A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (21 page)

There is a haunting aspect to the end of the Norse in Greenland,
with the ruins of the houses and churches a testament both to the prosperity of the settlement in its heyday and to the mystery of its demise. A papal letter of 1492 – the very year that Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean – contains the last known reference to the settlement:

It is said that Greenland is an island near the edge of the world … Because of the ice that surrounds the island, sailings there are rare, because land can only be made there in August when the ice has receded. For that reason it is thought that no ship has sailed there for the last eighty years, and no bishop nor priest has been there …

The start of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age' may have become apparent in Greenland by the late thirteenth century, with the advance of glaciers, an increase in sea-ice and a shorter summer growing season; the sea-ice would have made it more difficult for hunters to reach the hauling-out grounds of walrus, especially if reduced walrus populations forced hunters to visit more ice-clogged seas to the north. The story of the Greenland ivory trade may be an early example of ecological globalisation, linking distant centres of consumption with hunter-gatherer societies – Constantinople and Baghdad with Greenland and the Canadian Arctic – and putting pressure on resources whose accessibility was affected by climate change, in a pattern that was to be repeated elsewhere as the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama opened up new areas of the world to European exploitation.

Norse seafaring in the north-west Atlantic is beautifully portrayed by the Danish artist Carl Rasmussen in a painting entitled
Sommernat under den Grønlandske Kyst circa Aar 1000
, ‘Summer night off the Greenland coast circa year 1000', completed in 1875 and based on his experience visiting Greenland five years before. In the foreground a Viking ship makes headway under sail in choppy seas, an iceberg looming behind and the coast in the distance shrouded by sea mist and clouds. It may represent the southernmost point of Greenland off Cape Farewell where the cold Greenland current meets the warmer water of the Gulf Stream, causing mist and unruly seas that can lead mariners astray; the iceberg might have calved off the glacier in the Ilulissat Icefjord – an event that I have witnessed close up, and the most likely origin of the berg that sank the
Titanic
in 1912 – and been heading out into the Atlantic. The colour conveys the frigidity of the sea as
only one who had been there could render it, and the men crowding the small ship seem vulnerable yet resolute in the huge expanse of the backdrop.

This is an image of the Norse not as sea-raiders but as explorers and colonists, yearning to catch a glimpse of the distant shore that had drawn them on this perilous venture. Rasmussen was painting several years before the discovery of the Gokstad and Oseberg ships, but the vessel that he depicts – while having the dragon prow and striped red and white sail that convention dictated for Viking ships – more accurately represents the vessels of the Norse off Greenland than a longship would have done, with a deeper hold for greater cargo capacity and high-sided to withstand heavy seas. The image is rendered all the more powerful because Rasmussen himself perished in these waters, going overboard while painting on a return trip from Greenland in 1893.

The story of the Norse arrival in Greenland is told in two great Icelandic sagas,
Grœnlendinga Saga
and
Eiríks Saga Rauða
, the Greenlanders Saga and the Saga of Erik the Red, both written in the thirteenth to fourteenth century but based on oral tradition going back more than two centuries before that. The historical reality of the Greenland settlement gives credibility to the most intriguing part of the sagas, describing one of the most remarkable maritime adventures in history – the Norse discovery of the place they called ‘Vinland' on the coast of North America. Some fifteen years after Eric the Red's colonisation of Greenland, his son Leif Erikson sailed south-west to a place where he found grapes, timber in abundance, salmon and wheat, where the climate was mild and where ‘… there was dew on the grass, and the first thing they did was to get some of it on their hands and put it to their lips, and to them it seemed the sweetest thing they had ever tasted.' According to the Greenlanders Saga, they built ‘large houses' at a place called Leifsbúðir, ‘Leif's houses', and overwintered there; in Erik's Saga this place is not mentioned but instead they were based at Straumfjord, ‘Fjord of the Currents', with a further landfall, Hop, meaning ‘Tidal Lagoon', where they harvested grapes and timber. Subsequent voyages involved Leif's brothers Thorvald and Thorstein, their sister Freydis and his sister-in-law Gudrid, with the last voyage taking place only a few years after Leif's discovery, and no indication that the Norse settlement in Vinland survived beyond this early period described in the sagas.

Belief that Vinland had a factual basis led Norwegian archaeologist
Anne Stine Ingstad and her husband Helge to follow up reports of house-shaped mounds at a remote place at the northern tip of Newfoundland called L'Anse aux Meadows, where a brook winds down to a sheltered cove through peat bogs and moss. Over seven seasons in the 1960s they excavated eight buildings in four complexes, three of them dwellings focused on a large hall and one for iron production – including a small furnace of clay and stone in which iron was smelted, and a kiln for making charcoal. The iron was bog iron, collecting in the brook, and was used to make nails for boat repair – almost a hundred nails were found at the site, as well as a plank with a wooden treenail, and one of the buildings may have been a shelter for boat construction. The houses had been built in Norse fashion with turf roofs over timber frames, and with sleeping platforms against the walls and central hearths; altogether they could have accommodated seventy to ninety people. Small artefacts, few in number but crucial for securing the identification of the site as Norse, included a bronze pin, a glass bead, a spindle whorl, a small whetstone, a bone needle, and a fragment of a gilded ring, the only personal embellishment found and the first such item of European manufacture ever to be discovered in the New World.

L'Anse aux Meadows was the first-ever UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains the only certain place of Norse landfall in North America. The paucity of personal belongings found in the excavation suggests an orderly rather than a hasty departure, and the lack of evidence for subsistence activity other than fishing and hunting – there were no animal enclosures, as at contemporary sites in Greenland and Iceland – is consistent with a short-lived, possibly seasonal settlement, most probably the place called Leifsbúðir or Straumfjord in the sagas. A strong case has been made for ‘Hop' being on the southern shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence in New Brunswick, where the tidal flats fit the description of a ‘lagoon' and grapes and timber could have been found in abundance. Among the organic finds at L'Anse aux Meadows were butternuts, from trees that do not grow as far north as Newfoundland but are found in New Brunswick; both butternuts for food and butternut wood could have been brought from Hop to be sent on to Greenland, with the wood being a good hardwood, similar to walnut.

In research published in 2021 in
Nature
, radiocarbon dating of a timber fragment from the site by high-precision mass spectrometry, combined with dendrochronological sequencing – based on the
identification of a tree ring reflecting a cosmic ray event known to have occurred in 993 – gave a date for the felling of the timber of 1021, the most precise date yet available for occupation at the site. The sagas indicate that Leif Erikson arrived in Vinland about 1000, suggesting that the new date may represent the final years of Norse presence. The certainty of that date – close to the likely construction date of the Roskilde ship – allows the site to be seen alongside other events recorded for 1021: in February, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah disappeared on a night ride outside Cairo, probably assassinated; in November, the Holy Roman emperor Henry II crossed the Brenner Pass with a 60,000-strong army, spending Christmas in Ravenna; to the east, the Byzantine army of Basil II defeated the Kingdom of Georgia – with the help of the Varangian Guard, though a decade before Harald Hardrada joined them; and in India, Rajendra Chola I extended his rule to the banks of the Ganges and invaded Bengal.

When I spent time at L'Anse aux Meadows in 2006 I was planning a chapter in my novel
Crusader Gold
that was set at the site, and I wanted to bring authenticity to my writing. It is an elemental place where little has changed since the time of the Norse and much would have been familiar from their homelands – icebergs grounded offshore, peat and sphagnum bogs leading down to the sea, and black pools reflecting the sky, bringing alive the stories with which such places were associated in the sagas. It is a place that lends itself to myth and fiction, and yet embedded in the sagas is an extraordinary historical reality equal to anything in the later European Age of Discovery and the first footholds in the Americas from the time of Columbus. The artefacts found and now the new radiocarbon date give certainty to the site and clarity to its place in history, to the reality behind the reconstructed turf buildings where in the year 1021 the ships of the Norse were pulled up, perhaps for the last time.

The sagas contain several firsts for the New World: the first recorded European shipwreck, when Leif's brother Thorvald had to repair his vessel and left the broken keel as a marker on a headland; the first European birth, of Gudrid's son Snorri; the first presence of Christianity, when Thorvald was buried with crosses at his feet after being fatally wounded; and, in the encounter that led to Thorvald's death, the first description of the indigenous people of North America, making Vinland the first known point at which humans had encircled
the globe – the culmination of a process that had begun when early humans left Africa and went east into Asia and north into Europe, the former crossing the Bering Strait at the end of the Ice Age and the latter developing the seagoing technology that eventually led the Norse to cross the Atlantic and make contact with the other stream of humanity tens of thousands of years after their ancestors had parted ways. Just as with the Greenland Norse and their penetration of the Arctic, we may never know how far the Norse got along the Atlantic seaboard and how long they stayed, but we can be certain that none of it would have been possible without their ability to build ships such as the Roskilde vessel and the merchant and transport vessels also sunk in the fjord – ships that flexed and muscled their way into unknown waters just like the vessel in Carl Rasmussen's painting.

In September 1066 King Harald Hardrada of Norway led an army against Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
states that the Norwegians – the ‘Northmen' – had a fleet of 300 ships, undoubtedly including many longships similar to the Roskilde vessel. Hardrada's defeat at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire can be regarded as the end of the Viking Age, the last great ‘raid' on English soil, not far from their first at Lindisfarne almost three centuries earlier. However, the army that defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings less than a month later was also Viking – William the Conqueror and his Normans, ‘Northmen' too, were the descendants of Norse war bands which had settled in northern France in the tenth century, and the ships depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry showing the invasion fleet are among the best images of Viking-style vessels to survive. In England, the arrival of Norman immigrants and the Norse ancestry of many people in the area of Danelaw means that Viking DNA survives as a major part of the English genetic makeup, and in that sense another great Viking diaspora can be seen in the spread of English people around the world from the sixteenth century as well as emigration from Scandinavia across the Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – people whose ancestors could have included the early explorers of Greenland and Vinland in the sagas, men and women who had visited the shores of North America half a millennium before most Europeans even knew it existed.

The supple, sinewy form of the ‘dragon-ship' passed into legend after the eleventh century, only to be revived in modern times with
replicas made on the basis of archaeological discoveries and the Viking ship once again becoming central to Scandinavian identity – in celebration not so much of warrior prowess but of the supreme achievement in ship design and the use to which it was put in the exploration and settlement of far distant lands. Historically, the longship was superseded in European waters by the cog, clinker-built with a single square sail like Viking vessels but with higher sides, a larger cargo capacity and flat bottoms that allowed them to sit upright on tidal flats, suited to the burgeoning maritime trade of the medieval period that included bulk agricultural produce. The cog was also used to transport armies across the English Channel and elsewhere to fight battles on land, and it was not until five centuries after the Roskilde ship that we once again find ships that were purpose-built for war, increasingly – with the advent of gunpowder – as weapons in their own right, something that is nowhere better seen than in the excavation and recovery of King Henry VIII's great flagship the
Mary Rose
.

The sinking of the English warship the
Mary Rose
off Portsmouth in 1545, described here by François van der Delft, ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor, was a devastating loss witnessed by King Henry VIII himself. Rediscovered in 1971, raised in 1982 and housed since 2013 in a state-of-the-art museum in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, the
Mary Rose
represents one of the supreme achievements of archaeology and gives a unique insight into the world of Tudor England. Today she lies close to HMS
Victory
, Admiral Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and HMS
Warrior
, Britain's first ironclad warship at the end of the age of sail, and within sight of the berths of the present-day aircraft carriers HMS
Prince of Wales
and HMS
Queen Elizabeth
. The
Mary Rose
was one of the first purpose-built warships in Henry VIII's navy and represents the first period of ships as platforms for guns powerful enough to disable or destroy an enemy vessel. She illuminates history at many different levels: through her role that day in the Battle of the Solent, which prevented the French from landing an invasion force in England; in the wider context of developments in ship design and armament in the sixteenth century,
and of Henry VIII and the English Reformation; and in giving rare access to individuals of the period. The finds represent diverse aspects of life on board a Tudor warship, including the ship's guns and small arms, longbows and edged weapons, nautical equipment and navigational instruments, foodstuffs and equipment for food preparation, carpentry tools, medical equipment and musical instruments.

Only two of the men on the
Mary Rose
at the time of her sinking are known by name, Vice-Admiral Sir George Carew and an officer named Roger Grenville, but other lives can be reconstructed with great clarity through the study of their remains and belongings, suggesting a hitherto unsuspected ethnic diversity among the men on Henry VIII's ships and allowing us to enter their world as if they had been brought back to life. It is at this level that the
Mary Rose
has provided the most vivid porthole into the past, through individuals otherwise lost to history whose lives can so easily touch our own.

Henry VIII was a little over two years into his reign when the
Mary Rose
was launched in 1511 and died less than two years after her sinking. The famous portrait of him by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1537 emphasizes the sheer physical presence of the man in his later years – ‘Bluff King Hal', who had become even larger by the time he watched the Battle of the Solent on 18–19 July 1545. Over the lifespan of the
Mary Rose
he had gone through his entire succession of wives, beginning with Katherine of Aragon and ending with Katherine Parr, his Queen Consort at the time of the wreck. The story of his wives contains arguably his most significant impact on history – it was Pope Clement VII's refusal to annul Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon that led to the break from the Church in Rome, resulting in the 1534 Act of Supremacy that made Henry the head of the new Church of England. Although the wider context was the Reformation movement that was sweeping Europe at the time, the immediate cause was Henry's desire to marry Anne Boleyn. His decision to divorce Katherine also has a direct bearing on the story of the
Mary Rose
; the demand by the Pope that Francis I of France and Charles V of Spain – a nephew of Katherine – invade England to retake it for the Catholic Church ultimately led to the French invasion fleet of 1545, with Francis intending to ‘liberate the English from the Protestant tyranny that Henry VIII had imposed on them'.

In a world seemingly shaped by aggressive and domineering men,
the presence of Katherine of Aragon in the story of the
Mary Rose
is a reminder of the power wielded by women in this period as well, something that reached its ultimate expression in the person of Henry and Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth – at the time of the sinking, an eleven-year-old learning Latin and Greek with no idea that she might one day be queen. Katherine was herself the daughter of one of the most powerful women of the age, Queen Isabella of Castile, who unified Spain through her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, oversaw with him the final stages of the
Reconquista
– ending Islamic rule in southern Iberia with the conquest of Granada in 1492 – and sponsored Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas. In 1513, Katherine was Queen Regent when Henry was away campaigning in France and the Scottish king James IV invaded Northumberland, leading to the English victory at the Battle of Flodden Field – a campaign in which the
Mary Rose
participated as a troop transport and Katherine went north for the battle, taking suits of armour and reputedly making a rousing speech. From the wreck itself, a fascinating connection with Katherine is two archer's wristguards bearing the coat of arms of Henry along with the pomegranate of Granada and the triple turret of Castile, probably originally issued early in Henry's reign to a specialised company of gentleman-archers at a time when Katherine was in favour and the strength of the new dynastic alliance with Spain was being celebrated.

Katherine was a highly educated woman with intellectual interests – she was a patron of the Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives, who dedicated his book
De Institutione Feminae Christianae
(‘On the Education of Christian Women') to her, and of the philosophers Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Erasmus was resident at Queens' College, Cambridge in the year that the
Mary Rose
was built, and More was Lord High Chancellor before being executed in 1532 for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy in support of Henry's religious authority. Both men were Renaissance humanists, part of the movement to revive the study of ancient Greek and Roman authors and bring their philosophical insights to bear on Christianity, drawing scholarship out of the narrow confines of medieval theology. In Italy the movement was seen in the influence of Graeco-Roman sculpture on the works of Michelangelo, alive at the time of the
Mary Rose
, and architecturally in the classical orders of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, under construction at this period.
Humanism led to a greater sense of individual self-worth, reflecting the Greek philosopher Protagoras's proposition that ‘man is the measure of all things'. This can be seen in the independence of thought that led to the Reformation, and in the realism of portraiture such as the Holbein paintings of Henry VIII and his court as well as what is today the best-known painting of the age, Leonardo da Vinci's
Mona Lisa
– begun in 1503–4 but not completed until 1516, so painted while the
Mary Rose
was undergoing her first voyages.

This intellectual and cultural awakening took place at a time when the European perspective on the world was opening up with every new voyage of discovery, allowing people to see ever-expanding outer limits previously populated by mythical monsters in the medieval
mappae mundi
. The Portuguese led the way, with Bartolomeu Dias rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and Vasco da Gama reaching India in 1498; by the time of the
Mary Rose
there were Portuguese trading posts along the coasts of Africa, the Middle East, India and South-east Asia. The first circumnavigation took place in 1519–22 under the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan, who named the Pacific Ocean, and the Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano. To the west, the landfalls of Columbus led to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and the Inca – the latter still taking place at the time of the sinking of the
Mary Rose
, with a devastating impact on the native people – and the establishment of the silver mines that made Spain the wealthiest nation in Europe, with the Viceroyalty of Peru established in 1542 and the fabled Cerro Rico, ‘Rich Mountain', opened up at Potosi in present-day Bolivia in the year that the
Mary Rose
sank.

To the north, the Breton Jacques Cartier explored the St Lawrence River in 1534–42, establishing the first French community at what is now Quebec City and naming the place ‘Country of Canadas' after the Iroquoian word for settlement. The Battle of the Solent in 1545 still had something of the medieval about it, played out with the pomp of a jousting match, but these new horizons meant that European conflicts from now on could be fought on a global stage, with the design and armament of the
Mary Rose
only one step away from the ships that would extend England's reach around the world in the reign of Elizabeth I.

The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, holds the only known contemporary depiction of the
Mary Rose
, part of the
‘Anthony Roll' prepared by Henry VIII's overseer of ordnance and presented to the king in 1546. The Roll contained depictions of all 58 ships of Henry's navy, with the names, tonnage, crew size and ‘the ordenaunce, artillary, munitions and habillimentes for warre.' Pride of place was given to the
Henry Grace à Dieu
, the ‘Great Harry', and then to the
Mary Rose
and her sister ship the
Peter Pomegranate
, all built in the early years of Henry's reign. These were carracks, called by the English ‘great ships', four-masted vessels with high forecastles and aftcastles and a hull shape that showed their origin in the cog, the wide-bellied merchantman of the medieval period. To our eyes they might appear unwieldy, with the fore and aft structures – providing fighting platforms for archers and men using breech-loading swivel guns and ‘hand-gonnes' – giving considerable wind resistance, but these were the ships of the first European voyages of discovery and the largest warship type of the first half of the sixteenth century. They were the earliest ships in England to have been pierced for guns and therefore to be designed from the outset as warships. By the time of the sinking of the
Mary Rose
they were being superseded by galleons, faster, more manoeuvrable vessels with an elongated hull and lowered forecastle – the ships that countered the 1588 Spanish Armada and took English adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh across the Atlantic and beyond.

The evidence of the wreck broadly corroborates the appearance of the ship on the Anthony Roll, which helps us to envisage features that only partially survived underwater including the forecastle, masts and rigging. One fascinating discovery in the wreck that also appears in the depiction is a ‘fighting top' – what we would call a crow's nest, a term first used in the nineteenth century – found disassembled in the hold. The depiction is also important for showing the highly decorative aspects of warships of this period, including rows of banners with heraldic designs along the railings and huge streamers from the masts with the cross of St George and green and white tails representing the colours of the House of Tudor.

Apart from his wives, Henry VIII is perhaps best remembered for the sumptuous spectacle known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the meeting near Calais in 1520 with Francis I of France – whose ships confronted Henry in the Solent twenty-five years later – in which the two kings vied with each other in displays of wealth. Battles and posturing for war had a strong element of the pageant about them and
were spectacles to be enjoyed in the same way. Sir George Carew, who went down with the
Mary Rose
, was an accomplished jouster, one of the challengers in a tournament in Durham in front of the king in 1540, a reminder that this aspect of the ‘medieval' was still alive in the sixteenth century and that potential conflict could still be displaced by ritualised combat and competitive showmanship. This could be seen in engagements at sea – a ship such as the
Mary Rose
with banners streaming sailing ahead of the fleet was another version of a knight riding into battle or a tournament with heraldry showing allegiance to his king.

The
Mary Rose
was laid down in 1510 less than a year after the accession of Henry VIII when he was only eighteen years old, so the vision he had of her as a flagship of his new English navy was bound up with his entire adult life and the span of his reign. She was built in Portsmouth, probably within sight of the location of her sinking. At some 600 tons burden she would have required about 600 large oak trees to construct, the equivalent of about 16 hectares of woodland. She was ordered alongside the
Peter Pomegranate
, with the names of the two ships reflecting the union of the king and his wife Katherine of Aragon – the Tudor rose and the pomegranate of the kingdom of Granada. The association of the ship's name with the Tudor rose was beautifully revealed when renewed excavations at the site in 2003–5 uncovered a wooden figurehead carved with the Tudor rose, the first known figurehead on an English warship to represent the name of the ship in this way.

In 1512 the
Mary Rose
was chosen as flagship of Sir Edward Howard, Lord Admiral and the first in a distinguished series of men of that name to serve the Tudors at sea. At the Battle of St Mathieu against the French on 10 August that year the
Mary Rose
shot off the mainmast of the French flagship the
Grand Louise
, in an engagement thought to have been the first fought at a distance by ships with lidded gunports and no attempt to board. Edward died in another action against the French in April 1513 and was replaced as Lord Admiral by his brother, Thomas Howard, future Duke of Norfolk – an uncle by his father's second wife of two of Henry's wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Later that year he took the
Mary Rose
to Newcastle-upon-Tyne with troops for the campaign against James IV of Scotland, who had invaded England and was killed at the Battle of
Flodden Field on 9 September. This was to be her last involvement in conflict for some time – in October 1514 the war with France ended with the marriage of Louis XII and Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.