After His Death, His Widow
Gudrid Made A Pilgrimage To Rome, Whence She Returned, And Ended Her Days
In A Nunnery In Iceland, Which Was Built For Her By Her Son Snorro, Who Was
Born In Winland.
Sometime afterwards, Finbog and Helgo, two Icelanders, fitted out two
ships, carrying thirty men, with which they made a voyage to Winland.
In
this expedition they were accompanied by Freidis, the daughter of
Eric-raude; but by the turbulence of her disposition, she occasioned many
divisions and quarrels in the infant colony, in one of which Finbog and
Helgo were both killed, together with thirty of their followers. Upon this
Freidis returned to Greenland, where she lived for some time universally
detested and despised, and died in the utmost misery. The remaining
colonists were dispersed, and nothing farther that can be depended on
remains on record concerning them. Even the Icelandic colony in Greenland
has disappeared, and the eastern coast, on which especially it was settled,
has become long inaccessible, in consequence of the immense accumulation of
ice in the straits between it and Iceland. To this it may be added, that,
in the beginning of the fifteenth century, a prodigious number of people
were carried off in Norway and Iceland by a disease or pestilence called
the Black Death; probably the scurvy in its worst state, occasioned by a
succession of inclement seasons and extreme scarcity, impelling the
famished people to satisfy the craving of hunger upon unwholesome food.
Deprived of all assistance from Iceland and Norway, the colonists of
Greenland and Winland were in all probability extirpated by the continual
hostilities of the Skraellingers, or Eskimaux; and the fabulous idea of any
remnant of those in Winland having still an existence in the interior of
Newfoundland, is entirely unworthy of any consideration.
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