[71-7] That is, about 1418. The last notice of Greenland based on Northern tradition is from the year 1409, telling of a marriage ceremony performed by Endride Andreson, the last bishop. See Laing's _The Sagas of the Norse Kings_ (London, 1889), p. 177.
[71-8] From Ivar Bardsen's description of Greenland it is known that the Greenlanders first came in conflict with the Eskimos during the fourteenth century. He was appointed to lead an expedition from the Eastern Settlement against the Skrellings (Eskimos), who had taken possession of the Western Settlement. When he arrived there the Skrellings had departed, and they found nothing but ruins and some cattle running wild. See _Antiquitates Americanæ_, p. 316.
The letter of Nicholas V. refers to an attack on the Western Settlement, of which there is no other recorded evidence. It is not likely that it will ever be possible to determine whether the settlement owed its final destruction to the irruptions of the Eskimos, "to the ravages of pestilence, to the enforced neglect of the mother country--itself during the fifteenth century too often in sore straits--to the iniquitous restrictions in commerce imposed by the home government, or to a combination of several of these evils." There was a regular succession of bishops from 1124 to the end of the fourteenth, or perhaps the beginning of the fifteenth century.
[73-1] Addressed to the two bishops of Skalholt and Holar, in Iceland.
[73-2] The Archbishop of Drontheim in Norway.
[73-3] Alexander VI. was pope from 1492 to 1503.
[74-1] Evidently this is only an approximate statement.
[74-2] There are no records that this man ever reached either Greenland or Iceland. The Greenland colony was not entirely forgotten by the home government (Denmark-Norway). In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Archbishop Valkendorf of Drontheim had agitated the question of searching for the Greenland colony. During the reign of Frederick II. of Denmark-Norway, Mogens Heinesen was in 1579 sent out, but he did not reach the island. The Englishman John Davis, in 1585, visited the western coast of Greenland, but found no Europeans.
ORIGINAL NARRATIVES OF THE VOYAGES OF COLUMBUS
ARTICLES OF AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE LORDS THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS AND CRISTÓBAL COLON[77-1]