Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (39 page)

fort to colonize the Americas, nearly 500 years before Columbus, it has been
the subject of romantic speculation and many books. For our purposes in this book, the most important lessons to be drawn from the Vinland ven
ture are the reasons for its failure.

The coast of northeastern North America reached by the Vikings lies
thousands of miles from Norway, across the North Atlantic, far beyond di
rect reach of Viking ships. Instead, all Viking ships destined for North
America sailed from the westernmost established colony, Greenland. Even
Greenland, though, was far from North America by Viking sailing standards. The Vikings' main camp on Newfoundland lay nearly 1,000 miles
from the Greenland settlements by a direct voyage, but required a voyage of
2,000 miles and up to six weeks by the actual coast-hugging route that
Vikings took for safety, given their rudimentary navigational abilities. To sail from Greenland to Vinland and then return within the summer sailing
season of favorable weather would have left little time for exploring Vinland
before setting sail again. Hence the Vikings established a base camp on
Newfoundland, where they could remain for the winter, so as to be able to
spend the entire subsequent summer exploring.

The known Vinland voyages were organized in Greenland by two sons,
a daughter, and a daughter-in-law of that same Erik the Red who had
founded the Greenland colony in 984. Their motive was to reconnoiter the land, in order to see what products it offered and to gauge its suitability for settlement. According to the sagas, those initial voyagers took along livestock in their boats, so that they would have the option of making a perma
nent settlement if the land seemed good to them. Subsequently, after the
Vikings had given up on that hope of settling, they continued to visit the coast of North America for more than 300 years in order to fetch lumber (always in short supply in Greenland), and possibly in order to extract iron
at sites where plenty of wood was available to make charcoal (also in short
supply in Greenland) for iron-smithing.

We have two sources of information about the Vikings' attempt to settle North America: written accounts and archaeological excavations. The writ
ten accounts consist mainly of two sagas describing the initial Vinland voy
ages of discovery and exploration, transmitted orally for several centuries and finally written down in Iceland during the 1200s. In the absence of in
dependent confirming evidence, scholars tended to dismiss the sagas as fic
tion and to doubt that the Vikings ever reached the New World, until the
debate was finally settled when archaeologists located the Vikings' New
foundland base camp in 1961. The saga accounts of Vinland are now recog-

nized to be the oldest written descriptions of North America, although
scholars still debate the accuracy of their details. They are contained in two
separate manuscripts, termed the
Greenlanders' Saga
and
Erik the Red's Saga,
which are in broad agreement but have many differences of finer
points. They describe up to five separate voyages from Greenland to Vin
land, within the short span of barely a decade, each voyage involving only a
single ship, except that the last voyage used either two or three ships.

In those two Vinland sagas, the main North American sites visited by the
Vikings are described briefly and given the Norse names of Helluland,
Markland, Vinland, Leifsbudir, Straumfjord, and Hop. Much effort has been
poured by scholars into identifying these names and brief descriptions (e.g.,
"This land [Markland] was flat and forested, sloping gently seaward, and
they came across many beaches of white sand.... This land will be named
for what it has to offer and called Markland [Forest Land]"). It seems clear that Helluland means the east coast of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and that Markland is the Labrador coast south of Baffin Island, both Baffin
Island and Labrador lying due west of Greenland across the narrow Davis
Strait separating Greenland from North America. In order to remain within sight of land as much as possible, the Greenland Vikings didn't sail straight across the open North Atlantic to Newfoundland but instead crossed Davis
Strait to Baffin Island and then headed south, following the coast. The re
maining place names in the sagas evidently refer to coastal areas of Canada south of Labrador, including surely Newfoundland, probably the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (which collectively were
termed Vinland), and possibly some of the New England coast. Vikings in
the New World would initially have explored widely in order to find the
most useful areas, just as we know that they did in Greenland before picking
the two fjords with the best pastureland to settle.

Our other source of information about Vikings in the New World is ar
chaeological. Despite much searching by archaeologists, only a single Viking
camp has been identified and excavated, at L'Anse aux Meadows on the
northwest coast of Newfoundland. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the
camp was occupied around
a.d.
1000, in agreement with saga accounts that the Vinland voyages were led by grown children of Erik the Red, who orga
nized the settlement of Greenland around 984, and whom the sagas de
scribe as still alive at the time of the voyages. The L'Anse aux Meadows site,
whose location seems to agree with the sagas' description of a camp known
as Leifsbudir, consists of the remains of eight buildings, including three
residential halls large enough to hold 80 people, an iron smithy to extract

bog iron and make iron nails for boats, a carpenter's shop, and boat repair
shops, but no farm buildings or farm implements.

According to the sagas, Leifsbudir was just a base camp at a location
convenient for overwintering and going out on summer explorations; the
resources of interest to the Vikings were instead to be found in those explo
ration areas termed Vinland. This is confirmed by a tiny but important
discovery made during the archaeological excavation of the L'Anse aux Meadows camp: two wild walnuts known as butternuts, which do not grow
in Newfoundland. Even during the centuries of warmer climate prevailing
around
a.d.
1000, the walnut trees closest to Newfoundland occurred south
of the St. Lawrence River Valley. That was also the closest area where the
wild grapes described in the sagas grew. It was probably for those grapes
that the Vikings named the area Vinland, meaning "wine land."

The sagas describe Vinland as rich in prized resources lacking in Green
land. High on Vinland's list of advantages were a relatively mild climate, much lower latitude and hence longer summer growing season than Green
land, tall grass, and mild winters, making it possible for Norse cattle to graze
outdoors for themselves throughout the winter, and thus sparing the Norse the effort of having to make hay in the summer for feeding their cattle in
barns during the winter. Forests with good timber were everywhere. Other
natural resources included lake and river salmon larger than any salmon
seen in Greenland, one of the world's richest ocean fishing grounds in the
seas surrounding Newfoundland, and game, including deer, caribou, and
nesting birds and their eggs.

Despite the valuable shiploads of timber, grapes, and animal furs that
the Vinland voyagers brought back to Greenland, the voyages were discon
tinued and the L'Anse aux Meadows camp was abandoned. Although the
archaeological excavations of the camp were exciting in finally proving that
Vikings had indeed reached the New World before Columbus, the excava
tions were disappointing as well, because the Norse left nothing of value.
Objects recovered were confined to small items that had probably been discarded or else dropped and lost, such as 99 broken iron nails, a single whole nail, a bronze pin, a whetstone, a spindle, one glass bead, and a knitting nee
dle. Evidently, the site was not abandoned hastily, but as part of a planned
permanent evacuation in which all tools and possessions of value were
taken back to Greenland. Today we know that North America was by far the
largest and most valuable North Atlantic land discovered by the Norse; even
the tiny fraction of it that the Norse surveyed impressed them. Why, then,
did the Norse give up on Vinland, land of plenty?

The sagas offer a simple answer to that question: the large population of hostile Indians, with whom the Vikings failed to establish good relations. According to the sagas, the first Indians that the Vikings met were a group of nine, of whom they killed eight, while the ninth fled. That was not a promising start to establishing friendship. Not surprisingly, the Indians came back in a fleet of small boats, shot arrows at the Norse, and killed their leader, Erik the Red's son Thorvald. Pulling the arrow out of his intestines, the dying Thorvald is said to have lamented, "This is a rich country we have found; there is plenty of fat around my belly. We've found a land of fine resources, though we'll hardly enjoy much of them."

The next group of Norse voyagers did manage to establish a trade with local Indians (Norse cloth and cow's milk in exchange for animal furs brought by Indians), until one Viking killed an Indian trying to steal weapons. In the ensuing battle many Indians were killed before fleeing, but that was enough to convince the Norse of the chronic problems that they would face. As the unknown author of
Erik the Red's Saga
put it, "The [Viking] party then realized that, despite everything that the land had to offer there, they would be under constant threat of attack from its former inhabitants. They made ready to depart for their own country [i.e., Greenland]."

After thus abandoning Vinland to the Indians, the Greenland Norse continued to make visits farther north on the Labrador coast, where there were many fewer Indians, in order to fetch timber and iron. Tangible evidence of such visits are a handful of Norse objects (bits of smelted copper, smelted iron, and spun goat's wool) found at Native American archaeological sites scattered over the Canadian Arctic. The most notable such find is a silver penny minted in Norway between 1065 and 1080 during the reign of King Olav the Quiet, found at an Indian site on the coast of Maine hundreds of miles south of Labrador, and pierced for use as a pendant. The Maine site had been a big trading village at which archaeologists excavated stone and tools originating in Labrador as well as over much of Nova Scotia, New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Probably the penny had been dropped or traded by a Norse visitor to Labrador, and had then reached Maine by an Indian trade network.

Other evidence of continuing Norse visits to Labrador is the mention, in Iceland's chronicle for the year 1347, of a Greenland ship with a crew of 18 that had reached Iceland after losing its anchor and being blown off course on the return voyage from "Markland." The chronicle mention is brief and matter-of-fact, as if there were nothing unusual requiring explanation
—as if the chronicler were instead to have written equally matter-of-factly, "So,

the news this year is that one of those ships that visit Markland each sum
mer lost its anchor, and also Thorunn Ketilsdottir spilled a big pitcher of
milk at her Djupadalur farm, and one of Bjarni Bollason's sheep died, and
that's all the news for this year, just the usual stuff."

In short, the Vinland colony failed because the Greenland colony itself
was too small and poor in timber and iron to support it, too far from both
Europe and from Vinland, owned too few oceangoing ships, and could not finance big fleets of exploration; and that one or two shiploads of Green-
landers were no match for hordes of Nova Scotia and Gulf of St. Lawrence
Indians when they were provoked. In
a.d.
1000 the Greenland colony proba
bly numbered no more than 500 people, so that the 80 adults at the L'Anse camp would have represented a huge drain on Greenland's available manpower. When European colonizers finally returned to North America after
1500, the history of European attempts to settle then shows how long were
the odds that those attempts faced, even for colonies backed by Europe's
wealthiest and most populous nations, sending annual supply fleets of ships far larger than medieval Viking vessels, and equipped with guns and abun
dant iron tools. At the first English and French colonies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Canada, about half of the settlers died of starvation and dis
ease within the first year. It's no surprise, then, that 500 Greenlanders, from
the most remote colonial outpost of Norway, one of Europe's poorer nations, could not succeed at conquering and colonizing North America.

For our purposes in this book, the most important thing about the fail
ure of the Vinland colony within 10 years is that it was in part a greatly
speeded-up preview of the failure that overtook the Greenland colony after 450 years. Norse Greenland survived much longer than Norse Vinland be
cause it was closer to Norway and because hostile natives did not make their
appearance for the first few centuries. But Greenland shared, albeit in less extreme form, Vinland's twin problems of isolation and Norse inability to
establish good relations with Native Americans. If it had not been for Native
Americans, the Greenlanders might have survived their ecological problems, and the Vinland settlers might have persisted. In that case, Vinland
might have undergone a population explosion, the Norse might have spread
over North America after
a.d.
1000, and I as a twentieth-century American
might now be writing this book in an Old Norse-based language like mod
ern Icelandic or Faeroese, rather than in English.