The Norse colony at L’Anse aux Meadows, made up of timber buildings and cut-turf houses, was abandoned and burned within a generation of being established. Eventually the Norse also retreated from Greenland. So while the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, and Mediterranean all buzzed with commercial shipping, by the late Middle Ages the Atlantic remained a great question mark on the map of the world. It was a barrier, far more than it was a bridge.
