The ground thus lost could not be regained. On the contrary, we may suppose the Eskimos to be getting stronger and drawing nearer. In 1355 an expedition under Paul Knutson came out to reinforce the Norsemen; but it returned home in or before 1364 and can have made only a temporary lightening of the load. In 1379 there seems to have been an Eskimo attack, costing the Norsemen 18 of their few men. But peace may have reigned as a rule. At any rate, the ordinary functions of life went on, for it is of record that a young Icelander, visiting Greenland, was married by the Bishop at Gardar in 1409; and the last visit of the Norwegian _knorr_, or supply ship, occurred by way of Iceland in 1410. After that nothing is certainly known. There are two papal letters at different periods of the century, based on very questionable hearsay information and indicating confusion and general falling away. There was even a futile effort to reopen communication in 1492. Probably by that time the Norsemen and Norse women were all dead or married to the Eskimos. That particular form of primitive heathendom seems to have absorbed them. Greenland was to be rediscovered and repeopled in due season; but for the time being it had become in European knowledge only a half-forgotten figure on certain maps, sometimes given with fair accuracy of outline but sometimes also as an oceanic Green Island of only indirect relation to reality and passing its name on to little islands and even fancied rocks far at sea, which owned nothing in common with the far northern region except a part of its name. CHAPTER VIII MARKLAND, OTHERWISE NEWFOUNDLAND The name Markland, meaning Forest Land, must be, in one language or another, among the oldest geographical designations known among men. Nothing could be more natural to even the most primitive people than to distinguish in this way any heavily overgrown region which especially challenged attention, perhaps as a refuge or as a barrier. Its appearance in any form of record was, of course, very much later. As to Atlantic regions, the earliest instance other than Norse may be the “Insula de Legname” of certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century portolan charts,[198] evidently given by some Genoese or other Italian navigator to Madeira, the latter name being a translation of the former, substituted by the Portuguese[199] after their rediscovery. Thus we might say that this island was the original western Markland, but for the fact that certain Greenland Norsemen had affixed the name long before to a region much farther west. FIRST NORSE ACCOUNT, IN HAUK’S BOOK