Deterioration of the Greenlanders themselves came about through malnutrition and intermarriage with the Eskimos who descended on their settlements. Some who voyaged to America probably remained there and were eventually absorbed by the natives. There is evidence that as late as 1362 an expedition of Swedes and Norwegians, exploring westward in the Hudson Bay, left their ship at the mouth of the Nelson River and in their afterboats penetrated through Lake Winnipeg up the Red River into Minnesota. An inscription on a rhune-stone, ostensibly left by them as a marker, says they were being cut off by the savages at the time. But, whether authentic or not, the storied voyage appears to be of little commercial significance; the era of Viking trade in America was ended. Among most scholars during the dark ages little notice had been taken of the Norse discoveries, if indeed very much was known about them. True, the chronicler Adam of Bremen had recorded the discovery of a large island in the western sea, called “Vinland,” but then everyone knew there were “islands” in the sea. Knowledge of any far-western lands, even of Greenland itself, faded with the withering of trade. Then Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, plowed the ocean straight west in 1492 and returned to assert that as he had predicted the east coast of Asia was six thousand miles nearer to Europe than most of the world’s best geographers had estimated it to be. A new, short route west to Asia! The news was electrifying to a now thoroughly trade-conscious world. Spain, England, Portugal, France--all took to the western sea. III _Codfish Land Spawns a Fur Frontier_ Christopher Columbus probably thought that “the western lands of the world” explored by the Norsemen were island-like masses, similar to Greenland, off the northern coast of Asia. From what he was able to learn, especially on his visit to Iceland, he no doubt concluded that these lands stretched far away to the southeast. He had a mariner’s instinct for such things. Certainly he calculated his landfall in 1492 with amazing accuracy. Columbus came among islands that he confidently took to be the Moluccas off Asia. The continent lay just beyond. But it was the wrong continent! Although Christopher Columbus made four voyages, reaching the mainland of South America in 1498, he never knew that he hadn’t really come upon Asia--that the natives he encountered were not wild, borderland East Indians.