Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [168]
We don’t know exactly when Eastern Settlement vanished. Between 1400 and 1420 the climate in the North Atlantic became colder and stormier, and mentions of ship traffic to Greenland ceased. A radiocarbon date of 1435 for a woman’s dress excavated from Herjolfsnes churchyard suggests that some Norse may have survived for a few decades after that last ship returned from Greenland in 1410, but we should not lay too much stress on that date of 1435 because of the statistical uncertainties of several decades associated with the radiocarbon determination. It was not until 1576-1587 that we know definitely of further European visitors, when the English explorers Martin Frobisher and John Davis sighted and landed in Greenland, met Inuit, were very impressed by their skills and technology, traded with them, and kidnapped several to bring back to exhibit in England. In 1607 a Danish-Norwegian expedition set out specifically to visit Eastern Settlement, but was deceived by the name into supposing that it lay on Greenland’s east coast and hence found no evidence of the Norse. From then on, throughout the 17th century, more Danish-Norwegian expeditions and Dutch and English whalers stopped in Greenland and kidnapped more Inuit, who (incomprehensibly to us today) were assumed to be nothing more than descendants of blue-eyed blond-haired Vikings, despite their completely different physical appearance and language.
Finally, in 1721 the Norwegian Lutheran missionary Hans Egede sailed for Greenland, in the conviction that the kidnapped Inuit really were Norse Catholics who had been abandoned by Europe before the Reformation, had reverted to paganism, and must by now be eager for a Christian missionary to convert them to Lutheranism. He happened first to land in the fjords of Western Settlement, where to his surprise he found only people who were clearly Inuit and not Norse, and who showed him ruins of former Norse farms. Still convinced that the Eastern Settlement lay on Greenland’s east coast, Egede looked there and found no signs of the Norse. In 1723 the Inuit showed him more extensive Norse ruins, including Hvalsey Church, on the southwest coast at the site of what we now know to be Eastern Settlement. That forced him to admit to himself that the Norse colony really had vanished, and his search for an answer to the mystery began. From the Inuit, Egede gathered orally transmitted memories of alternating periods of fighting and friendly relations with the former Norse population, and he wondered whether the Norse had been exterminated by the Inuit. Ever since then, generations of visitors and archaeologists have been trying to find out the answer.
Let’s be clear about exactly what the mystery involves. The ultimate causes of the Norse decline are not in doubt, and the archaeological investigations of the top layers at Western Settlement tell us something about the proximate causes of the collapse in the final year there. But we have no corresponding information about what happened in the last year of Eastern Settlement, because its top layers have not been investigated. Having taken the story this far, I can’t resist fleshing out the end with some speculation.
It seems to me that the collapse of Eastern Settlement must have been sudden rather than gentle, like the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and of Western Settlement. Greenland Norse society was a delicately balanced deck of cards whose ability to remain standing depended ultimately on the authority of the Church and of the chiefs. Respect for both of those authorities would have declined when the promised ships stopped coming from Norway, and when the climate got colder. The last bishop of Greenland died around 1378, and no new bishop arrived