Ívar Bárðarson

The reports covered the Eastern Settlement, church property, daily life, and perilous sailing routes.

On an expedition to the more remote Western Settlement, Bárðarson found the colony abandoned, inhabited only by feral livestock.

[8] Until a new bishop was ordained, Bárðarson filled the vacancy at Garðar Cathedral as an official representative of the Catholic Church.

[12] He wrote that Gunnbjörn's skerries, a group of rocky islands along the eastern coast of Greenland, had once been the halfway point on voyages to the colonies, "but now ice has come down from the northeast out of the gulf of the sea so near to the aforesaid skerries, that no one without extreme peril can sail the old course, and be heard of again..."[13] In 1364, he was appointed canon of Bergen Cathedral.

[4] It is also one of only a handful of primary source documents covering interactions between the Precolumbian Norse explorers and Native Americans.

[11] The Eastern Settlement had not heard from the more remote colony, and when Bárðarson sought out colonists in the north, he found only abandoned farms.

[11] Inside an abandoned Norse home, archaeologists found one of the colony's last feral domesticated goats preserved in permafrost.

[11] The removal of furniture indicated that the residents had intentionally abandoned the farm, and the layer of feces on the floor showed that the goat had lived in the empty home until a wall collapsed onto it.