Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/76

62, few ships sailed for the distant settlement; those which set out were wrecked and when after many years another ship came to Greenland, the fiords were deserted; the stone houses, churches, cattle barns and sheep pens stood echoing empty. The first men to tempt the Arctic had disappeared into it. Thousands of the sons of the boldest blood of Europe with their flocks and herds and horses had vanished; and no man remained to say how or where they had gone.

A few straggling Eskimos came to the coasts to fish and spear seals. Danes, who now claimed the land, arrived and married Eskimos. They left the old ruins of the Norsemen and built their own dwellings. These people form the present population of Southern Greenland, who kill the eider duck and prepare the skins, try out the seal and whale oil and take the polar bear and fox pelts which bring each summer to the settlements the ships of the Royal Danish Trading Company.

One of these vessels, flying the crimson and white-crossed flag of Denmark, was steering up the West Greenland coast from Cape