correct the abuse of licentious liberty, to banish bloody dissensions from among individuals, to restrain robberies and piracy, softening the ferocity of manners, requiring a certain knowledge of letters and history, re-establishing a part of mankind, who groaned under a miserable slavery, in their natural rights, introducing a relish for a life of peace, and an idea of happiness independent of sensual gratifications, sowed the seeds, if I may so speak, of that new spirit which grew to maturity in the succeeding ages, and to which the arts and sciences, springing up along with it, added still more strength and vigour.

But, after all, is it very certain, as the objection supposes, that the climate of Europe has not undergone a change since the times we speak of? Those who have read the ancients with attention, think differently, and conclude, that the degrees of cold are at this time much less severe than they were formerly. This is not a place to enlarge on a subject which might appear foreign to the work. Let it suffice to observe, that the rivers in Gaul, namely, the Loire and the Rhone, were regularly frozen over every year, so that frequently whole armies with their carriages and baggage could march over them. Even the Tiber froze at Rome, and Juvenal says positively that it was requisite to break the ice in winter, in order to come at the water of that river. Many passages in Horace suppose the streets of Rome to be full of ice and snow. Ovid assures us, that the Black Sea was frozen annually, and appeals for the truth of this to the governor of the province, whose name he mentions: he also relates several circumstances concerning that climate, which at present agree only with Norway or Sweden. The forests of Thrace and Pannonia were full of bears and wild boars, in like manner as now the forests of the north. The northern part of Spain was little inhabited for the same cause. In short, all the ancients who mention the climate of Gaul, Germany, Pannonia and Thrace, speak of it as insupportable, and agree that the ground was covered with snow the greatest part of the year, being incapable of producing olives, grapes, and most other fruits. It is easy to conceive that the forests being cleared away, the face of the country better cultivated, and the marshy places drained, the moist exhalations which generate cold, must be considerably lessened, and that the

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

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

Who

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

244

SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTERS

BY

THE EDITOR.

COLONIZATION OF

CHAPTER I.

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

ABOUT a century after the discovery of Iceland, of which an account has been previously given, a Norwegian chieftain named Thorvald, having been banished for homicide, retired thither with his son Eirek, surnamed the Red. Some years afterwards, probably in 982, Eirek was sentenced to three years' exile for a similar offence, and set sail towards the west in quest of a coast that had recently been descried by a Nor wegian navigator. His search proved successful, and he landed on a small island, west of Cape Farewell, where he passed the first winter. In the spring he went to survey the mainland, and finding it covered with a pleasing verdure, gave it the name of Grænland, Greenland, saying, that a good name would induce people to settle there. Eirek, when the term of his banishment was expired, returned to Iceland, and, in the year 986, again set sail for Greenland with a number of settlers, and established himself in a place he named Brattahlid, on a creek called after him, Eireksfjörd (Eric's Frith), which soon became a very considerable colony t. Some years

*

See page 187.

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

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

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

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

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

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