Note 757 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

The collapse of the bridge at the close of the Glacial Epoch left the Atlantic abyss effectually dividing the two hemispheres. Its islands, few and far between, were helpless to maintain intercourse between the opposite shores; this is proven by the fact that all of them from Greenland to Tristan da Cunha, excepting only the Canaries, were uninhabited at the time of their discovery. History records when the first bold voyagers came upon them in that unmarked waste of waters, and gave them their first occupants. The political upheavals of Norway in King Harfagr's time (872) sent to the Faroes and Iceland their first settlers, though these islands were previously known to the Celts of Ireland. The Norse colonists who went to Greenland in the year 1000 seem to have been the first regular settlers on those inhospitable coasts. They found no native inhabitants, but numerous abandoned dwellings, fragments of boats and stone implements,757 which doubtless recorded the intermittent voyages thither of the Eskimo, preliminary to permanent occupation. The Scandinavians did not encounter natives on the island till the 12th century, when Greenland probably received its first Eskimo immigration.758