[Sidenote: Place-names on the east coast]
The Icelandic accounts mention several places in East Greenland, such as "Kross-eyjar," "Finnsbuðir," "Berufjord" ("bera" == she-bear), and the fjord "Öllum-Lengri." Frequent expeditions for seal-hunting were made to these places from the Eastern Settlement, and they must have lain near it, just north of Cape Farewell.
VOYAGES TO THE NORTHERN WEST COAST OF GREENLAND, NORÐRSETUR, AND BAFFIN'S BAY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
[Sidenote: Runic stone from 72° 55' N. lat.]
To the north of the northernmost inhabited fjords of the Western Settlement lay the uninhabited regions. Thither the Greenlanders resorted every summer for seal-hunting; there lay what they called the "Norðrsetur" ("seta" == place of residence; the northern stations or fishing-places), and it is doubtless partly to these districts that reference is made in Eric the Red's Saga, where it is said of Thorhall the Hunter that "he had long been with Eric hunting in summer," and that "he had a wide acquaintance with the uninhabited regions." We have no information as to how far north the longest expeditions of the Greenlanders extended, but we know that they reached the neighbourhood of the modern Upernivik; for, twenty-eight miles to the north-west of it--on a little island called Kingigtorsuak, in 72° 55' N. lat.--three cairns are said to have been found early in the nineteenth century (before 1824); and in one of them a small runic stone, with the inscription: "Erling Sigvathsson, Bjarne Thordarson, and Endride Oddson on the Sunday before 'gagndag' [i.e., April 25] erected these cairns and cleared ..."[267] Then follow six secret runes, which it was formerly sought to interpret, erroneously, as a date, 1135. Professor L. F. Läffler has explained them as meaning ice;[268] it would then read "and cleared away ice." Judging from the language, the inscription would be of the fourteenth century;[269] Professor Magnus Olsen (in a letter to me) thinks it might date from about 1300, or perhaps a little later. Why the cairns were built seems mysterious. It is possible that they were sea-marks for fishing-grounds; but it is not likely that the Greenlanders were in the habit of going so far north. One would be more inclined to think they were set up as a monument of a remarkable expedition, which had penetrated to regions previously unknown; but why build more than one cairn? Was there one for each man? The most remarkable thing is that the cairns are stated to have been set up in April, when the sea in that locality is covered with ice. The three men must either have wintered there in the north, which seems the more probable alternative; they may then have been starving, and the object of the cairns was to call the attention of possible future travellers to their bodies--or they may have come the same spring over the ice from the south, and in that case they most probably travelled with Eskimo dog-sledges, and were on a hunting expedition, perhaps for bears. But they cannot have travelled northwards from the Eastern or Western Settlement the same spring. In any case they may have been in company with Eskimo, whom we know to have lived on Disco Bay, and probably also farther south at that time. From them the Norsemen may have learnt to hunt on the ice, by which they were able to support themselves in the north during the winter.