Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/75

the newer coast; these stayed in America four years before the Indians became too strong for them. Two years after their return, another party sailed in two ships from Brattahlid and made a second attempt to settle the wooded land; quarrels destroyed this settlement, and it was abandoned. But the colonies in Greenland continued to thrive and to prosper for more than four hundred years. In their two settlements, the people numbered more than five thousand, one colony containing one hundred and ninety farmsteads and one cathedral and eleven smaller churches, two villages and four monasteries. The colonies became a separate diocese of the church and were sent bishops from Rome, and they paid to the pope their tithes in ox-hides, sealskins and walrus ivory and contributed to the Crusades. There was some culture as well as security in these colonies; a Brattahlid poet composed and bards sang a poem yet known in Iceland. Fifteen generations of Europeans lived and died on the west coast of Greenland before serious troubles came. Hostilities began with the Eskimos; and, with wars and difficulties in Eu-