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Note. An important Christian colony existed in Greenland for nearly 400
years--from some time in the tenth to near the end of the fourteenth
century,--a colony in which, in the fourteenth century, there were 190
townships and a town called Garda, in which were a cathedral, bishop's
seat, and twelve or thirteen churches, besides other Christian
establishments, with a regular succession of bishops for their
superintendence, of whom seventeen are named in the sagas. This colony,
strange to say, was obliterated, no one knew how or when, and its very
existence was forgotten by the civilised world. It was chronicled,
however, in the Icelandic sagas and brought to light by antiquaries of
the highest authority. The statistical details given by the sagas have
been corroborated by the actual discovery in Greenland, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of vast ecclesiastical and other
buildings. These are facts which do not admit of reasonable doubt--so
writes Samuel Laing in his translation of "The Heimskringla, or
Chronicle of the Kings of Norway," volume one, page 141.