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Book Review: The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca A.D. 1000–1500

Kirsten Seaver sets out to unravel the fate of the Norse colony in Greenland in a profoundly revisionist way. Challenging the traditional view that the Greenland colony succumbed before the end of the fifteenth century to disease, neglect, or environmental degradation after having been abandoned by Norway and cut off from Europe, Seaver maintains that the Eastern Settlement in fact survived until late in the fifteenth century, supported by commerce in stockfish with merchants of Bristol, England. Only when the discovery of the fish stocks at Newfoundland and the direct trans-Atlantic route between Europe and North America caused the Bristol-Greenland trade link to lose its vitality was the colony finally abandoned. Seaver avoids a conclusive explanation as to precisely when this happened or, for that matter, where the Greenlanders went, but she speculates that it occurred before the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, and that the inhabitants probably migrated to an unidentified destination in mainland North America. That the book represents an impressive, almost monumental, research effort cannot be denied. Seaver draws heavily on a diversity of disciplines and sources to build her argument, which she presents in ten carefully developed chapters. She opens with a thoughtful evaluation of Greenland's role in the exploration of North America at the end of the first millennium, followed by a social and economic history of Norse Greenland before 1350, including a chapter on "Church and Trade." It is here that she begins to depart from conventional history. Chapters four through six argue that the more northerly of the two settled regions in Greenland, the Western Settlement, came to an end not in the middle of the fourteenth century, but more than fifty years later; chapters seven through nine maintain that the more populous Eastern Settlement remained vigourous thanks to trade with English fishermen and especially merchants who knew about the Greenland settlements "well before the middle of the fifteenth century" (p. 181) and made regular commercial