A History of the Vikings
Chapter 14
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GREENLAND
A GREAT adventurer was Eric the Red. With his father, because they were implicated in a murder-suit, he had left his home in the Jaeder in Norway and fared to Iceland where he had settled and married; but here too ill-luck had attended him, and in 981 or 982 a stormy and quarrelsome sojourn ended in his being outlawed. Accordingly Eric prepared his ship for departure, telling his friends that it was his purpose to seek for the land that one Gunnbjörn had sighted nearly a century ago when he had been driven far west past Iceland. This country, of which there was still talk, was Greenland, and thither Eric turned his prow when he put out to sea, intending to prove or disprove the tale of Gunnbjörn accidental discovery. The voyage was successful; he soon sighted the ice-bound eastern coast of Greenland, sailed south, rounded Cape Farewell, and following the ice to the north-west eventually found an opening through the floes and put in to land at a point on the west coast probably about the latitude of Cape Desolation; thence he explored many of the fjords in the search for a habitable district and spent his first winter at Ericsey which lies opposite the entrance to Ericsfjord not far from the modern Julianehaab. In the summer he explored large tracts of the western coast, giving names to many places that he visited, and the second winter he spent at Ericsholm near Cape Desolation; the next summer he explored northwards as far as the modern Unatok. Then he returned to Ericsey and penetrated inland up to the head of Ericsfjord, and the third winter he abode once more at Ericsey. The following summer he returned to Iceland.
There he was soon involved again in the quarrels that had led to his being outlawed, and though he eventually patched up a peace with his principal enemy, he left Iceland the summer after his return with the express purpose of founding a colony in the new country west-over-sea, this being called by him Greenland for the reason that a good name might attract other
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settlers to join him. And, indeed, so favourable were his accounts of the place that in the summer twenty-five ships bearing emigrants and their wives left Iceland for Greenland, though it is told that only fourteen of these reached their destination. Not all of these joined Eric at his 'eastern settlement' near Julianehaab, for some went further on to establish a 'western settlement'
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around the modern Godthaab. And thus, in 985 or 986, was Greenland first colonized. (1) They were all heathens, save for a
1. Note that W. M. Peitz, "Untersuchungen zu Urkundenfdlschungen des Mittelalters", I, Die Hamburger Fdlschungen, Freiburg, 1919, p. 93 ff., has sought to prove that Greenland, and Iceland too, had been discovered and explored at least as early as 832, for both countries are named as being under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishop of Hamburg in papal letters of 832 and 834. Though Peitz's contention has received some support, the fact remains that the letters in question are inadmissible as evidence, since it is common ground that they have been doctored, if not deliberately falsified. Yet Peitz has much ingenious argument to bring forward in their favour.
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single Christian from the Hebrides, these first colonists, and Red Eric was accepted as their chief.
The two settlements lay to the west of Cape Farewell for the reason that the east coast of Greenland is ice-locked for the greater part of the year and was consequently uninhabitable; but even on the west and south-west coast, where the pack-ice thins out so that ships can make land, the great ice-cap that lies upon the country leaves only a narrow strip of bleak and mountainous sea-board, on an average some fifty miles in width, to sustain human life. This western littoral, however, is broken by fjords into a maze of necks and islands, and on the lower margins of these fjords, and at their heads, there is grass in plenty, so that cattle can be fed, and a scrub of small birch-trees and willows. In such districts lived the early colonists, depending for their livelihood on the breeding of their scraggy cattle, eking out their larders with the salmon of the rivers and the fish of the fjords and sea, and hunting, too, the reindeer, hares, and foxes of the mountains. They were able to extract iron from the local ore and, if there was fuel enough to keep the furnaces going, could make for themselves such simple articles as knives, hooks, and nails; but corn they had none, though in later days attempts were made to induce a little barley to grow; wood was precious and scarce; soapstone had to suffice for the making of their pots and pans. Yet they were not without valuables, skins of seal and bear, walrus-tusks, and the like, to offer to the few trading-ships that came their way, and so, for two centuries or more, the little colony of thrifty and simple souls managed to hold their own on this remote and horrid shore.
The eastern settlement, extending along the coast from Cape Farewell to Arsuk, was the larger and the more important of the two Norse establishments; in the heyday of the Greenland vikings it boasted nearly two hundred homesteads, and, because these were far scattered and travel between them took long, by the fourteenth century there were a dozen churches and two monastic foundations. Here, in the old days, dwelt the founder of the colony, Eric the Red, at Brattahlid (now Kagssiarsuk) in Ericsfjord (now Tanugdliarfik), and here, on the low isthmus separating Ericsfjord and Einarsfjord (now Igalikofjord), was Gardar, the place of the meeting of the Althing, the grand assize of Greenland, and, some time after Christianity was introduced, the site of the cathedral and the bishop's seat.
The western settlement lay about 170 miles to the north of Arsuk and was made up of some ninety homesteads and four
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