Accordingly, There Set Out For This Place
Twenty-Five Vessels, Carrying People Of Both Sexes, Household Furniture,
Implements Of All Kinds, And Cattle For Breeding, Of Which Only Fourteen
Vessels Arrived In Safety.
These first colonists were soon followed by many
more, both from Iceland and Norway; and in a few years their number is said
to have increased so much, as to occupy both the eastern and western coasts
of Greenland.
This is the ordinary and best authenticated account of the discovery and
settlement of Old Greenland, which rests on the credit of the great
northern historian, Snorro Sturleson, judge of Iceland, who wrote in the
year 1215. Yet others assert that Greenland had been known long before, and
ground their assertion on letters-patent from the Emperor Lewis the Pious
in 834, and a bull of Gregory IV. in 835, in which permission is given to
Archbishop Ansgar to convert the Sueones, Danes, Sclavonians; and it is
added, the Norwaehers, Farriers, Greenlanders, Halsingalanders, Icelanders,
and Scridevinds. Even allowing both charter and bull to be genuine, it is
probable that the copy which has come down to our time is interpolated, and
that for Gronlandon and Islandon, we ought to read Quenlandon and
Hitlandon, meaning the Finlanders and Hitlanders: Quenland being the old
name of Finland, and Hitland or Hialtaland the Norwegian name of the
Shetland islands. It is even not improbable that all the names in these
ancient deeds after the Sueones, Danes, and Sclavonians, had been
interpolated in a later period; as St Rembert, the immediate successor of
Ansgar, and who wrote his life, only mentions the Sueones, Danes, and
Sclavonians, together with other nations in the north; and even Adam of
Bremen only mentions these three, and other neighbouring and surrounding
nations[2]. Hence the authority of St Rembert and Snorro Sturleson remains
firm and unshaken, in spite of these falsified copies of the papal bull and
imperial patent; and we may rest assured that Iceland was not discovered
before 861, nor inhabited before 874; and that Greenland could hardly have
been discovered previous to 982, or 983, and was not inhabited before 985
or 986. - Forst.
[1] Forster, Voy. and Disc. 79.
[2] Vit. S. Anscharii, ap. Langeb. Script. Dan. I. 451. Ad.
Brem. Hist. Eccles. Lib. I. cap. 17.
CHAP. III.
Early Discovery of Winland by the Icelanders, about A.D. 1001.[1]
The passion which the Nordmen or Normans had always manifested for maritime
expeditions, still prevailed among them in the cold and inhospitable
regions of Iceland and Greenland. An Icelander, named Herjolf, was
accustomed to make a trading voyage every year to different countries, in
which latterly he was accompanied by his son, Biorn. About the year 1001,
their ships were separated by a storm, and Biorn learned on his arrival in
Norway that his father had sailed for Greenland, to which place he resolved
to follow his father; but another storm drove him a great way to the
south-west of his intended course, and he fell in with an extensive flat
country covered all over with thick woods; and just as he set out on his
return, he discovered an island on the coast.
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