The Colony That Vanished

The Icelandic sagas tell of Erik the Red, a colourful character who was proclaimed an outlaw from Iceland and sentenced to three years’ banishment. During his exile he reached what we now know as Greenland, around ad 986. When he returned to Iceland, he solicited others to settle there. The late 13th-century Flateyjarbók records that, with a talent for branding, Erik called this new land ‘Greenland’, ‘for he said that might attract men thither, when the land had a fine name’.

Greenland was certainly an enticing prospect; the milder climate of the Medieval Warm Period (c.950 to c.1300) meant that farming was possible near the sheltered pockets of the fjords, while hunting provided seal meat and caribou. Archaeologists have identified the ruins of hundreds of farms and several churches belonging to a Norse colony. Three main settlements on the southwest coast of Greenland could, at the colony’s peak, have been home to up to 5,000 inhabitants. The largest series of connected farms form the Eastern Settlement, which stretched more than 100 km, covering what are now the towns of Nanortalik, Narsaq and Qaqortoq. Norse Greenland was an export economy. An important source of income for the Norse Greenlanders was the walrus tooth they sold, supplying European elites with ivory crucifixes, knife handles and chess pieces. By 1100 Greenland had become the major supplier of ivory to much of Europe.

The colony prospered for more than 400 years and then vanished. Its disappearance is still not fully understood. The last record of a ship sailing from Greenland is in 1410, after which there is no trace of the settlers. Archaeology shows that the Norse Greenlanders vanished in the course of the 15th century. In the centuries after communication ceased, speculation about the settlers’ fate abounded. A 14th-century account of church property in Greenland by the Norwegian cleric Ívar Bárdarson recounts that he visited one of the major settlements, which had been raided: ‘Now the Skrælings [the Norse name for the Inuit] have destroyed the entire Western Settlement’ and only livestock were left, but ‘no people, either Christian or heathen’. 

When Danish missionaries resettled Greenland in the early 18th century, they asked the Inuit to confirm this story about past violence and their informers gave them what they wanted. Yet subsequent research has shown that many Inuit stories were adaptations of standard legends about hostilities with other peoples and not necessarily evidence of the colony’s fate. Another belief that gained traction was that the settlers had succumbed to the onset of a colder climate. In James Montgomery’s bestselling poem Greenland (1819), a series of dramatic scenes imagines the Norse people being buried under falling ice.

A possible explanation for why the Norse disappeared is less dramatic: prices for walrus teeth may have fallen after 1350 as Asian and East African elephant tusks, whose whiteness was superior to walrus and therefore more prestigious, took over. The end to the prosperous walrus ivory trade, precipitated by a deteriorating climate, may have been incentives to leave. 

East isn’t East

The colony’s fate came to have an enduring hold on Western imagination: from accounts in papal correspondence of the 1440s of Greenland settlers having been sacked by pirates who carried inhabitants away, to Arthur Conan Doyle, who, recalling his time as a surgeon on board a Greenland whaler, speculated whether the Norse colonists were ‘still singing and drinking and fighting’ in Greenland’s ‘ancient city’.

The colony’s possible wealth also proved alluring. While he found the Western Settlement seemingly abandoned, Ívar Bárdarson’s account of the Eastern Settlement in the 14th century described a prosperous community with abundant wealth, natural resources and precious metals. His account – essentially a tax survey – was reproduced and translated in several manuscripts and later committed to print. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, manuscripts and books regularly repeated stories of the riches in the Eastern Settlement, based on Ívar’s report and general expectations about Arctic abundance, which promised whaling possibilities, precious furs and gold and silver ores.

The Danish king Christian IV sent out three expeditions to Greenland between 1605 and 1607 to search for his lost subjects and their precious metals. (The Norse Greenlanders had, originally, been under the rule of the Norwegian king, but when Denmark and Norway united in 1397 the colony transferred to the Danish Crown.) Christian was prompted in part by the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who had made three voyages to Greenland’s surroundings some 30 years earlier. He had returned and reported finding gold, although the ore later proved to be worthless deposits.

The colony’s mystique was only enhanced by the difficulties in actually finding it. The Norse settlements were on the west coast of Greenland, but the name ‘Eastern Settlement’ caused much confusion in later centuries. It was so named because Greenland’s west coast veers east as it runs south; so, in relative terms, it was to the east of the smaller Western Settlement further up the coastline. The ‘Eastern Settlement’ was therefore misinterpreted as being on the east coast, where ships could not land due to sea ice clogging up the shores. The misconception and lack of access kept alive the belief that this settlement still stood, out of reach. The legends of wealth, which there were no witnesses to confirm or deny, circulated for centuries and made Greenland an object of imperialist desire like other lands in the New World.

Danish claims to Greenland, therefore, did not go unchallenged. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer, promoted the legend of the Welsh prince Madoc, who had allegedly crossed the Atlantic in 1170 and established communities in both Greenland and North America. The assertion that Greenland was part of English colonial history was also made in publications by George Peckham and Richard Hakluyt. During the 17th century, Danish historians attempted to gain political leverage by studying Greenland’s colonial history and the settlers’ use of the land. The publication of books and elaborate maps of the former colony under Danish suzerainty served to virtually recolonise Greenland on paper. However, English and Dutch scholars continued to dispute Danish claims to all of Greenland, seizing on the French intellectual Isaac La Peyrère’s evaluation in his popular Relation du Groenland (1647) that ‘Danish’ settlements made up only a small part of the extensive northern land.

Missionary zeal

At the beginning of the 18th century, the Danes realised that Dutch whaling vessels in particular were prospering from fishing in Greenland’s waters. Historical precedent alone was not enough to enforce authority against this; new settlements were needed. At the same time, there was a growing missionary yearning to save the colonists’ descendants – Christians who were thought to be isolated on Greenland’s ice-clogged shores, cut off since before the Reformation and therefore in need of spiritual re-education. This ambition prompted the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede to solicit royal permission to establish a colony on the west coast of Greenland in 1721. Early documents from his recolonisation show that the hope was to re-establish contact with the Eastern Settlement to help finance Egede’s mission through trade, exploitation of the extensive forests purportedly there (wood was a much-needed resource for the new Danish colony) and the extraction of the fabled precious ore.

Egede’s published eyewitness account of his 15 years as missionary, A Description of Greenland (1741), was translated into several European languages. The book provides much new information about the landscape and its Indigenous inhabitants, but it is also significantly haunted by the legends of the Norse settlements. His third chapter begins, tellingly: ‘We are informed by ancient histories...’ Based on his extensive reading of European texts on Greenland, Egede’s writing sometimes takes the form of a negative checklist of what one would expect to find. He tells us that 18th-century Greenland has no cattle, no cultivated farmland and no forests – negations relevant for readers familiar with the descriptions of Norse Greenland. He also declares that there is ‘little or nothing to say’ about (precious) minerals or metals.

If Egede’s text strips older books of their authority, he does not outright reject their information unless his own experiences directly contradict them. In fact, he leaves open the possibility that riches may exist beyond the horizon; old promises of abundance in the Eastern Settlement were deferred rather than annulled.

Egede made two failed attempts at reaching the Eastern Settlement, and several Danish expeditions to the east coast, both by sea and over land, were also launched in the 1720s. The expeditions were all failures, some costly. Modern studies have tended to treat the fantasies about a still-standing Eastern Settlement as a wild goose chase, but it was an important driving force for Danish interest in Greenland during the early period of resettlement.

Finally, at the end of the 18th century, the Danish geographer Heinrich Peter von Eggers proposed that the Eastern Settlement had been on the west coast. This (correct) theory gradually gained acceptance in European scientific circles. Even so, speculations that descendants of the old colonists inhabited remote parts of Greenland were not put to rest.

Imperial interest

Beginning in 1818, when ships and men were freed up after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Admiralty sent out expeditions to the Arctic to find a sailing route across the North Pole to reach Asian markets. As Greenland was en route, it was inevitably drawn into the orbit of British imperial interest. The whaler William Scoresby Jr had observed that sea ice around Greenland was disappearing, sparking the hope that the prohibitive east coast might become accessible.

The 1818 expedition led by Captain John Ross along the west coast of Greenland failed to find the mythical Northwest Passage, yet an interesting cultural encounter between Ross’ crew and the isolated Inughuit at Qaanaaq (also known as Thule) took place. Indigenous helpers were often important aides on Arctic expeditions, although seldom adequately acknowledged. Ross’ expedition included the Inuit interpreter John Sacheuse, who made it possible for this remote people to communicate with the visitors. According to eyewitness accounts of the encounter, Sacheuse exclaimed: ‘These are right Eskimaux, these are our fathers!’, in the belief that the isolated Inughuit were a lost colony of his ancestors, who had migrated southwest. From a British perspective, the meeting was no compensation for failing to find a navigable trade route, but it indicated that the European colony could perhaps also be discovered.

British writers, buoyed by an understanding of their nation as the leading sea power, saw it as a moral duty to discover the old Christian colonists in Greenland and save them from isolation, starvation and falling into abject heathenness. The poet Anna Jane Vardill, for example, hoped in ‘The Arctic Navigator’s Prayer’ (1818) that melting icebergs could make possible a British discovery of ‘some bright cove, where long unseen / Our kindred hearts have shelter’d been!’ In such appeals it was implied that the Norse Greenlanders were an extraction of the stock that constituted the Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlers in Britain. However, philanthropic aims, widely publicised at the time, could easily veer into imperial overtures.

Britain never officially made claims to Greenland, but several non-state actors advocated that it should be a target not only for exploration but also for exploitation. The English inventor George Manby, who worked to improve Britain’s failing whaling industry, argued in a series of pamphlets that Greenland’s east coast could be used as a penal colony. He (mistakenly) believed that the history of the old Greenland settlers proved that it offered habitable conditions, while emphasising that the location had a more salutary climate than the Australian colonies to which British criminals were otherwise transported. As it became clear that Scoresby Jr’s observation of an ice-free Arctic was not permanent, British enthusiasm for Greenland’s east coast seems also to have cooled.

Lessons learned

Greenland was often viewed as a proving ground for the two Western expansionist movements: colonialism and Christian mission. John Howison’s monumental European Colonies, in Various Parts of the World (1834), for example, includes extensive speculation on the old Greenland settlements alongside his survey of contemporary (and primarily British) colonial possessions. The tragic fate of the medieval Greenland settlers – either isolation or demise – is held out as a lesson for modern colonial powers who venture into increasingly far-flung corners of the world.

Fears that the Norse settlers had descended to savagery had long abounded but were given substance by 18th-century missionaries, who recorded Inuit folklore of strange peoples in remote Greenland regions. In the popular History of Greenland (1765) by the German missionary historian David Crantz, accounts are relayed about a cannibalistic tribe living in a mountainous area. Crantz surmises that they may be descendants of the Norse settlers, but staunchly rejects the notion that they were ‘man-eaters’ as nothing but Inuit fancifulness. This was the usual pattern; cannibalism was viewed as practically inconceivable for Europeans. Furthermore, in a missionary context, to assume that the old settlers had lost the last vestiges of their human dignity would make them undeserving of recovery and conversion, which remained an ambition.

Legends of literature

As a 20-year-old medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle enlisted as a surgeon on board a Greenland whaler. Many years later, in ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’ (1892), he reflected on the experience and what may have happened to the ‘ancient city’ of Greenland: had they been murdered by the Skrælings; or had they intermarried to produce a mixed race? Eventually, Conan Doyle preferred to leave the question unsolved, as, at a time when explorers and mapmakers were robbing the world of its secrets, authors, he argued, need mysteries to fire their imagination. Conan Doyle never got to write a story about Greenland’s lost colonists, but many others did.

After both British and Danish expeditions had surveyed large swathes of the east coast in the 1820s (finding no definite traces of any surviving colonists), literary writers joined scientists and historians in turning their gaze towards other parts of the Arctic for possible locations where the settlers may have sought refuge. A reference in an old manuscript discovered by the 17th-century Icelandic bishop Gísli Oddsson described a possible migration from Greenland. This possibility was compounded by travellers who provided ethnological accounts of fair-skinned Inuit in Labrador, or of Native Americans in New England speaking Norse, and so on. The reverberations of such spurious observations led to numerous fiction stories about adventurers who discover that Greenland’s lost settlers have migrated elsewhere in the Arctic.

These stories also took advantage of a contemporary geophysical theory that the North Pole had a temperate climate and an ice-free sea. The British-American author Frederick Whittaker’s The Lost Captain; or, Skipper Jabez Coffin’s Cruise to the Open Polar Sea (1880) is perhaps the earliest such story. Whittaker imagines the Greenland settlers having migrated to a new habitat. Adventure stories that followed, such as William Huntington Wilson’s Rafnaland (1900), Fenton Ash’s In Polar Seas (1915-16) and Fitzhugh Green’s ZR Wins (1924), also draw on geothermal theories that the Arctic was home to volcanically heated islands. The tales feature either Norse migrants from Greenland or the descendants of bold Viking explorers who had managed to navigate beyond the wall of ice where modern ships usually got stuck.

The ‘Norse colony’ tales were a subcategory of the popular ‘lost races’ adventure stories that had their heyday between the 1870s and the 1920s, often piggybacking on the success of Henry Rider Haggard’s novels. The fact that the Polar Sea was still a blank spot offered authors the opportunity of imagining the vanished Norse settlers’ fate. 
 

Blessed isolation

In the early 20th century, the first Inuit novelists projected future hopes for their fellow Greenlanders. Mathias Storch published Sinnattugaq (The Dream, 1914), which envisions Nuuk in the year 2105 when Greenlanders are well educated and the Danish trade monopoly has been lifted. Augustinus ‘Augo’ Lynge’s 1931 novel Ukiut 300-nngornerat (300 Years After) depicts Greenland in the year 2021 when Nuuk has become an important shipping port with shopping facilities and luxury hotels – all for the benefit of the Indigenous Greenlanders.

If these early novels imagine a time with expanded international connections, British and American stories focused on fictional Norse settlers who had enjoyed a glorious isolation, escaping the vicissitudes of world history. In William Gordon Stables’ The City at the Pole (1906) adventurers find themselves among a hidden, white community that had not suffered the racial degeneration of the outside world. The fascination with isolated colonies of strong, healthy and physically impressive Norse warriors reflected public anxieties about the detrimental effects of immigration and cultural decline. These tales, written for the popular market, are therefore best understood against the backdrop of the eugenicist movement in Britain and the miscegenation laws in the US. The Arctic colonies are communities frozen in time and often offer adventurers the opportunity to engage in masculine battle as an antidote to the effeminising effects of modernity.

‘Blond Eskimos’

A twist in the tale of the long search for the vanished settlers was the explorer and ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s discovery of ‘Blond Eskimos’ on a 1912 expedition to Canada’s Victoria Island. He regarded the community as descendants of the European Greenlanders who had mixed with the Indigenous population. Stefansson, however, did not claim that they were white, only that they were tall, slender and had red-brownish hair. Nonetheless, the world press ran with the term ‘Blond Eskimos’. Modern DNA analysis of the Victoria Island Inuit has disproven any Norse ancestry, but Stefansson’s claim rekindled the old hope that the mystery of the vanished settlers’ fate could be solved. In the wake of the extensive press interest in the apparent discovery, earlier ‘lost colony’ adventure tales were republished and sometimes revised to reflect the mixed-race solution. Among new stories produced, the American author Samuel Scoville Jr’s The Boy Scouts in the North (1919-20) has a heroic Inuk, who is ennobled by his Norse ancestry, but who also reflects a growing respect for Inuit ability to survive in harsh climates. Towards the end of the 1920s the popularity of stories about Norse descendants living in hidden colonies began to wane. This was in part due to advances in Arctic mapping, which narrowed the space for imaginative hideouts. But the template of ‘lost race’ fiction also began to feel trite, collapsing under the weight of its own success.

In 1933 the Permanent Court of International Justice ruled in favour of Denmark in the dispute with Norway over possession of Greenland. The tribunal was won partly on account of past Danish commitment to finding the long-vanished settlers and Denmark’s insistence on speaking of the people in Greenland as ‘our subjects’. At this time, the reference to Greenland’s Nordic settlers proved its continuing political importance, but the legend’s cultural survival over the centuries is, perhaps, even more impressive.

Robert W. Rix is the author of The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).