A quiz question · medium
What was Hans Egede looking for when he sailed to Greenland in 1721?
Egede, a Norwegian Lutheran missionary, spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast searching for the descendants of Erik the Red's 985 AD Norse settlements. They had stopped communicating with Iceland and Norway around 1450 — probably starved out by Little Ice Age cooling. Egede found only ruins. He stayed and built a mission to the Inuit instead, founding modern Greenland's capital Nuuk.
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The Missionary Who Sailed to Greenland to Find the Vikings Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.
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