Sometime afterwards, Finbog and Helgo, two Icelanders, fitted out two ships, carrying thirty men, with which they made a voyage to Winland. In this expedition they were accompanied by Freidis, the daughter of Eric-raude; but by the turbulence of her disposition, she occasioned many divisions and quarrels in the infant colony, in one of which Finbog and Helgo were both killed, together with thirty of their followers. Upon this Freidis returned to Greenland, where she lived for some time universally detested and despised, and died in the utmost misery. The remaining colonists were dispersed, and nothing farther that can be depended on remains on record concerning them. Even the Icelandic colony in Greenland has disappeared, and the eastern coast, on which especially it was settled, has become long inaccessible, in consequence of the immense accumulation of ice in the straits between it and Iceland. To this it may be added, that, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, a prodigious number of people were carried off in Norway and Iceland by a disease or pestilence called the _Black Death_; probably the scurvy in its worst state, occasioned by a succession of inclement seasons and extreme scarcity, impelling the famished people to satisfy the craving of hunger upon unwholesome food. Deprived of all assistance from Iceland and Norway, the colonists of Greenland and Winland were in all probability extirpated by the continual hostilities of the Skraellingers, or Eskimaux; and the fabulous idea of any remnant of those in Winland having still an existence in the interior of Newfoundland, is entirely unworthy of any consideration. [1] Forster, Hist. of Disc. in the North, 82. [2] Every quality must be judged of by comparison; and, contrasted with the inhospitable regions of Iceland and Greenland, in lat. 65°, this country, which was as far south as even beyond the south of England, must have appeared admirable.--E. [3] It is true that grapes grow wild in Canada which are very good to eat, yet no one has ever been able to make good wine from their juice. Whether these wild grapes are found in Newfoundland I know not. The species of vines which grow in North America, are named by Linnaeus, Vitis labrusca, vulpina, and arborea.--Forst. The propriety of the names imposed by the Norwegians on their new discoveries is admirable. Iceland, Greenland, Helleland, Markland, Winland, and many others; which are perfectly philosophical, excellently systematic, and infinitely preferable to the modern clumsy appellations, New Britain, New France, New England, New Holland, Sandwich Islands, Society islands, and a multitude of much worse names.--E. CHAP. IV. _Travels of two Mahomedans in India and China, in the Ninth Century._[1] INTRODUCTION.