Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (49 page)

his Greenlander friends, only to discover that his feet couldn't fit under the
deck and that his upper legs were too big to enter the manhole.

In their range of hunting strategies, the Inuit were the most flexible and sophisticated hunters in Arctic history. Besides killing caribou, walruses,
and land birds in ways not unlike those of the Norse, the Inuit differed from
the Norse in using their fast kayaks to harpoon seals and to run down
seabirds on the ocean, and in using umiaqs and harpoons to kill whales in
open waters. Not even an Inuit can stab to death at one blow a healthy
whale, so the whale hunt began with a hunter harpooning the whale from
an umiaq rowed by other men. That is not an easy task, as all you devotees of Sherlock Holmes stories may remember from the "Adventure of Black
Peter," in which an evil retired ship's captain is found dead in his house,
with a harpoon that had been decorating his wall thrust clean through him. After spending a morning at a butcher's shop, vainly attempting himself to
drive a harpoon through a pig's carcass, Sherlock Holmes deduces correctly
that the murderer must have been a professional harpooner, because an un
trained man no matter how strong cannot drive in a harpoon deeply. Two
things made that possible for the Inuit: the harpoon's spear-thrower grip
that extended the throwing arc and hence increased the hunter's throwing
force and the impact; and, as in the case of Black Peter's murderer, long
practice. For the Inuit, though, that practice began already in childhood, re
sulting in Inuit men developing a condition called hyperextension of the throwing arm: in effect, an additional built-in spear-thrower.

Once the harpoon head became embedded in the whale, the cleverly de
signed toggle connection released, allowing the hunters to retrieve the har
poon shaft now separated from the harpoon head embedded in the whale. Otherwise, if the harpooner had continued to hold a rope tied to the har
poon head and shaft, the angry whale would have dragged underwater the
umiaq and all its Inuit occupants. Left attached to the harpoon head was an
air-filled bladder of sealskin, whose buoyancy forced the whale to work harder against the bladder's resistance and to grow tired as it dived. When the whale surfaced to breathe, the Inuit launched another harpoon with yet
another bladder attached, to tire the whale even more. Only when the whale
had thus become exhausted did the hunters dare bring the umiaq alongside
the beast to lance it to death.

The Inuit also devised a specialized technique for hunting ringed seal, the most abundant seal species in Greenland waters but one whose habits
made it difficult to capture. Unlike other Greenland seal species, the ringed
seal winters off the Greenland coast under the ice, by opening breathing

holes through the ice just large enough for its head (but not for its body).
The holes are difficult to spot because the seal leaves them covered with a cone of snow. Each seal has several breathing holes, just as a fox makes an
underground burrow with several foxholes as alternate entrances. A hunter
could not knock the snow cone off the hole, else the seal would realize that someone was waiting for it. Hence the hunter stood patiently next to a cone
in the cold darkness of the Arctic winter, waited motionless for as many hours as necessary to hear a seal arrive to catch a quick breath, and then tried to harpoon the animal
through
the snow cone, without being able to
see it. As the impaled seal swam off, the harpoon head then detached from the shaft but remained attached to a rope, which the hunter played out and
pulled until the seal became exhausted and could be dragged in and lanced.
That whole operation is difficult to learn and execute successfully; the
Norse never did. As a result, in the occasional years when other seal species
declined in numbers, the Inuit switched to hunting ringed seals, but the
Norse did not have that option, and so they were at risk of starving.

Thus, the Inuit enjoyed those and other advantages over the Norse and
the Dorset people. Within a few centuries of the Inuit expansion across Canada into Northwest Greenland, the Dorset culture, which had previ
ously occupied both areas, disappeared. Hence we have not one but two
Inuit-related mysteries: the disappearance first of the Dorset people, then of
the Norse, both of them soon after Inuit arrival in their territories. In Northwest Greenland some Dorset settlements survived for a century or two after the Inuit appeared, and it would have been impossible for two
such peoples to be unaware of each other's presence, yet there is no direct archaeological evidence of contact between them, such as Inuit objects at contemporary Dorset sites or vice versa. But there is indirect evidence of
contact: the Greenland Inuit ended up with several Dorset cultural traits
that they had lacked before arriving in Greenland, including a bone knife
for cutting snow blocks, domed snow houses, soapstone technology, and the
so-called Thule 5 harpoon head. Clearly, the Inuit not only had some op
portunities to learn from Dorset people but also must have had
something
to do with their disappearance after the latter had lived in the Arctic for
2,000 years. Each of us can imagine our own scenario for the end of Dorset culture. One guess of mine is that, among groups of Dorset people starving in a difficult winter, the women just deserted their men and walked over to Inuit camps where they knew that people were feasting on bowhead whales
and ringed seals.

What about relations between the Inuit and the Norse? Incredibly, during the centuries that those two peoples shared Greenland, Norse annals in
clude only two or three brief references to the Inuit.

The first of those three annal passages may refer to either the Inuit or else Dorset people because it describes an incident from the 11th or 12th
century, when a Dorset population still survived in Northwest Greenland,
and when the Inuit were just arriving. A
History of Norway
preserved in a
15th-century manuscript explains how the Norse first encountered Green
land natives: "Farther to the north beyond the Norse settlements, hunters
have come across small people, whom they call skraelings. When they are
stabbed with a nonfatal wound, their wounds turn white and they don't
bleed, but when they are mortally wounded, they bleed incessantly. They
have no iron, but they use walrus tusks as missiles and sharp stones as tools."

Brief and matter-of-fact as this account is, it suggests that the Norse had
a "bad attitude" that got them off to a dreadful start with the people with whom they were about to share Greenland. "Skraelings," the Old Norse
word that the Norse applied to all three groups of New World natives that
they encountered in Vinland or Greenland (Inuit, Dorset, and Indians),
translates approximately as "wretches." It also bodes poorly for peaceful re
lations if you take the first Inuit or Dorset person whom you see, and you
try stabbing him as an experiment to figure out how much he bleeds. Recall also, from Chapter 6, that when the Norse first encountered a group of Indi
ans in Vinland, they initiated friendship by killing eight of the nine. These
first contacts go a long way towards explaining why the Norse did not estab
lish a good trading relationship with the Inuit.

The second of the three mentions is equally brief and imputes to the
"skraelings" a role in destroying the Western Settlement around
a.d.
1360;
we shall consider that role below. The skraelings in question could only have been Inuit, as by then the Dorset population had vanished from
Greenland. The remaining mention is a single sentence in Iceland's annals for the year 1379: "The skraelings assaulted the Greenlanders, killing 18
men, and captured two boys and one bondswoman and made them slaves." Unless the annals were mistakenly attributing to Greenland an attack actu
ally carried out in Norway by Saami people, this incident would presumably
have taken place near Eastern Settlement, because Western Settlement no
longer existed in 1379 and a Norse hunting party in the Nordrseta would
have been unlikely to include a woman. How should we construe this la
conic story? To us today, 18 Norse killed doesn't seem like a big deal, in this

century of world wars in which tens of millions of people were slaughtered.
But consider that the entire population of Eastern Settlement was probably
not more than 4,000, and that 18 men would have constituted about 2% of
the adult males. If an enemy today were to attack the U.S., with its popula
tion of 280,000,000, and killed adult males in the same proportion, the
result would be 1,260,000 American men dead. That is, that single docu
mented attack of 1379 represented a disaster to Eastern Settlement, regard
less of how many more men died in the attacks of 1380,1381, and so on.

Those three brief texts are our sole written sources of information about
Norse/Inuit relations. Archaeological sources of information consist of
Norse artifacts or copies of Norse artifacts found at Inuit sites, and vice
versa. A total of 170 objects of Norse origin are known from Inuit sites, in
cluding a few complete tools (a knife, a shears, and a fire-starter), but mostly just pieces of metal (iron, copper, bronze, or tin) that the Inuit
would have prized for making their own tools. Such Norse objects occur not only at Inuit sites in locations where the Vikings lived (Eastern and Western
Settlements) or often visited (Nordrseta), but also in locations that the
Norse never visited, such as East Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Hence
Norse material must have been of sufficient interest to the Inuit that it
passed by trade between Inuit groups hundreds of miles apart. For most of the objects it is impossible for us to know whether the Inuit acquired them
from the Norse themselves by trade, by killing or robbing Norse, or by scav
enging Norse settlements after the Norse had abandoned them. However, 10
of the pieces of metal come from bells of Eastern Settlement churches,
which the Norse surely wouldn't have traded. Those bells were presumably
obtained by the Inuit after the demise of the Norse, for instance when Inuit were living in houses of their own that they built within Norse ruins.

Firmer evidence of face-to-face contact between the two peoples comes
from nine Inuit carvings of human figures that are unmistakably Norse, as judged by depictions of a characteristically Viking hairdo, clothing, or a
crucifix decoration. The Inuit also learned some useful technologies from
the Norse. While Inuit tools in the shape of a European knife or saw could just have been copied from plundered Norse objects without any friendly
contact with a live Norseman, Inuit-made barrel staves and screw-threaded
arrowheads suggest that the Inuit actually saw Norse men making or using
barrels and screws.

On the other hand, corresponding evidence of Inuit objects at Norse sites is almost non-existent. One Inuit antler comb, two bird darts, one
ivory towline handle, and one piece of meteoric iron: those five items are

the grand total known to me for all of Norse Greenland throughout the
centuries of Inuit/Norse coexistence. Even those five items would seem not
to be valuable trade items but just discarded curiosities that some Norse
person picked up. Astounding by their complete absence are all the useful
pieces of Inuit technology that the Norse could have copied with profit but
didn't. For instance, there is not a single harpoon, spear-thrower, or kayak
or umiaq piece from any Norse site.

If trade did develop between the Inuit and Norse, it would probably
have involved walrus ivory, which the Inuit were skilled at hunting and
which the Norse sought as their most valuable export to Europe. Unfortu
nately, direct evidence of such trade would be hard for us to recognize, be
cause there is no way to determine whether the pieces of ivory found on
many Norse farms came from walruses killed by the Norse themselves or by
Inuit. But we certainly don't find at Norse sites the bones of what I think
would have been the most precious things that the Inuit could have traded
to the Norse: ringed seals, Greenland's most abundant seal species during
the winter, hunted successfully by the Inuit but not by the Norse, and avail
able at a time of year when the Norse were chronically at risk of exhausting
their stored winter food supply and starving. That suggests to me that there
really was very little, if any, trade between the two peoples. As far as ar
chaeological evidence for contact is concerned, the Inuit might as well have
been living on a different planet from the Norse, rather than sharing the
same island and hunting grounds. Nor do we have any skeletal or genetic
evidence of Inuit/Norse intermarriage. Careful study of the skulls of skele
tons buried in Greenland Norse churchyards showed them to resemble con
tinental Scandinavian skulls and failed to detect any Inuit/Norse hybrid.

Both the failure to develop trade with the Inuit, and the failure to learn from them, represented from our perspective huge losses to the Norse, al
though they themselves evidently didn't see it that way. Those failures were
not for lack of opportunity. Norse hunters must have seen Inuit hunters in the Nordrseta, and then at the Western Settlement outer fjords when
the Inuit arrived there. Norsemen with their own heavy wooden rowboats and their own techniques for hunting walruses and seals must have recog
nized the superior sophistication of Inuit light skin boats and hunting
methods: the Inuit were succeeding at doing exactly what the Norse hunters
were trying to do. When later European explorers began visiting Greenland
in the late 1500s, they were immediately amazed at the speed and maneu
verability of kayaks and commented on the Inuit appearing to be half-fish,
darting around in the water much faster than any European boat could