring to page 86, that this so-called king, even if the statement may be relied on, merely cleared a small district, and not "vast provinces,” and that the surname of wood-cutter was given him by his enemies, in order to throw ridicule on his proceedings.--ED.

244

SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS

BY

THE EDITOR.

CHAPTER I.

COLONIZATION OF GREENLAND, AND DISCOVERY OF THE AMERICAN CONTINENT BY THE SCANDINAVIANS.

ABOUT a century after the discovery of Iceland, of which an account has been previously given, a Norwegian chieftain named Thorvald, having been banished for homicide, retired thither with his son Eirek, surnamed the Red. Some years afterwards, probably in 982, Eirek was sentenced to three years' exile for a similar offence, and set sail towards the west in quest of a coast that had recently been descried by a Norwegian navigator. His search proved successful, and he landed on a small island, west of Cape Farewell, where he passed the first winter. In the spring he went to survey the mainland, and finding it covered with a pleasing verdure, gave it the name of Grænland, Greenland, saying, that a good name would induce people to settle there. Eirek, when the term of his banishment was expired, returned to Iceland, and, in the year 986, again set sail for Greenland with a number of settlers, and established himself in a place he named Brattahlid, on a creek called after him, Eireksfjörd (Eric's Frith), which soon became a very considerable colony t. Some years * See page 187.

*

Eireksfjörd is supposed to be the modern Tunnulliorbik in the Julianeshaab district on the eastern coast of Baffin's Bay, in lat. 60° 55'. Brattahlid

afterwards, probably in 997, Leif, the son of Eirek, having made a voyage to Norway, met with a favourable reception from King Olaf Tryggvason, who persuaded him to embrace the doctrines of Christianity, or, more properly speaking, to be baptized, and then sent him back, accompanied by a priest, to convert the new colony. Eirek was at first offended at his son for deserting the faith of his forefathers, but was at length obliged to give his tacit consent to the propagation of the new religion, which was soon embraced by all the settlers, though it would appear that Eirek himself remained to the day of his death a worshipper of Thor and Odin. The settlements in Greenland continued to increase and flourish. They were divided into the East and the West Bygd, or inhabited districts, the intervening tract being termed the Ubygd, or uninhabited country, The West Bygd, at a later period, contained ninety farms, with four churches; the East Bygd, one hundred and ninety farms and two towns, with one cathedral, eleven churches, and three monasteries. The cathedral was in Garda. The first bishop was ordained in 1121, the seventeenth and last in 1404; and documentary proofs of his having officiated in 1409 at a marriage in Garda have lately been discovered by the learned Finn Magnusen, who derives his pedigree from the marriage in question. After this nothing more was heard of the Greenland colonies. How they perished we know not,

The learned men of the seventeenth century, when they recalled to mind that a Christian community had existed on these remote shores for upwards of four centuries, could only account for its extinction by a sudden catastrophe. Some supposed that the settlements had been ravaged by the pirates who infested the north seas at the close of the fourteenth century; others, that the great pestilence of 1348, called the Black Death, had swept off the greater part of the population, and that the survivors had been massacred by the Esquimaux. But it seems very unlikely that pirates would have directed their marauding expeditions to such a poor country as Greenland, and although the colony may probably have been visited

was long the residence of Eirek's descendants, and afterwards of the chief magistrate of Greenland. The word may be rendered by Steepslope; from Brutti, steep, and hlid, a slope or acclivity.

by the terrible scourge so graphically described by Boccaccio in the introduction to his Decameron, we believe there is no documentary evidence to show that this was actually the case. We know at least that upwards of half a century later there was still a bishop at Garda, and may therefore conclude that the colonists were able to resist the attacks of the Esquimaux, with whom they appear to have been in constant hostility. The real cause of the gradual decay and final extinction of these settlements was, no doubt, the pernicious system of commercial policy pursued by the mother country. Previous to the Calmar Union, Queen Margaret had made the trade with Iceland, Greenland, and the Færoe islands a royal monopoly, only to be carried on in vessels belonging to, or licensed by, the sovereign; and this monopoly was kept up by her successors, and, after the dissolution of the union, by the kings of Denmark, to a very late period, being only abolished for Iceland in 1776. Finn Magnusen, in a very able paper on the trade between England and Iceland during the Middle Ages, published in the Nordisk Tidskrift for Oldkyndighed, very justly observes that "Iceland would probably have shared the same fate as Greenland, had not British merchants, in spite of opposition, supplied it with articles absolutely necessary for the existence of its inhabitants."

one.

A few fruitless attempts were made in the sixteenth century to rediscover the lost colonies; but as it was not known at that period that Greenland had a west coast, the two Bygds were naturally supposed to have been situated on the eastern Subsequently to the voyages of Davis, Frobisher, and Baffin, it became the general opinion of northern antiquaries that the East and West Bygds were situated respectively on the east and west coasts of the peninsula. In 1721, Hans Egede, a zealous Norwegian clergyman, prevailed on the king of Denmark to form a new settlement on the west coast, Egede himself going out as missionary. Since the establishment of this colony numerous vestiges of the ancient one have been discovered; urns, implements, fragments of church bells, Runic inscriptions, and ruined edifices-especially in the district of Julianeshaab. We know by several very accurate topographical descriptions of the ancient settlements that the West Bygd only contained four churches, and as the ruins of seven have been discovered in the southern part of West

Greenland, the opinion gradually gained ground that both Bygds were situated on the west coast; the supporters of this hypothesis contending that the current, which sets southwestward from the Polar Seas, accumulates the ice on the east coast of Greenland to an extent which must, in all ages, have rendered the climate much more rigorous than that of the west coast, and formed an insurmountable barrier to colonization. This question was finally set at rest in 1829 by Captain Graah, who, by order of the Danish government, explored the east coast in umiaks-the larger kind of Esquimaux boats-from Cape Farewell to the sixty-fourth parallel of latitude, without finding a single trace of the ancient colonies *.

The prevailing opinion of the northern antiquaries at present is, that the East Bygd extended from Cape Farewell to Immartinek, in lat. 60° 50′, and the West Bygd from Arksut Creek, lat. 61° 40', to lat. 67°. The coast beyond the West Bygd, was called Nordrsetur, and was much frequented in the summer season by the colonists for fishing. They also appear to have had some permanent settlements on this coast, both to the south and north of Disco Island.

In 1824, a stone was found in the island of Kingiktorsoak, in lat. 72° 54′, long. 56°. west of Greenwich, bearing a Runic inscription, which was submitted to Finn Magnusen, Professor Rask, and Dr. Brynjulfvson of Iceland; and these celebrated Runologists, without any communication on the subject having passed between them, respectively arrived at the same interpretation of the characters, except the last six, which Professor Rask and Finn Magnusen at length agreed meant the numerals MCXXXV; Dr. Brynjulvson contenting himself with expressing an opinion that they might be mere ornaments, but that, from the form of the other characters, he should deem the inscription to be of the twelfth century. These gentlemen gave the inscription as follows :—

See Narrative of an Expedition to the East Coast of Greenland by Capt. W. A. Graah, of the Danish Royal Navy. Translated by the late E. Gordon Macdougall.

+From seta, a seat. The northern seats; or, possessions.