Note 8 — PAPAL LETTERS CONCERNING THE BISHOPRIC OF GARDAR IN GREENLAND DURING THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY70-1

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.