The first account of Greenland given to the world, indeed the first mention of that region in literature, is by Adam of Bremen, an ecclesiastical official and geographical author.
He interviewed in 1069 the enterprising king Sweyn of Denmark, and acquired from him divers Scandinavian and other northern items which Adam embodied about 1076 in his work “Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis,” the Description of the Northern Islands. Nansen quotes, with other matter, the following passages:175
... On the north this ocean flows past the Orchades, thence endlessly around the circle of the earth, having on the left Hybernia, the home of the Scots, which is now called Ireland, and on the right the skerries of Nordmannia, and farther off the islands of Iceland and Greenland....
Furthermore, there are many other islands in the great ocean, of which Greenland is not the least; it lies farther out in the ocean, opposite the mountains of Suedea, or the Riphean range. To this island, it is said, one can sail from the shore of Nortmannia [sic] in five or seven days, as likewise to Iceland. The people there are blue (“cerulei”, bluish-green) from the salt water; and from this the region takes its name. They live in a similar fashion to the Icelanders, except that they are more cruel and trouble seafarers by predatory attacks. To them also, as is reported, Christianity has lately been wafted.
It was in fact about seventy-five years since Leif, son of Eric the Red, according to the sagas, had effected that wafting from the Christian court of Norway to the still pagan Norsemen of his father’s far-western domain. For Adam clearly means these white people and not the Eskimos, with whom they had not yet come in contact and of whom no whisper had yet reached the European world unless it related to relics of former occupancy discerned on first landing. It is surely matter for astonishment to find the ruddy followers of hot-blooded Eric described as bluish-green and so conspicuous in this complexion that it gave their region its name. Perhaps there is no more curious instance to be found of the inveterate human tendency to read into any unfamiliar name some meaning that seems plausible.
It is not clear where Adam supposed Greenland to be located; perhaps he, too, was not clear about the matter. The earlier of his two passages on the subject seems to call for something like the true location in the far west; but the later mention of the mountains of Sweden has been understood by the most learned commentators to indicate a site directly north of Norway. King Sweyn perhaps had a fairly good idea of the sailing courses for Iceland and Greenland, but his guest may have assimilated the information rather confusedly. Adam seems convinced that Greenland was a distinctly oceanic island, with no suggestion of any near relation to any continent. In this respect he differs from certain maps of the fifteenth century with which we shall presently have to deal. We know now that the truth lies between these views; that the highly glaciated mass which we name in its entirety Greenland is, indeed, an island and probably the largest of islands but an island with the aspect and attributes of a peninsula, being barely severed from that polar archipelago which crowns our American mainland and being not very remote at one point from the mainland itself.
Adam’s idea of oceanic insulation was accepted in many quarters, as the maps disclose. Of course, they may not have derived it from him in all instances, directly or indirectly, but at least they shared it. Usually the name, slightly changed, becomes the equivalent “Green Island” in one or another of several languages. Thus, to take a very late instance, the map of Coppo, 1528176 (Fig. 13), discloses near the true site of Greenland a mass of land elongated from east to west, but clearly all at sea with no greater land near it, and labeled Isola Verde. There seems no room for doubt of the meaning or origin of this name. That any land found there should be an island of the sea was the natural assumption of geographers at that time. Maps of the early sixteenth century generally show a scattering of islands south of North America sometimes approaching an archipelago, sometimes more widely distributed, and in either case being substitutes for what we now know as North America and its appendages.
In another well-known map177 (Fig. 7), an unnamed cartographer, said to be Catalan, probably about 1480, delineates an elongated Illa Verde (using the Portuguese name for island), locating it southwest of Iceland, which bears the name Fixlanda, but is easily identifiable by its outline and geographical features. His Illa Verde runs nearly north and south, approximating more closely than Coppo’s island the true trend of Greenland. It also by its greater bulk seems founded on more adequate information. It is equally at sea and remote from other land, except that off its concave southern end, with a narrow interval, lies a large circular island named Brazil, our old mythical acquaintance of medieval maps not often located so far westward but, as we have seen in Chapter IV, apparently intended to represent the Gulf of St. Lawrence region. These two islands strikingly resemble in general situation and arrangement the Greenland and Estotiland (Labrador) in a map (Fig. 14) illustrating Torfaeus’ early eighteenth century “Gronlandia,”178 except that the rounded outline of Estotiland is not completed, its proportional area is greater than “Brazil,” the strait between the two bodies of land is a little wider, and the lower end of Torfaeus’ Greenland is not made concave like that of Illa Verde. But again there can be no doubt that the Illa Verde of the Catalan (if he were a Catalan) represents the Greenland of Adam of Bremen and the sagas.
To the same origin, in a remoter sense, we may ascribe the rather large Insula Viridis of Schöner, 1520,179 which is brought down to a latitude between that of southern Ireland and that of northern Spain and something east of mid-ocean. It must seem that the map-maker had quite lost sight of any relation between this Latinized Green Island and the true Greenland of the northwest.
This is even more obviously true of Nicolay’s map of 1560180 (Fig. 6), which carries Verde into the Newfoundland Banks, even nearer than his Brazil to a broken-up Newfoundland; and of Zaltieri’s map of 1566,181 which plants Verde rather close to “C. Ras” (Cape Race), with only a narrow strip of water between. These cartographers undoubtedly indicated American habitats for their little island; but they can have had no thought of confusing it with Greenland, which they well knew and which Zaltieri distinctly shows as Grutlandia. They would be far from admitting a common origin. Perhaps in most of such northern cases a conception like Coppo’s of Greenland as an oceanic island is at the root of the derivation; but successive copyings, modifications, and shiftings may have altered the area, form, and location, while the clue was gradually lost and only the name remained—hardly as a reminder, for it is of too general descriptive application.
There is, indeed, one instance of a Green Island with which Greenland can have had nothing whatever to do. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s sketch map of 1511182 shows a small tropical Isla Verde near Trinidad; it is apparently Tobago. Doubtless its luxuriance of vegetation prompted the name.
This may have happened in other instances of warm climates or even in temperate zones where grass and foliage grow freely; so that we in many cases cannot distinguish on the maps the Green Islands, real or fanciful, which acquired their name as a remote legacy of Eric’s land from those which were called “green” simply because they were green. Both derivations may sometimes apply; but the islands of the far northwest bearing that name, like Coppo’s island and the Catalan’s Illa Verde, must naturally go into the former category.
As we have seen, Green Islands were scattered rather widely; but the name occurs most often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the middle or eastern part of the ocean to indicate a small island, having Mayda (Vlaenderen) for its rather distant consort. Desceliers indeed, in 1546183 (Fig. 9), shows it in the same longitude as the tip of Labrador, but this is done by carrying Labrador too far eastward. St. Brandan’s Island is a neighbor on his map. Ortelius, in 1570184 (Fig. 10) and Mercator, in 1587,185 represent Y Verde west of Vlaenderen in the region north of the Azores. In the eighteenth century it still held its ground west of France in the eastern Atlantic as Isla Verde, Isla Verte, Ile Verte, Ilha Verde, and Green Island. By the early part of the nineteenth century it had, after its kind, dwindled to Green Rock—Brazil Island similarly becoming Brazil Rock—as dubious rocks became easier to believe in than dubious islands. Perhaps the well-known actual instances of Rockall and the Virgin Rocks may have prompted credence in other spears and knolls of the earth crust here and there reaching the surface.
The Hydrographic Office does not believe in any such Green Rock or Green Island but supplies, in a letter to the writer, a mariner’s yarn which is not without interest and may be evidence for the rock as far as it goes.
“Captain Tulloch, of New Hampshire, states that an acquaintance of his, Captain Coombs, of the ship Pallas, of Bath, Maine, in keeping a lookout for Green Island actually saw it on a remarkably fine day when the sea was smooth. According to the story, he went out in his boat and examined it and found it to be a large rock covered with green moss. The rock did not seem much larger than a vessel floating bottom upward, and it was smooth all around. The summit was higher than a vessel’s bottom would appear out of the water, being about twenty feet above the surface of the sea. Captain Coombs added that if the object had not been so high he would have thought it to be a capsized vessel. A sounding taken near this spot shows that a depth of 1,500 fathoms exists there.”
So Greenland, misunderstood and carried southward, dwindles to what may be taken for a capsized vessel’s hull, the existence of which is denied by those who best should know. Or, to take it the other way about, the traditions of Green Island, dwindling, prompted the mariner’s fancy to develop a Green Rock; and Green Island is in numerous instances derived mainly, even if remotely, from Greenland, reinforced sometimes by implications of attractiveness.
There can be no doubt that the Down East sea captain, who was so quick to perceive green vegetation on his fancied Green Island, came nearer the true explanation of Greenland’s name than the good prebendary of Bremen with his bluish-green Norsemen colored by the sea. It is pretty well understood that about 985 or 986 Eric Rauda (Eric the Red, or Ruddy), the first explorer and colonizer of this new region, applied the name at least partly as an advertisement of fertility and promising conditions for the encouragement of Icelandic colonists. This is the way Ari Frode (the Wise), the best informed man of Iceland, puts it in his surviving Libellus of the “Islendingabok” about a century later:186
This country which is called Greenland was discovered and colonized from Iceland. Eric the Red was the name of the man, an inhabitant of Breidafirth, who went thither from here and settled at that place, which has since been called Ericsfirth. He gave a name to the country and called it Greenland and said that it must persuade men to go thither if it had a good name. They found there both east and west in the country the dwellings of men and fragments of boats and stone implements such that it might be perceived from these that that manner of people had been there who have inhabited Wineland and whom Greenlanders call Skraelings. And this when he set about the colonization of the country was fourteen or fifteen winters before the introduction of Christianity here in Iceland, according to what a certain man who himself accompanied Eric the Red thither informed Thorkell Gellison.
This last was an uncle of Ari, a man of liberal and inquiring mind and one of Ari’s most valued sources of knowledge as to the affairs of earlier generations.
The passage has been often quoted, but that Eric was largely justified in his nomenclature is less generally known. Greenland to the intending colonists would naturally mean not the ice-enshrouded waste of the almost continental interior nor yet the forbidding cliffs of the eastern coast guarded by a nearly impassable floe-laden Arctic current, but the really habitable thousand-mile fringe of uncovered land along the southwestern shore, on the average fifty miles wide and occasionally much wider. It was partly shut in by forbidding headlands and perverse currents, but feasible of access when the true course was disclosed. Some parts of this region were, and still are, green with grass and bright with summer flowers. Nansen, who certainly ought to know, declares that the Greenland sites chosen would have seemed more attractive than Iceland to an Icelander. Rink, who was connected with the Greenland government for a full generation, mentions certain places with special approval and regards life in most parts of the inhabited region quite contentedly.187 Professor Hovgaard tells us:188
It was on this strip of land that the Icelanders settled at the end of the tenth century. Though barren on the outer shores and islands and on the hills, it is covered at the inner part of the fiords on the low level by a rich growth of grass together with stunted birch trees and various bushes, particularly willows. On the north side of the valleys crowberries (Empetrum nigrum) may be found....
Eric settled in Ericsfiord, the present Tunugdliarfik, at a place which he called Brattahlid, now Kagsiarsuk, in 985 or 986. Two distinct colonies were founded, the Eastern Settlement, extending from about Cape Farewell to a point well beyond Cape Desolation, comprising the whole of Julianehaab Bay and the coast past Ivigtut, and the Western Settlement, beginning about one hundred and seventy miles farther north at Lysufiord, [i.e. Agnafiord], the present Ameralikfiord, comprising the district of Godthaab.
The fiord next Ericsfiord in the Eastern Settlement was Einarsfiord, now Igalikofiord. These fiords were separated at their head by a low and narrow strip of land, the present Igaliko Isthmus. It was here, at Gardar, that the Althing of Greenland met, and here was also found the bishop’s seat, established at the beginning of the twelfth century. There were as many as sixteen churches in Greenland, for almost every fiord had its own church on account of the long distances and difficult traveling between the fiords.
The unfamiliar localities above named may be followed by the aid of the accompanying map (Fig. 15) copied from Finnur
Jónsson’s maps,189 which embody the results of the research of the best experts and scholars with the aid of relics on the ground and surviving records. It is apparent that from the first to last the heart of Greenland was about the low, fairly fertile, favorable tract near the heads of the two fiords named for Eric and his friend, Einar, and not far from Eric’s Greenland home. The Western Settlement was a comparatively small offshoot, with four churches only, yet it contrived to maintain existence for between three and four centuries, being at last obliterated, as is supposed, by the Eskimos. The main settlement was still more enduring, having a continuous record of nearly half a millennium, a history not surpassed in duration by some far more populous and powerful nations.
This seems marvelous, if it be true that the entire population never exceeded 2,000 souls, as Nansen and Hovgaard have supposed. Rink, on the other hand, estimated the maximum at 10,000.190 Some intermediate number would seem more likely than either extreme, if we may hazard a conjecture where doctors disagree. The prosperity of the colony, such as it was, seems to have been at its best in the eleventh and twelfth centuries but was never conspicuous enough to get an outline of Greenland into the maps until about the time of final extinction.
We must remember, though, that during the earlier part of this period there were not many maps extant which included the Atlantic, and of these the greater number were more concerned with theological conceptions and figures of wonder than with the sober facts of geography, especially in remote places. About 1300 a remarkable series of navigators’ portolan maps, revolutionizing this attitude, began to add to the delineation of the Mediterranean, which they had already developed with considerable minuteness, something definite of the outer European coasts, islands, and waters. Step by step they advanced into the unknown or little known, but perhaps none of them, before the fifteenth century, can be confidently relied on as indicating Greenland.
This remained for the Nancy map of Claudius Clavus (Schwartz), 1427191 (Fig. 16). Greenland is, however, made distinctly continuous with Europe, being connected thereto by a long land bridge, far north of Iceland, in accordance with an hypothesis then prevailing. The second half of the same century saw this conception of Claudius Clavus greatly popularized. Divers maps192 appeared, some showing Greenland as a prodigiously elongated peninsula of Europe, having its tip in the correct location (Fig. 17), while others ran up a perverse trapezoidal Greenland from the north coast of Norway.
Probably one or more of the former kind suggested in part the memorable Zeno map of 1558193 (Fig. 19), professing to be a reproduction of a map prepared by the Zeni of a past generation and carelessly damaged by the final editor in boyhood. If not a total forgery, it is at least untrustworthy, as we shall see in Chapter IX, and the same is true of an accompanying narrative of experiences in Greenland about 1400.
Another map of somewhat later date, by Sigurdr Stefánsson, probably 1590194 (Fig. 18), is a quite honest presentation of the traditional views of Icelanders at that time and is distinctly more modern than the Zeno map in the complete severance of Greenland from Europe and its union with the great western land mass which included Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, supposed to be divided by a fiord from “America of the Spaniards.” Of course, that union with the Western continent is not precisely accurate and the eastward trend which he gives his great peninsula is still less so; but his map, often copied, remains a peculiarly interesting production.
To hark back to Adam of Bremen, the charges of special cruelty and predatory attacks on seafarers in the middle of the eleventh century awaken some surprise. The life of the people seems simple and innocent enough, as disclosed by their relics and remnants, which have been unearthed with great care. As seal bones predominate in their refuse piles, this offshore supply must have been their greatest reliance for animal food; but they had also sheep, goats, and a small breed of cattle. They spun wool and wove it; they carved vessels of soapstone, sometimes with decoration; they milked cows and made butter; they exported sealskins, ropes of walrus hide, and walrus tusks; they paid tithes to the Pope in such commodities; they boiled seal fat and made seal tar; they gathered tree trunks as driftwood far up the coast and probably brought back cargoes of timber from Markland; they built substantial houses and churches, using huge stones in some cases. But they had to import grain, iron, and many other articles from Europe; and the infrequent visits of ships from Iceland, Norway, and elsewhere must have made a break in the monotony of their lives which they could ill afford to forego. One would expect them to be especially kind to such visitors.
On the other hand, the belligerent spirit which kept up the bloody feuds of Iceland would not quickly have lapsed from these transplanted Icelanders in their new home. Moreover, there were thralls among them and the irritations growing out of thralldom. Also, while much of their daily routine was quiet enough, they were subject to savage weather and perils of navigation, of the fisheries, of hunting far up the coast, where many of them maintained stations for that purpose at Krogfiordsheath and other points. Even in getting to Greenland Eric was able to carry through only about half of the ships that sailed with him, and Gudrid and Thorbiorn, coming later, incurred ample experiences of storm and danger. These wild elements of life would tend to enhance a certain recklessness; and the law must have been impotent to maintain order in remote fiords and headlands, even if it had sought to do so.
In the Floamanna Saga, dealing with events not long after the very first settlement, the thralls of Thorgils murder his young wife on the eastern coast, where they had all been cast ashore together. In another of the Greenland tales there is a bloody contention, freely involving homicide, over the claims of the church upon the contents of two ships which had come to grief. No doubt such instances might be multiplied; but in the main we may believe that the lives of the Greenlanders went orderly enough in common grooves of very primitive husbandry and fishing. Adam may have judged by reports of visitors with a grievance, narrated at second or third hand.
If Greenland had a long history, it was that of a few people in a remote region and could not present many salient features. The colony possessed at least one monastery and the beginning of a literature, including, it is said, the Lay of Atli, revealing a curious interest in the career of the great Hun Attila, on the part of a distant colonist hidden in Arctic mists and writing beside the glaciers. In art, as distinguished from literature, they seem to have made few advances, if any, beyond mere ornamental carving or designing on a plane hardly surpassing that of the Eskimos.
But in seamanship and exploration their achievements, considering their numbers and resources, were really wonderful. All experts agree that Eric’s first exploration was daring, skillful, persistent, and exhaustive, according to the best modern standards, and that his selection of settlement sites was exceedingly judicious; in fact, could not have been improved upon. Then followed in less than twenty years the discovery of the American mainland by Eric’s son Leif (or, as some say, by one Biarni, followed by Leif) and a series of other voyages, including Thorfinn Karlsefni’s prolonged effort to colonize, involving the tracing of the American coast line from at least upper Labrador to some point south of Newfoundland. The precise lower limit is matter of dispute, but, according to the better opinion, may be found somewhere on the front of southern New England. These were followed in 1121 by the missionary journey, as it seems to have been, of Bishop Eric Gnupsson, who then sailed out of Greenland for Vinland, we do not know with what result. Subsequent communication with parts of the American continent was probably not uncommon, as has been inferred from the accidental arrival in 1347 of a ship which had sailed from Greenland to Markland and been storm-driven from the latter westward. It pursued its course to Norway.
In the opposite (northern) direction we know of at least two venturesome voyages up Baffin Bay, and, as the records have reached us almost by accident, we may naturally conjecture many more.
A British exploring expedition in 1824 acquired a small stone inscribed with runic characters near some beacons on an island north of Upernivik on the upper northwestern coast of Greenland. The original is lost, but a duplicate of it is preserved in the Copenhagen National Museum. Divers copies195 have been published. The inscription is thought to date from about 1300, translated by various runologists, with differences in detail. As given by Professor Hovgaard, it reads:
Erling Sigvatsson and Bjarne Thordarson and Endride Oddson built this (or these) beacon(s) Saturday after “Gagnday” (April 25th) and cleared (the place) (or made the inscription) 1135 (?).
The year is reported with some uncertainty; and it must be owned that the body of the text offers several alternatives. Such a memorial would more naturally be put up by the men who built the beacons or those of about their time than by a later generation to commemorate the not vitally important doings of those who were dead and gone. The year 1300 seems a little late for venturing so far, as it was about the beginning of a period of decadence and less than forty years before the Western Settlement vanished altogether. The date 1135 would better accord with the climax of Norse strenuousness and Greenland adventure. Perhaps the runes were carved in the stone earlier than the runologists suppose. But, whether the original visit took place in the twelfth century or the fourteenth, and whether the stone denotes two Norse visits to this place or only one, it is still conclusive that some Greenlanders had explored well to the northward along the shore of Baffin Bay in the time of the old colony.
A more extensive exploration was undertaken in 1266 by the clergy, apparently of the Bishop’s seat, since they traveled home to Gardar. It appears that certain men had been farther north than usual but reported no sign of previous occupancy by the Eskimos (who seem by this time to have awakened some concern among the Norsemen) except at the unusually broad reindeer-pasture land and hunting ground of Krogfiordsheath, a little below Disko Bay. This made a good starting point for the ship, which was thereupon sent “northward in order to explore the regions north of the farthest point which they had hitherto visited,” apparently with a special view of getting more light on the whereabouts of the heathen and their line of approach. In these regards the adventure was barren; but the narrative of one of the priests is interesting so far as it goes:196
... they sailed out from Krogfiordsheath, until they lost sight of the land. Then they had a south wind against them and darkness, and they had to let the ship go before the wind; but when the storm ceased and it cleared up again, they saw many islands and all kinds of game, both seals and whales and a great number of bears. They came right into the sea-bay and lost sight of all the land, both the southern coast and the glaciers; but south of them were also glaciers as far as they could see.
That was their farthest point. They then sailed southward, reaching Krogfiordsheath again and eventually Gardar. On the way they had noticed some abandoned Eskimo houses but no living Eskimos.
There is some attempt to indicate latitude by the way shadows fell in a boat. Also we are told, apparently meaning midsummer or a little later: “at midnight the sun was as high as at home in the settlement when it is in northwest.” But speculations as to their course and distance have given varying results. Some think they may even have passed into Smith Sound; others that they may have crossed the Middle Water to the western shore of Baffin Bay, seeing south of them the glaciers of northeastern Baffin Land; others still that they did not get very far above Upernivik; but, whatever the exact limit, it seems to have been a notable bit of Arctic exploration, prosecuted rather at random and with scant resources.
The Eskimos (Skraelings) are referred to in this account as if already known to the settlers, though uncertain as to their home quarters and mysterious in their coming and going. Probably there had been some contact, not wholly friendly, between outranging members of the two races. The Historia Norvegiae,197 a manuscript of the same century discovered in Scotland, says:
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.