more than half were lost on the way, but eleven ships
landed safely and founded a colony in Greenland. Other
settlers came, and this Greenland colony had at one time
a population of about two thousand people. Its inhabitants
embraced Christianity when their kinsfolk in other places
did so, and the ruins of their stone churches still exist.
The settlers raised cattle and sheep, and sent ox hides
and seal skins and walrus ivory to Europe in trade for
supplies. But as there was no timber in Greenland they
could not build ships, and thus their communication with
the outside world was more or less precarious. In spite
of this, the colony lasted for about four hundred years.
It seems to have come to an end at about the beginning
of the fifteenth century. The scanty records of its
history can be traced no later than the year 1409. What
happened to terminate its existence is not known. Some
writers, misled by the name 'Greenland,' have thought
that there must have been a change of climate by which
the country lost its original warmth and verdure and
turned into an arctic region. There is no ground for this
belief. The name 'Greenland' did not imply a country of
trees and luxuriant vegetation, but only referred to the
bright carpet of grass still seen in the short Greenland
summer in the warmer hollows of the hillsides. It may
have been that the settlement, never strong in numbers,
was overwhelmed by the Eskimos, who are known to have
often attacked the colony: very likely, too, it suffered
from the great plague, the Black Death, that swept over
all Europe in the fourteenth century. Whatever the cause,
the colony came to an end, and centuries elapsed before