[Illustration: Ruins of the church at Kakortok.]

[Sidenote: Further fortunes of the Greenland colony.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Eric's voyage in search of Vinland, 1121.]

[Sidenote: The ship from Markland, 1347.]

As for the colony in Greenland, while its population seems never to have
exceeded 5,000 or 6,000 souls, it maintained its existence and its
intercourse with Europe uninterruptedly from its settlement in 986, by
Eric the Red, for more than four hundred years. Early in the fourteenth
century the West Bygd, or western settlement, near Godthaab, seems to
have contained ninety farmsteads and four churches; while the East Bygd,
or eastern settlement, near Julianeshaab, contained one hundred and
ninety farmsteads, with one cathedral and eleven smaller churches, two
villages, and three or four monasteries.[268] Between Tunnudliorbik and
Igaliko fiords, and about thirty miles from the ruined stone houses of
Brattahlid, there now stands, imposing in its decay, the simple but
massive structure of Kakortok church, once the "cathedral" church of the
Gardar bishopric, where the Credo was intoned and censers swung, while
not less than ten generations lived and died. About the beginning of the
twelfth century there was a movement at Rome for establishing new
dioceses in "the islands of the ocean;" in 1106 a bishop's see was
erected in the north of Iceland, and one at about the same time in the
Faeroes. In 1112, Eric Gnupsson,[269] having been appointed by Pope
Paschal II. "bishop of Greenland and Vinland _in partibus infidelium_,"
went from Iceland to organize his new diocese in Greenland. It is
mentioned in at least six different vellums that in 1121 Bishop Eric
"went in search of Vinland."[270] It is nowhere mentioned that he found
it, and Dr. Storm thinks it probable that he perished in the enterprise,
for, within the next year or next but one, the Greenlanders asked for a
new bishop, and Eric's successor, Bishop Arnold, was consecrated in
1124.[271] After Eric there was a regular succession of bishops
appointed by the papal court, down at least to 1409, and seventeen of
these bishops are mentioned by name. We do not learn that any of them
ever repeated Eric's experiment of searching for Vinland. So far as
existing Icelandic vellums know, there was no voyage to Vinland after
1121. Very likely, however, there may have been occasional voyages for
timber from Greenland to the coast of the American continent, which did
not a