Note 23 — Chapter I
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Accurate information respecting the former intercourse of the Northmen with the Continent of America reaches only as far as the middle of the fourteenth century. In the year 1349 a ship was sent from Greenland to Markland (New Scotland) to collect timber and other necessaries. Upon their return from Markland, the ship was overtaken by storms, and compelled to land at Straumfjord, in the west of Iceland. This is the last account of the "Norman America," preserved for us in the ancient Scandinavian writings. The settlements upon the west coast of Greenland, which were in a very flourishing condition until the middle of the fourteenth century, gradually declined, from the fatal influence of monopoly of trade, by the invasion of the Esquimaux, by the black death which depopulated the north from the year 1347 to 1351, and also by the arrival of a hostile fleet, from what country is not known.
By means of the critical and most praiseworthy efforts of Christian Rafn, and the Royal Society for Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen, the traditions and ancient accounts of the voyage of the Normans to Helluland (Newfoundland), to Markland (the mouth of the River St. Lawrence at Nova Scotia), and at Winland (Massachusetts), have been separately printed and satisfactorily commented upon. The length of the voyage, the direction in which they sailed, the time of the rising and setting of the sun, are accurately laid down. The principal sources of information are the historical narrations of Erik the Red, Thorfinn Karlsefne, and Snorre Thorbrandson, probably written in Greenland itself, as early as the twelfth century, partly by descendants of the settlers born in Winland.—Rafn, Antiq. Amer., p. 7, 14, 16. The care with which the tables of their pedigrees was kept was so great, that the table of the family of Thorfinn Karlsefne, whose son, Snorre Thorbrandson, was born in America, was kept from the year 1007 to 1811.
The name of the colonized countries is found in the ancient national songs of the natives of the Färöe Islands.—Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii., p. 268-452.