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The great romance of the Middle Ages was the first crossing of the Atlantic by Europeans, the unveiling of the New World. The great tragedy of the westward movement was the disappearance of 9,000 Europeans from their first American colony. The great mystery is how and why they disappeared.

It was seemingly the Irish, or at least people from the British Isles, who first crossed the main stream of the North Atlantic to discover Iceland some time before 795 a.d.—perhaps long before. Larger than Ireland, Iceland is the largest island known to have been discovered without aborigines by a European people. The Irish were for a time the only inhabitants. Norwegians began to reconnoitre the country around 850 and to colonize around 870. By 930 there were 50,000 Europeans in Iceland, a country wholly independent of all European nations. The language is Norse, but the blood, by varying estimates, is from 10 to 50 per cent Irish.

Iceland was the first European democracy north of the Alps, if you think of the country as European; the first American democracy if you think of it as part of the New World, which it geographically is. For you can see Greenland from Iceland, the next island in turn from Greenland and so till you reach the mainland of North America.

A Norwegian colonist, Gunnbjorn, on his way to a homestead in western Iceland, saw and reported Greenland around 900. In 982 a chieftain of the northwest coast of Iceland, Erik the Red, was outlawed for a period of three years. He decided to devote those years to the exploration of Greenland. He spent three winters there and examined the west coast several hundred miles northward, perhaps to Disko.

Erik liked the new country so well that he decided he would urge its colonization when his exile was over. According to the saga, he called it “Green Land” because he thought people would colonize it more readily if it had an attractive name. But there may have been the other reason, too, that he found the districts green and beautiful, as travelers do now. For it is only in such literature as the kindergarten songs of our childhood that “in Greenland there is nothing green to grow.”

The colonization propaganda took hold so readily in Iceland during the winter after Erik’s return that he was able to start out the next spring with twenty-five ships carrying perhaps an average of thirty persons and a varying cargo of the Icelandic farm animals—horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and fowl.

The ships met rough weather. Some of them were lost, and some turned back. Fourteen arrived in Greenland, therefore, with about four hundred people. This was in 986.

The colony developed at first chiefly along pastoral lines. However, as in northern European countries of the time, there was considerable reliance on fishing and hunting.

Immigration continued, chiefly from Iceland, and a government was formed similar to the Icelandic. By 990 the Greenlanders had their congress in session. This was America’s first democracy, if we look upon Iceland as European.

In the year 1000 a citizen of the Greenland republic, Leif, the son of Erik the Red, saw the mainland of North America first in Labrador. During the next few years the Greenlanders tried to plant colonies on the mainland, and explored it southward. The discovery and exploration are not, as a share of the public still believes, a matter of dispute with historians. What they dispute is merely how far south the Greenlanders went. It is agreed they reached the St. Lawrence and Nova Scotia; many believe they reached Massachusetts or New York; a few think they attained Florida; and the suggestion has been advanced that the later Norse view of a connection between America and Africa was probably based on some voyage which discovered that the north coast of South America trends easterly and runs well toward Africa.

Map showing Icelandic settlements in Greenland, and countries explored from Greenland and Iceland during the Middle Ages. Compiled by Vilhjalmur Stefansson; drawn by William Briesemeister. Base map used by courtesy of the American Geographical Society, New York.

In the year 1000 parliament voted that Greenland should be Christian. Thenceforward we have two main European sources of the history of the New World, the literature of Iceland and the records of the Church of Rome.

Greenland was constituted a separate bishopric in 1124, governed through the German archbishopric of Hamburg at first but later through the Norwegian archbishopric of Nidaros. The chain of bishops remained unbroken till 1537, when the last of them, Vincetius, died as a prisoner in the hands of the Lutherans—after the Reformation and forty-five years after the San Salvador expedition of Columbus. The last published Church document referring to the New World in its Greenland sector was written by Pope Alexander VI in 1492.

Life in Greenland at the height of prosperity, which was perhaps in the twelfth century, was similar to life in Iceland.

The government was a democracy, with well developed legislative and judiciary sides but with a weak executive; so that decisions of the court, rendered according to law, were at times not carried out against chieftains who were able to gather around them considerable groups of fighting men. Still, the feuds which eventually bordered upon civil war in Iceland were never so serious in Greenland, doubtless chiefly because of the smaller population and the greater distance between settlements.

Greenland farms were at the heads of fjords, some of which run so far inland that you are thirty to fifty miles from the chilling effect of the ocean proper beyond the headlands. The climate here was similar to the Icelandic, the winters a little colder, the summers a little hotter, or at least with a few days of more extreme heat. The main dependence was on animal husbandry. Stables have been excavated which show as many as 104 stalls for cattle in a single barn, and there were corresponding numbers of sheep, with a few of the other domestic animals, horses, goats, pigs and fowl.

The houses were small. As in Iceland this was for two related reasons, that fuel was hard to come by, and that large timbers for building were scarce. The Icelanders got timber as driftwood, chiefly upon their own northern coast, and then by importation from Norway. The Greenlanders had driftwood, too, and doubtless made voyages north along the west Greenland coast to pick it up where it was more abundant. That is inference. What we know is that voyages were made across to Labrador where ships took on cargoes of timber that either were brought back to Greenland and used directly or were taken to Iceland where they were exchanged for European wares.

During the republic, Greenlanders had their own ships; but there were also trading and other vessels which came to Greenland from abroad, chiefly at first from Iceland but later from Norway and from other European countries. Through our knowledge of maritime developments, which has been corroborated by archaeological finds in Greenland, we can now see that by the fifteenth century a part, and likely enough the greater part, of the shipping was from the British Isles—from Bristol and Lynn. For instance, garments have been found preserved by the frozen ground of cemeteries that are cut in fashions which prevailed in Germany around 1450. It is likely that these fashions reached Greenland some decades later, perhaps around 1475. Their arrival probably depended on shipping from England.

The dress of Greenland in this late period, as well as in the earlier, was partly of imports and partly of cloth woven locally from the wool of Greenland sheep.

The exports with which Greenland paid for her imports were, in addition to the already mentioned timber from America, chiefly walrus and seal oil, the hides of these animals, wool, and perhaps dairy products. This is not so much known from direct commercial records as from statements on how Greenland paid tithes to Rome and taxes to Norway.

There were two luxury exports from Greenland, polar bears and falcons. The bears always, or nearly always, were presents or bribes for princes, secular or churchly. The falcons were sometimes gifts, but they were used in the payment of tithes or taxes and were regular exports.

During the late Middle Ages the sport of falconry had a hold on Europe such as not even baseball has on the American public now. Emperors and kings were passionate falconers, and so were nobility and gentry. There was a corresponding social gradation among falcons. Some species were so low, socially, that even peasants might use them.

One of the eagles was reserved for emperors. Second rank was held by the Greenland falcon, the hunting bird of kings and other royalty. That Greenland was the home of this bird of kings makes works on falconry sources of Greenland history. For instance, the Emperor Frederick II, King of Sicily and Jerusalem, says in his book De Venandi cum Avibus that Iceland is an island which lies in the sea between Norway and Greenland—showing that Greenland was even better known to the Mediterranean lands than Iceland. This book was written between 1244 and 1250.

In 1396 a son of the Duke of Burgundy was taken prisoner by the Saracens, who demanded twelve Greenland falcons for his return. That might seem a difficult ransom, for these birds were never domesticated—they had to be captured in their native country. The young nobleman, however, was ransomed. This means, among other things, that the Saracens knew enough about Greenland and its falcons to ask for the birds, and that either there were a dozen Greenland falcons in Europe where the Duke of Burgundy could get them, or else a special consignment of falcons was obtained from Greenland.

We have referred to the Christianizing of Greenland in the year 1000, to the establishment of the bishopric and the growth of the church thereafter. Its power seems to have been less in Greenland proportionately than in European countries. The bishops seem to have been men of influence rather than authority.

To the historian, the most important thing about the Greenland church is that through proclamations and other documents that come from the Popes themselves, and through various church records, we are able both to find direct information about how things were in Greenland and to check our other sources for reliability. These other sources are chiefly from Iceland.

In the early farming period, as we have implied, the European population of Greenland was concentrated at the heads of the fjords. From the start there must have been some dependence on hunting, and a greater dependence on fishing. We find archaeological confirmation of this, for in the farm refuse heaps the bones of game animals appear early. As time advanced there were more and more of these bones, showing an increasing dependence upon game.

But game is scarce in the farming districts, more abundant on the headlands. Then as now it was scarcer in the south of West Greenland than farther north, as a result of natural law. For the chief game animals are the seal, walrus and polar bear. Seals may be found where there is no ice, but they are usually more numerous among ice and much easier to secure, by Eskimo technique. The walruses, easier to kill than seals and bigger, are creatures of the ice. They are more numerous where there is more ice, and more readily secured on the ice than in the water. The polar bear, superficially a land animal, is really a sea beast. He, like the walrus, depends on the ice.

Accordingly, people from both the southern and the northern colony went for hunts north along the coast, well beyond the northern colony. These were at first summer journeys, made with tents; but there developed gradually a custom of spending the winter.

The most northerly evidence of European colonization in western Greenland, that is undisputed by everyone, is a runic stone which was found about four hundred and fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle, some twenty miles farther north than the present Upernivik. The inscription is signed by three men and is dated in April, which shows that these three men at least must have spent the winter in the vicinity. This gives the minimum extent of their ranging by 1300.

Folklore gathered by Knud Rasmussen indicates that the medieval Europeans went much farther north. They used to come sailing at least as far north as Etah, where Peary, centuries later, had winter base stations for his polar work. Here numerous European objects from the medieval Greenland period have been dug up within the last few years by archaeologists, some of them well north of Etah in the Inglefield Land section around 79° N. Lat., about eight hundred and fifty miles north of the Circle. It is disputed whether these articles show that Norsemen, or people of mixed Norse-Eskimo blood, were living in the Inglefield district. It may be that full-blooded Eskimos secured these articles by trade from the Norsemen of the more southerly coast.

Captain Gunnar Isachsen, second-in-command of the Sverdrup Expedition of 1898-1902, has written about what he thinks are Norse finds on the shores of Jones Sound—not in Greenland but in Canada, west of Melville Sound and six hundred miles north of the Circle. He identified there large numbers of stones placed in such a way that they must have been shelters for eider ducks.

When the Norwegians colonized Iceland in the ninth century they brought with them the custom of building eider duck shelters. These are used in Iceland to this day without change of design (although new designs have also been introduced). The Icelanders would have taken the custom to Greenland when they colonized it.

Isachsen can have been mistaken in his identification; but that would be strange, for he is a Norwegian, used to seeing these shelters in his own country. Certainly nothing is more foreign to Eskimos than to build such shelters—unless, indeed, they had acquired this detail of European culture from the Norsemen.

Unless and until later students visit Jones Sound and show that Isachsen was mistaken, we must consider that Norsemen, of the centuries between the eleventh and the sixteenth, not only spread north along the Melville Sound coast of Greenland but also crossed the Sound and spread west into the Canadian islands.

The first premonitions of Greenland tragedy came in 1261, for in that year Greenland voluntarily ceased to be a republic and affiliated itself politically with Europe as a province of Norway, with a resulting decline in prosperity. It had been a republic since 990, or two hundred and seventy-one years—more than a hundred years longer than the United States has yet been a republic. During that period the country had been free to do the best it could for itself. Now, instead of receiving the expected favors from Norway, it became a stepchild, the victim of petty and major tyrannies, particularly of monopolistic trade.

Today most of us think of the America-facing coast of Greenland as running north and south where it really trends about northwest-southeast; Europe during the Middle Ages felt that it ran east and west. So we have the Icelandic, Norwegian, and other records speaking of the Eastern Settlement of Greenland where we would think of the Southern, and of the Western where we would speak of the Northern. The Eastern Settlement began near the south tip of Greenland and ran north along the West Greenland coast some one hundred miles, corresponding roughly to what now is the Julianehaab District. Then came the Uninhabited Coast, about one hundred and seventy miles to around Lat. 63° 45′ N. The section from there to about 65° N. Lat. was the Western Settlement, coinciding approximately with the present Godthaab District. Northwest from there, at least to three hundred miles beyond the Arctic Circle, ran the undefined stretch called the Northern Outposts (Nordurseta). At the height of prosperity during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were in the Eastern Settlement twelve churches, an Augustinian monastery, a Benedictine nunnery and about one hundred and ninety farms; the Western had four churches and some ninety farms.

The foremost historian of medieval Greenland was Professor Finnur Jonsson of the University of Copenhagen. In 1899 he estimated the population of the colony as never having exceeded 3,000; in a statement issued thirty years later he raised the estimate to 9,000. For meantime great numbers of ruins from the days of the republic had been excavated and a better basis for estimating had been gained.

Students who depended solely upon the direct literary sources of the history of the Greenland church and state, as found chiefly in Rome, Norway, and Iceland, have considered that the “last recorded voyage” to Greenland was either in 1410 or in 1448. They believed that even before this time all farms in the Western Settlement were tenantless, but considered that many if not most of the farms of the Eastern district were still occupied when this “last” contact with Europe took place.

Scandinavians reoccupied Greenland in 1721 with the support of a king who lived in Denmark, but under the leadership of Hans Egede, a missionary from Norway who had dedicated his life to the proposition that there still were Christian Scandinavians in Greenland whose faith needed rejuvenation. He was not the first to think and talk this way, for there had been through the centuries to 1492 a sequence of spokesmen, among them popes, who wanted the Roman Church strengthened in Greenland. After the Reformation there arose in Norway and elsewhere a desire to save the Greenlanders from the heresies of Rome and guide them toward the orthodoxy of Lutheranism.

In Egede’s time it had come to be believed even by Icelanders, better informed than any other Europeans on these problems, that the Eastern Settlement, with which their ancestors had had continual relations from the tenth to the fourteenth century, had been on the east coast of Greenland; the Western Settlement, on the west coast. The ruins of churches and homes and the graveyards of Christians which Egede found in southwestern Greenland were to him, therefore, remains of the Western Settlement. It appeared to him that, but for these monuments, his departed countrymen had left no sign. He did not hear Norse words when he listened to the speech of the Eskimos. The customs of Europe and the religion of Christianity had left no traces that he could find.

Some years later, and particularly when Egede’s children had secured a command of the Eskimo tongue, the missionaries began to pick up stories of how and why the Greenlanders had disappeared. Essentially these were that they had grown weak through the breakdown of commerce with Europe. They had not been able to secure iron for weapons, they had sickened because they had been deprived of those foods which are required for the health of Europeans. The weakened whites were then attacked by the Eskimos, not in any systematic way, but every now and then through specific quarrels. Finally the last small settlement was wiped out, the last white man destroyed.

Thus Egede and his successors in Greenland and the scholars of Europe built up a consistent explanation of how and why the medieval Europeans had disappeared.

According to the theory developed, there had been ominous signs of the final tragedy from the start. For the Icelandic colonists who first settled Greenland, though they had seen no people, had found here and there on the coast remains, such as peculiar skin boats, which they afterwards recognized as proving that the same people had been ahead of them in this part of Greenland as those whom the Greenlandic explorers following the year 1000 had met in Labrador—Eskimos. But seemingly the Eskimos themselves were never seen in Greenland during the first generation or two of occupancy by the Europeans. Then the contact with the Eskimos began, and increased steadily. By the thirteenth century there were recurrent attacks by the natives; around 1345 the northern colony of the Europeans, the Western Settlement, had been destroyed.

The account of the destruction of the northern colony we have from Ivar Bardarson, who was, from about 1341 to around 1360, manager of the farm attached to the Bishop’s seat at Gardar, now called Egaliko, in the Julianehaab District. No news had been received from the Northern Settlement for several years and Bardarson organized a relief expedition. They sailed north along the coast, past an uninhabited stretch that separated the two colonies, and came to farmhouses. They were afraid to land. Spying from the boats they saw domestic animals grazing around the farms, but there were no people. Bardarson assumed they had all been killed by the Eskimos.

The main forces of destruction, scholars agreed, were malnutrition due to the lack of a mixed diet suited to Europeans, and decimation by attacks of savages healthy and aggressive on a meat diet.

The historians speculated as to subsidiary causes. The Black Death had swept over Norway in 1348-49. Although there had apparently been no sailings during the period 1346-55 from Bergen, which then by royal decree had a monopoly of the Greenland trade, this school believes that some ship finally carried the disease. Assuming, then, a mortality as in Norway, the Greenland colony would have been so weakened that the remnants became an easy prey to the Eskimos.

Forthright statements that the Greenland settlements were declining are found chiefly in certain papal documents. We give samples.

In 1276 Pope John XXI received a letter from the Archbishop of Nidaros. This has not been found in the Vatican archives, which are as yet barely touched in the search for pre-Columbian records of Europe’s contact with America. However, the loss in this particular case is small, for the Pope summarized the Archbishop’s letter in his reply.

The Pope has noted what the Archbishop says about Greenland being a remote country and about the difficulty in this instance of carrying out the instructions to visit personally all parts of the Kingdom of Norway for the purpose of collecting tithes. The diocese of Greenland is so far distant that one can scarcely reach those parts within the time appointed for the payment of the tithe. Moreover, when Greenland is reached, the farms are so far apart that one has to camp out between settlements. When finally, after great effort, the tithes have been collected, there may be no ship returning to Norway during the season. The Pope now understands, from the letter of the Archbishop, that it may require five years from the time that the Archbishop receives the instructions of his superiors to gather the tax and bring it back to Norway. Nevertheless the Pope commands the Archbishop to procure suitable men for this task and to give the collection of the tithes his own diligent solicitude.

In 1279 the Vatican had again received a letter from the Archbishop of Nidaros concerning the delay in collecting the Greenland taxes. Pope Nicholas III wrote on January 31, 1279, that the Vatican perhaps had been a little hasty in excommunicating the Greenlanders for being so slow in paying their tithes, and notified the Archbishop that the decree was lifted.

In 1282 Martin IV wrote that he understood from the Archbishop’s letter that the recent consignment of the tithes consisted mainly of leather and of leather rope—commodities of which Norway itself produced an abundance, so that it was extremely difficult to sell them in the local market. The Archbishop wanted to know whether he should sell them for a nominal sum, hold them for a rise in the market, or ship the leather and ropes to Italy. The Pope agreed that the situation was difficult but thought that, everything considered, the Archbishop had better sell the leather for whatever he could get. And would he please hurry the proceeds along, for the Vatican was in desperate need of funds (to meet the bills of a projected crusade).

Nicholas V, in 1448, wrote to the Bishops of Iceland that he was saddened by the doleful story of the inhabitants of Greenland who for hundreds of years had been faithful to Holy Church. He had only now learned that these people had been attacked thirty years before by barbarians, who had devastated their homes, destroyed all but nine parochial churches, killed a large number of inhabitants, and carried many others away in captivity. The nine churches which were spared were those which “extend into the farthest districts, where they [the barbarians] could not approach conveniently because of the defiles of the mountains.” At the same time that this news had reached the Pope there had come the further word that many of the captives had returned to their homes, making such repairs as they could and attempting to carry on divine worship. But their poverty was so great that for the entire thirty years they had been unable to support priests and a bishop, and had during this period been deprived of priestly guidance, except for a few who, after arduous travel, “had succeeded in reaching those churches which the barbarian hand had passed unhurt.” The Greenlanders now were petitioning the Vatican to send a representative to minister to their spiritual wants. The Pope therefore commanded the Bishops of Iceland, “whom we understand to be one of the nearer bishops of the aforesaid island,” to send to Greenland priests to govern the restored churches and administer the Sacrament. Also, if it seemed expedient, the Iceland Bishops were instructed to ordain some practical and able person as Bishop of Greenland.

In 1492 Alexander VI, who had just ascended the throne of Peter, gave out a sort of letter of credit to Matthias, bishop-elect, who was about to devote himself to reviving the Church in Greenland. The Pope recites that when he was in minor orders (around 1456) he was already interested in the Greenland Church, and that when he was a bishop he participated in the election of their beloved brother Matthias to the bishopric of Greenland. Now that he is Pope he continues his interest and is concerned over the deplorable condition of the Greenlandic Church, which has had no resident priest for about eighty years—a period during which no ship has visited the country. The Greenlanders who “are accustomed to live on dried fish and milk for lack of bread, wine and oil,” have as a result in many cases renounced their sacred baptismal vows.

The general idea that the European colony was destroyed through the breakdown of commerce with Europe, through the attack of “pirates” (as one letter calls them) who were Eskimos, with possible help from the Black Death, has been coaxed along right down to our own time, until in 1935 Poul Nörlund gives it the benefit and implications of what are to him the up-to-the-minute verdicts not merely of archaeology and geology but also of physiology and dietetics.

Nörlund and other somewhat less recent commentators have, then, added new trimmings to the Bardarson-Egede-Rink picture. One of them is that the climate of southwestern Greenland has deteriorated since the colonization, and that poverty and scarcity of food resulted in part from the growth of ice fields on land and the filling of the sea with drift ice, thus restricting the acreage of the grazing fields and meadows, decreasing their output through a shortening and chilling of the summer—rendering commerce less profitable to European ships because there were now fewer things for which to trade, and making navigation difficult because of the ice blockades.

This theory proceeds along the line that commerce declined through these natural causes and through the Norwegian monopoly of trade. There came, as a result, a physical deterioration which has been shown by archaeologists, particularly through skeletal proof of rickets and other deficiency diseases. It is no mere theory, says Nörlund, but is actually proven through the skeletons, that the people were weakened by malnutrition—the assumption being that, although Eskimos are healthy on a meat diet, Europeans cannot be; and that the cereal and other vegetal elements in the food of the Greenlanders became insufficient for health through the above mentioned decrease of commerce.

But whereas most of the school to which Nörlund belongs previously wanted to put the final extinction of the Norse colony fairly early in the fifteenth century, Nörlund concedes that evidence of many kinds makes it highly probable, if not certain, that European civilization was still being maintained by a people of Christian religion and blond complexion in southern west Greenland at least thirty years after Columbus.

We have now devoted all the space we can to what has long been the orthodox view. We turn to contrary views, which are frequently spoken of as new, but which have been maintained sporadically at least since 1776.

The main attack on the theory originated by the Norwegian Egede, and brought to full stature by the Dane Nörlund, came from the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen at various times, but chiefly through the publication of the Norwegian original of the book which we have in two English volumes, called In Northern Mists (London and New York, 1911). However, in working out the chronology for the predecessors of Frobisher for the 1938 Argonaut edition of The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, we happened upon several predecessors of Nansen. We shall mention here only three. Two of these were apparently unknown to Nansen; for he was always meticulously fair in giving precedences and still does not mention them in his carefully documented two-volume work.

In 1774 the Icelandic missionary Egill Thorhallason was in Greenland and visited what we now know were both the Eastern and the Western Settlements, although he thought he had seen only the Western Settlement, the Eastern being still considered to be on the east coast. He was familiar with the views of Egede and his successors, and ridiculed them in an appendix to his Rudera, published in Copenhagen in 1776.

There are in literature few better examples of how clear minds, even in different centuries, can arrive at the same conclusions from the same evidence, than the brief and trenchant appendix of Thorhallason compared with the lengthy and documented chapters of Nansen.

Thorhallason feels that perhaps most absurd of all the absurdities in the “orthodox” theory is the contention that the Black Death, introduced from Norway, so weakened the Europeans in Greenland that they fell a ready prey to the Eskimos. We know, says Thorhallason, that there was a great deal of contact between the Europeans and the Eskimos during the fourteenth century. What reason have we to think, he asks, that a plague coming from Europe would pick out only Europeans for destruction and leave the Eskimos in full number to strike down a few surviving whites? Thorhallason contends that the reverse would have been more likely; for European plagues, so far as he knows, are more deadly to American natives than to Europeans.

Thorhallason bears down on this argument and suggests that the Black Death, if it had reached Greenland, would have killed a higher percentage of Eskimos than of Europeans, reversing the strength ratio, if it was previously in favor of the Eskimos. He does not say so, but evidently means that if there had been a Black Death the next act would more reasonably have been an extermination of the few surviving Eskimos by the Europeans.

Next in absurdity, says Thorhallason, is the idea that the “barbarians” or “pirates” whom the Pope mentioned were Eskimos. What can be more ridiculous than to say that Eskimos were able, in their “ships,” to attack only those Europeans who lived on promontories, but could not reach those who lived in the depth of the fjords? On the contrary, he says, the Eskimos would surely be able to ferret out any corner that was available to the whites. The barbarians to whom the Pope referred as taking prisoners on the forelands, and as being unable to reach the depth of the fjords, must have been Europeans in big ships. They had, perhaps, no local pilotage and so were timid about the narrow fjords.

Thorhallason takes up the Pope’s statement that the barbarians took prisoners, whom they repatriated after several years. He thinks it absurd to believe that Eskimos would carry off captives. But this is just what you might expect from European pirates of the fourteenth century. Doubly illogical would it be for the Eskimos to repatriate captives; it would be logical for Europeans to do so.

Thorhallason feels that, if not absurd, it is scarcely reasonable to suppose that the Europeans and the Eskimos were hostile to each other in Greenland, and that the Eskimos were the aggressors. His whole knowledge of this people, he says, inclines him to believe that they would have been friendly, helpful, sympathetic. Thorhallason knew from the Icelandic sagas how arrogant the Norsemen had been in Europe. But he feels that in Greenland, facing new conditions, they would have acquired a humility and an adaptability that would make them almost as ready to be friends with the Eskimos as the Eskimos were to be friends with them.

Adoption of the Thorhallason view leads to a decision that Bardarson was wrong in thinking that the Eskimos had destroyed the Northern Settlement; that it is wrong to understand Vatican documents as saying (or is a mistake in the documents themselves) that the Greenlandic Europeans were attacked by Eskimos; and that everybody must have been wrong in thinking that the colony disappeared at all, in the sense of being exterminated. What happened was that, when European commerce declined, the European colonists gradually adopted an Eskimo culture, intermarried with the people, and disappeared only in the sense that their culture disappeared.

Seemingly unaware of Thorhallason, the Norwegian sociologist and historian Eilert Sundt, in a note to his edition of Hans Egede’s diary (Kristiania, Norway, 1860) gives only about half of Thorhallason’s reasoning but arrives at the same conclusion.

Sundt found that, among white families dwelling in Lapp districts of Norway, within a generation the tall and blond Norwegians begin to feel that the Lapps are a more successful and in that sense a better people, so that not only do the Norwegian men marry Lapp women but Norwegian girls come to prefer Lapp husbands, since they are more at home in the country and are better providers. And, queries Sundt, what reason have we to think that the modern Norwegian is different from the Norseman of the Middle Ages in Greenland? European culture would be less well adapted to Greenland conditions, and men would be the more successful, the better providers, the more nearly they adapted themselves to Eskimo ways. Thus, as among the Lapps whom Sundt knew personally, there would have been not only a marriage of Eskimo women to Norse men but also, by the choice of the women themselves, a deal of marriage between Norse women and Eskimo men.

Sundt closes by saying it is pathetic that Hans Egede, who longed for nothing so much as to discover in Greenland traces of the former Icelandic colonists, must have seen (without understanding what he saw) many who bore in their faces the clear proof that they were in part of European descent. Egede unknowingly revealed that he had seen European traits occasionally among the Greenland Eskimos of 1721 when he said: “Both the men and women ... have broad faces and thick lips; they are flat-nosed and of a brown complexion. Still, some of them are attractive and of a fair complexion.”

The question whether the European colony disappeared by extermination or amalgamation threatens to become an absurdly nationalistic issue. For most Danes favor the extermination theory, and most Norwegians the one of amalgamation. There are notable exceptions. For instance, the Dane Gustav Meldorf agrees (in 1906) with those writers who during the last one hundred and fifty years have held the opinion that the “barbarian” attacks upon the Greenlanders were made by European pirates or privateers. He considers that probably those Europeans who survived the pirate raids were befriended by the Eskimos and eventually amalgamated with them. He mentions Thorhallason and appears to have been acquainted with his view although he seems not to have read his appendix.

As said, the attack upon the extermination theory which the world has most noted was in Nansen’s In Northern Mists. He uses the same arguments that Thorhallason and Sundt used, buttressing them with scholarship and adding a few details of his own. He makes it clear that there is no sound reason to believe that the medieval colony suffered from a change of climate. Besides, a chilling of the climate might have had effects that were on the whole good. An increase of ice in the sea, for instance, might have interfered somewhat with husbandry and with commerce, but it would have brought a compensating increase of game. For it is the veriest commonplace of northern countries that the more sea ice there is the more game there is, and the easier to secure. This, indeed, was one reason why the colonists, even during the early and largely pastoral stage of the settlement, used nevertheless to have their hunting outposts in the far north.

With greater scholarship, Nansen was better equipped than Thorhallason in at least one other way for tearing up the orthodox picture of how the Greenlanders disappeared. Thorhallason was a missionary from Iceland, where there are no big game animals. As a religious worker from a pastoral country he was doubly not a hunter. Nansen was an experienced hunter, well grounded in the lore of the chase.

As a practical hunter, and as one who knew Eskimo hunters, Nansen asks us to consider the facts on which Bardarson grounded his conclusion that the Europeans of the Northern Settlement were killed off by Eskimos.

Bardarson was not a Greenlander but a Norwegian temporarily resident there as superintendent of the bishop’s farm in the southern district. His understanding of Greenland matters would be incomplete. The southern colony was little in touch with the Eskimos, as compared with the northern colony.

For several years none of the northern colonists had come south. They had no reason to come except for European wares, and we know that trade with Europe had sunk low before this period. On the other hand, they had a pressing reason for going north: they were more and more dependent upon hunting, less and less upon husbandry, and the hunting was better up north. Besides, traders usually visit their customers. Northerners who hoped for European trade would expect a visit from the south. They would not use up time on a southerly journey which was pressingly required for the northern hunt.

The southerners were curious to know how the northerners were getting on. Perhaps the new farm superintendent combined the traditional good Norwegian seamanship with the equally traditional Norwegian venturesomeness and a desire to see new countries. He made an occasion for going north, at once eager to see strange things and a bit fearful of the Eskimos who were supposed to be powerful in witchcraft, as were all similar people (for instance, the Lapps in northern Norway).

When the Bardarson party came opposite a farm of the Northern Settlement they pulled close inshore and had a good view of the house and of farm animals grazing about. But they saw no people. Doubtless they shouted, and probably they hovered about just offshore for a good while, finally convincing themselves that there was no human being anywhere near. They then returned to the southern colony and reported that the people of the Northern Settlement had been exterminated by the savages.

We have no information as to whether the southern colony accepted Bardarson’s view that the northerners had been exterminated. The document we have is not even written by Bardarson himself. It was written in Norway after he had returned to his own country, his assignment to the Greenland job finished. Then apparently Bardarson gave verbal information to someone who knew how to write. There resulted the document we have, a memorandum by an unknown Norwegian of what Bardarson told him.

Nansen considers that Bardarson’s interpretation of what he saw (perhaps rather the interpretation given in Norway to Bardarson’s statement) is preposterous: that it shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation in Greenland, of hunting peoples in general and of the Eskimos in particular. He says it is easily possible that Eskimos, meeting domestic animals, might kill them as if they were a new kind of wild animal; or that, understanding them to be domestic and the property of a given person, they might nevertheless kill them. Their purpose in killing, in either case, would be for eating. Eskimos might have killed farm animals without killing the people; but they certainly would not have killed the people without killing the farm animals.

The truth was that the northern colonists were now mainly devoted to hunting, but they had not yet wholly discontinued the breeding of sheep and cattle. It was mid-summer and the entire family were in one of the mountain valleys gathering eggs, catching salmon at a waterfall, or pursuing the caribou which, then as now, would have been hunted at this season.

Had Bardarson understood the conditions he would have inferred that all was well, from seeing the farm animals grazing about. The people, he would have known, were away because it was the hunting season.

There seems little doubt that, had Bardarson not been frightened by his misinterpretation of what he saw at the first farm, he would have gone on to other farms, eventually finding one where some at least of the family were not away hunting.

The records preserved from the time after Bardarson are mainly documents from Rome, of which we have given specimens. It is more than possible that communication between the north and south colonies was resumed after his time and was known in Iceland, even in Norway and at the Vatican, without documents surviving; and it is also probable that cataloguing and arranging of the Vatican archives will reveal further documents and make them fully available for study. However, if not at Bardarson’s time, then perhaps not much later, the northern colonists gave up husbandry pursuits and went over completely to hunting. Thereupon they would naturally migrate northward, gradually or in a concerted movement of a large group. For it had now been known to them for centuries that the better hunting was in that direction.

Like Thorhallason, Nansen points out first that the Black Death may never have reached Greenland, and second that, if it did arrive, it must have killed natives as well as whites. He agrees that it was European pirates and not Eskimos that would have devastated the forelands without being able to reach the heads of the fjords. Like Thorhallason he says that for Eskimos to capture people for slavery is absurd, although for Europeans of the time it was logical. Doubly absurd would it be for the Eskimos (though logical for Europeans) to repatriate captured slaves, which the Pope says was done.

Thorhallason rested his argument about the pirates on common sense and a general knowledge of history. Nansen was able to document his conclusion; for he knew that in 1432 King Henry VI of England made an agreement with his royal uncle Eric of Pomerania, king of the Scandinavian countries, that English privateers should repatriate in dependencies of King Eric’s realm prisoners who had been captured there. Among the dependencies were both Iceland and Greenland. So here you have a royal English promise that the very thing would be done by the pirates (or privateers) which Pope Nicholas V says was done by the “barbarians.”

It is mainly through documentation that Nansen carries beyond Thorhallason the attack upon the contention, from Egede to Nörlund, that the blood of the European Greenlanders disappeared from Greenland. In this sphere the one thing which Nansen does not thoroughly demolish is Nörlund’s contention that signs of rickets in the skeletons found at Herjolfsnes are proof that the medieval Norsemen disappeared from the whole of Greenland partly through malnutrition. So we follow that question beyond Nansen, aiming to show that while Nörlund is correct for Herjolfsnes, and for such trading centers as may have resembled Herjolfsnes, he is wrong in extending conclusions derived from a trading village to those hunting or farming communities which contained the larger part of the Greenland population during the centuries 1400 and 1500.

Nörlund’s basic assumption is that Europeans will suffer malnutrition on an all-flesh diet, though Eskimos do not.

It was demonstrated by the Stefansson expeditions, through the experience of more than twenty non-Eskimos between the years 1906 and 1918, that everyone who tried it was as healthy on a diet consisting wholly of animal tissue and water as he had ever been on any diet. These men included not only more than half a dozen European nationalities but also South Sea Islanders. It is known from other sources that Negroes do as well on an all-meat diet as Eskimos or whites.

A survey of the history of human diet through the resources of anthropology will show that in many different countries and climates, in the remote and recent past as well as in the present, large numbers of people have lived without malnutrition on diets where elements from the vegetable kingdom were either wholly absent or present in negligible quantity. No doctrine of that rapidly changing science, dietetics, is so surely on its way out as the notion that the only diet on which you can have normal health is one of elaborate and careful food mixture. The fact is, of course, as most anthropologists have long believed and as dietitians are now beginning to realize, that you can be healthy on a vegetarian diet, that you can be healthy on a flesh diet, and that you can be healthy on a blending of the two.

In any case, there is no evidence that people who live exclusively on flesh have a poorer chance of normal health than those who use, in addition to meat, such things as were imported from Europe to Greenland during the Middle Ages.

This is the general statement on health. The particular one concerning rickets is that an investigator of Nörlund’s own nationality, Alfr. Bertelsen, has shown the disease is today fairly common in Greenland within the families of Danes who live mainly on food imported from Europe; and that rickets is practically unknown among those Eskimos in Greenland who still live on their native diet.

Dr. William A. Thomas of Chicago reported on deficiency diseases through the Journal of the American Medical Association from his observations in Greenland and northern Labrador. In Greenland he concluded that “among these primitive, carnivorous people there is neither scurvy nor rickets,” thus confirming Bertelsen. In Labrador the natives have for so long been in contact with civilization that they have abandoned their primitive diet in favor of European foods. Among these Dr. Thomas found rickets to be “almost universal.”

More recent Norwegian testimony confirms the Danish and American sources with regard to rickets. Dr. Arne Höygaard published at Oslo in 1937 “Some Investigations Into the Physiology and Nosology of Eskimos from Angmagssalik in Greenland: A Preliminary Statement.” He says: “There was possibly slight rickets in the case of three small children in the colony, but none in the outlying district.” The context shows the “slight rickets” to have been among families who lived partly on native and partly on European food; the absence of rickets was where European food was also absent.

While the most striking Nörlund argument is that the Europeans of Greenland during the Middle Ages suffered from rickets because they had insufficient European food, he also gives a picture of general physical breakdown. Such a breakdown would necessarily include tuberculosis. It is, therefore, pertinent that Dr. Höygaard writes (personal communication dated June 29, 1938) that he has been investigating the relation of tuberculosis to diet in east Greenland, and that he has found a better prognosis when the patients live in the primitive way than when they use, in addition to the meat, considerable amounts of a food rich in carbohydrates. Now grains (the only noteworthy source of carbohydrates available by European commerce to the medieval Greenlanders) rank high, if not at the top, among those food elements for the want of which Nörlund thinks the Europeans died out from Greenland during the Middle Ages. Thus he recommends for better health the very factors which Höygaard finds detrimental in the same climate.

True, Nörlund argues that carbohydrates are necessary for Europeans but not for Eskimos. However, as we have said, the existence of such a racial difference is a pure assumption. What little evidence we have tends in the opposite direction—the presence or absence of things like vitamins or carbohydrates apparently will have about the same physiological effect upon different races.

The place where Nörlund found the skeletons that showed rickets was the main trading station of south Greenland, Herjolfsnes, where people would have more European food than anywhere else in Greenland—partly because the ships arrived there and partly because the townspeople and the surrounding community made their living by dealing with these ships.

In other words, what Nörlund has really shown is only that dietetics and physiology were the same in Greenland during the Middle Ages as they now are in Greenland and in Labrador—that those who live on European foods, or on native foods handled in the European way, will develop rickets and other deficiency troubles.

So we can forecast with confidence that, whenever archaeological studies of Greenland are carried far enough, it will be established that skeletons show rickets where there are evidences, or at least probabilities, of a good deal of European contact; and that skeletons will not show rickets, nor marked signs of any of the deficiency diseases, where the evidence or the probabilities lead us to believe that the people were living chiefly on Greenland food prepared in the native Greenland way.

The medieval Europeans in Greenland needed for survival only the good sense to realize that they ought to change the European for the Eskimo way of life. Nansen puts it well where he says that he cannot think so badly of his own countrymen of the twelfth to the fifteenth century as to believe they were too stupid to learn that the road to salvation lay through shedding the customs they had brought with them and adopting those of their new country.

Nörlund has shown in our cited volume that the Europeans were still surviving as Europeans in Greenland to at least 1520.

The summer of 1578 Frobisher went ashore in Greenland and saw an encampment whose people had fled. He found there an iron trivet and things which showed that the people had “trade with some ciuill people, or else are in deede themselues artificiall workemen,” and thus very different from the Eskimos, whom he knew in what we now call Baffin Island.

Nothing is clearer among students of the Eskimos than that a trivet has little or no place in their way of life, and that any piece of iron is sure to be cut up immediately into things for which they have use. It may seem strange to the casual reader, but is a fact widely attested, that things like rifle barrels or pieces of an anchor can be worked by Eskimos with Stone Age tools, and are shaped by them into knives, spearheads, arrow points, and particularly into needles.

Therefore, the people who left a trivet at their encampment, when they fled on the approach of Frobisher, either were not wholly Eskimo in their way of life or else were Eskimos who had such an abundant supply of iron that they could afford to leave some of it unused, in the shape of a trivet. In other words, you must choose one or the other theory: that this party were not wholly Eskimo, or that they were Eskimos who had had an extensive European contact of which we are unaware except through this evidence.

In 1586 John Davis found in Greenland a burial place of men who were dressed in skin, and who had no sign of European contact except that there was a cross laid upon the grave. The student of comparative religions, or of the history of religion, will consider nothing more reasonable than this discovery. For it is well known that the symbolism of a belief will survive longer than the belief itself. The people whose grave was found by Davis may not have been Christian in any other sense, but they still preserved the symbolism of the cross.

Seventy years after Davis we have a confirmatory statement from the Frobisher-Davis region. It comes to us round-about through a book on the West Indies. A Frenchman, Charles de Rochefort, in his Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam, 1658), digresses to include an account which he has received from Nicolas Tunes of Flushing. Tunes described a people he had found on his voyage of 1656 to Davis Strait, at 64° 10′ N. Lat., therefore in the vicinity of Gilbert Sound. De Rochefort says (pages 194-95): “Regarding the people who inhabited this country, our voyagers saw two sorts, who lived together with good relations and perfect amity. One sort had a very tall stature, well formed bodies, of a fairly white complexion.... The others were much smaller, of an olive complexion, well enough proportioned in their members except that their legs were short and thick.”

Tunes, then, saw in 1656 two kinds of people in the district where, Nörlund concedes, European Greenlanders were living at least to 1520. One sort Tunes describes as if they might have been nearly or quite pure Eskimo; the other as if they could have been half or three-quarters European.

Both schools of thought with regard to the lost colony agree that, among the present 16,000 “Eskimos” in Greenland, few if any are without European blood, while some are so European in appearance that, conventionally dressed, they would pass unnoticed in any American or European gathering.

For this high percentage of European traits, including light eyes and hair, the two schools advance different explanations. Those who believe that there was extensive intermarriage between the two races during the Middle Ages, and that the civilization disappeared but not the blood, claim that these mixed people get half of their European traits through descent from the lost colony. Those who believe in the extinction of the medieval Europeans claim that all the European qualities, or practically all, are to be explained by mixture with Europeans since the time of Frobisher and Davis, chiefly through intermarriages since the Danes took over, following Egede in 1721.

Because the exterminationists have the advantage in point of numbers, we let the survivalists have the last say, through two quotations:

We repeat the statement of Hans Egede for what he saw in west Greenland during the years following 1721: “Both the men and women ... have broad faces and thick lips; they are flat-nosed and of a brown complexion. Still, some of them are attractive and of a fair complexion.”

To supplement Egede’s statement we use a translation from the mentioned Norwegian sociologist and historian, Eilert Sundt, fellow countryman and admirer of Hans Egede. In his 1860 edition of Egede’s diary, Sundt comments on the above passage: “Egede had probably expected to find recognisable countrymen; but the indefatigable way in which he took care of the ‘savages’ that he found there will please us still more when there is a reason to think that the remains of the Norwegian population really had assimilated with the Eskimos, so that he—though without understanding what he saw—had on his journey south [along the west coast of Greenland] a glimpse of his countrymen’s fair hair and blue eyes.”