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By Root 1872 0

They include: foot bones of small wild birds and rabbits, which would normally have been considered too small to be worth hunting and usable only as last-ditch famine food; bones of a newborn calf and lamb, which would have been born in the late spring; the toe bones of a number of cows approximately equal to the number of spaces in that farm’s cow barn, suggesting that all cows had been slaughtered and were eaten down to the hoofs; and partial skeletons of big hunting dogs with knife marks on the bones. Dog bones are otherwise virtually absent in Norse houses, because the Norse were no more willing to eat their dogs than we are today. By killing the dogs on which they depended to hunt caribou in the autumn, and by killing the newborn livestock needed to rebuild their herds, the last inhabitants were in effect saying that they were too desperately hungry to care about the future. In lower debris layers of the houses, the carrion-eating flies associated with human feces belong to warmth-loving fly species, but the top layer had only cold-tolerant fly species, suggesting that the inhabitants had run out of fuel as well as food.

All of these archaeological details tell us that the last inhabitants of those Western Settlement farms starved and froze to death in the spring. Either it was a cold year in which the migratory seals failed to arrive; or else heavy ice in the fjords, or perhaps a band of Inuit who remembered their relatives having been stabbed by the Norse as an experiment to see how much blood ran out of them, blocked access to the seal herds in the outer fjords. A cold summer had probably caused the farmers to run out of enough hay to feed their livestock through the winter. The farmers were reduced to killing their last cows, eating even the hoofs, killing and eating their dogs, and scrounging for birds and rabbits. If so, one has to wonder why archaeologists did not also find the skeletons of the last Norse themselves in those collapsed houses. I suspect that Ivar Bardarson failed to mention that his group from Eastern Settlement performed a cleanup of Western Settlement and gave a Christian burial to the bodies of their kinsmen—or else that the copyist who copied and shortened Bardarson’s lost original omitted his account of the cleanup.

As for the end of Eastern Settlement, the last Greenland voyage of the royal trading ship promised by the king of Norway was in 1368; that ship sank in the following year. Thereafter, we have records of only four other sailings to Greenland (in 1381, 1382, 1385, and 1406), all by private ships whose captains alleged that their destination had really been Iceland and that they had reached Greenland unintentionally as a result of being blown off course. When we recall that the Norwegian king asserted exclusive rights to the Greenland trade as a royal monopoly, and that it was illegal for private ships to visit Greenland, we must consider four such “unintentional” voyages as an astonishing coincidence. Much more likely, the captains’ claims that to their deep regret they had been caught in dense fog and ended up by mistake in Greenland were just alibis to cover their real intentions. As the captains undoubtedly knew, so few ships by then were visiting Greenland that the Greenlanders were desperate for trade goods, and Norwegian imports could be sold to Greenlanders at a big profit. Thorstein Olafsson, captain of the 1406 ship, could not have been too sad at his navigational error, because he spent nearly four years in Greenland before returning to Norway in 1410.

Captain Olafsson brought back three pieces of recent news from Greenland. First, a man named Kolgrim was burned at the stake in 1407 for having used witchcraft to seduce a woman named Steinunn, the daughter of the lawman Ravn and the wife of Thorgrim Sölvason. Second, poor Steinunn then went insane and died. Finally, Olafsson himself and a local girl named Sigrid Bjornsdotter were married in Hvalsey Church on September 14, 1408, with Brand Halldorsson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses,