Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/160

 much more numerous, and more wholesomely fed, clothed, and lodged, than we can suppose a colony in Greenland to have been, and it seems to have raged particularly in the north. It is supposed by some that this pestilence either swept off the whole population of the colony, or weakened it so much that the survivors were at last cut off by the Skrtelingers or Esquimaux, with whom the colonists appear to have been always in hostility. The inequality between the most contemptible race of savages and the most civilised people of Europe would be but small, or the advantage probably on the side of the uncivilised, in all warfare between them before the use of fire-arms; which, next to Christianity, has been the great means of diffusing and securing civilisation among the human race. The pope's brief of 1448, if it be a genuine document,—and it is said to have been found in the archives of the Vatican by a Professor Mallet some years ago, but how he got there is not shown,—would prove the truth of the conjecture which has been made, that the colonists were overpowered by the Skrælingers. The existing traditions among the Esquimaux, of their having come in their canoes and surprised and killed all the Kabloon or European people in old times, is not worth much, as evidently it is a tradition only of the moment produced by leading questions put to them. No tradition in any country seems to exist but as an impersonation, as an account of an individual person doing a thing; and it is the individual and his personal feats, not the great act itself, that is delivered by tradition as its principal subject matter. Another cause was, that Queen Margaret, on whom the three northern crowns had devolved in