The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (4 page)

-Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

And what a wonder! Some knights who were sitting on a magnificently outfitted horse gave the horse and their weapons away
for cheap wine; and they did so because they were so terribly
hungry.

A German chronicler of 1315

Major historical and climatic events, 950 to 1500

Anonymous, Hafgerdinga Lay

("The Lay of the Breakers')

he fog lies close to the oily, heaving water, swirling gently as a bitterly
cold air wafts in from the north. You sit gazing at a featureless world, sails
slatting helplessly. Water drips from the rigging. No horizon, no boundary between sea and sky: only the gray-shrouded bow points the way
ahead. The compass tells you the boat is still pointing west, barely moving through the icy chill. This fog can hug the water for days, hiding icebergs and the signs of rapidly forming pack ice. Or a few hours later, a
cold northeaster can fill in and sweep away the murk, blowing out of a
brilliantly blue sky. Then the horizon is as hard as a salt-encrusted knife,
the sea a deep blue frothing with white caps. Running easily under reduced sail, you sight snow-clad peaks far on the western horizon a halfday's run ahead-if the wind holds. As land approaches, the peaks cloud
over, the wind drops, small ice floes dot the now-calm ocean. The wise
mariner heaves to and waits for clearer weather and a breeze, lest ice block
the way and crush the ship to matchwood.

Icebergs move haphazardly across the northern seas. Pack ice floes undulate in broken rows in the endless ocean swell. Far to the north, a ribbon of gray-white light shimmers above the horizon, the ice-blink of solid
pack ice, the frontier of the Arctic world. To sail near the pack is to skirt
the barrier between a familiar universe and oblivion. A brilliant clarity of
land and sky fills you with keen awareness, with fear of the unknown.

For as long as Europeans can remember, the frozen bastions of the
north have hovered on the margins of their world, a fearsome, unknown
realm nurturing fantastic tales of terrible beasts and grotesque landscapes.
The boreal oceans were a source of piercing winds, vicious storms and
unimaginably cold winters with the ability to kill. At first, only a few Irish
monks and the hardy Norse dared sail to the fringes of the ice. King Harald Hardrade of Norway and England is said to have explored "the expanse of the Northern Ocean" with a fleet of ships in about A.D. 1040,
"beyond the limits of land" to a point so far north that he reached pack
ice up to three meters thick. He wrote: "There lay before our eyes at
length the darksome bounds of a failing world."' But by then, his fellow
Norse had already ventured far over northern seas, to Iceland, Greenland
and beyond. They had done so during some of the warmest summers of
the previous 8,000 years.

I have sailed but rarely in the far north, but the experience, the sheer
unpredictability of the weather, I find frightening. In the morning, your
boat courses along under full sail in a moderate sea with unlimited visibility. You take off your foul-weather gear and bask in the bright sun with,
perhaps, only one sweater on. By noon, the sky is gray, the wind up to 25
knots and rising, a line of dense fog to windward. The freshening breeze
cuts to the skin and you huddle in your windproof foulies. By dusk you
are hove-to, storm jib aback, main with three reefs, rising and falling to a
howling gale. You lie in the darkening warmth belowdecks, listening to
the endless shrieking of the southwester in the rigging, poised for disaster,
vainly waiting for the lesser notes of a dying storm. A day later, no trace
remains of the previous night's gale, but the still, gray water seems colder,
about to ice over.

Only the toughest amateur sailors venture into Arctic waters in small
craft, and then only when equipped with all the electronic wizardry of the
industrial age. They rely on weather faxes, satellite images of ice condi tions, and constant radio forecasts. Even then, constantly changing ice
conditions around Iceland and Greenland, and in the Davis Strait and
along the Labrador coast, can alter your voyage plans in hours or cause
you to spend days at sea searching for ice-free waters. In 1991, for example, ice along the Labrador coast was the worst of the twentieth century,
making coastal voyages to the north in small craft impossible. Voyaging
in the north depends on ice conditions and, when they are severe, small
boat skippers stay on land. Electronics can tell you where you are and
provide almost embarrassing amounts of information about what lies
ahead and around you. But they are no substitute for sea sense, an intimate knowledge of the moody northern seas acquired over years of ocean
sailing in small boats, which you encounter from time to time in truly
great mariners, especially those who navigate close to the ocean.

The Norse had such a sense. They kept their sailing lore to themselves
and passed their learning from family to family, father to son, from one
generation to the next. Their maritime knowledge was never written
down but memorized and refined by constant use. Norse navigators lived
in intimate association with winds and waves, watching sea and sky,
sighting high glaciers from afar by the characteristic ice-blink that reflects
from them, predicting ice conditions from years of experience navigating
near the pack. Every Norse skipper learned the currents that set ships off
course or carried them on their way, the seasonal migrations of birds and
sea mammals, the signs from sea and sky of impending bad weather, fog,
or ice. Their bodies moved with swell and wind waves, detecting seemingly insignificant changes through their feet. The Norse were tough,
hard-nosed seamen who combined bold opportunism with utterly realistic caution, a constant search for new trading opportunities with an abiding curiosity about what lay over the horizon. Always their curiosity was
tempered with careful observations of currents, wind patterns, and icefree passages that were preserved for generations as family secrets.

The Norse had enough to eat far from land. Their ancestors had
learned centuries before how to catch cod in enormous numbers from
open boats. They gutted and split the fish, then hung them by the thousands to dry in the frosty northern air until they lost most of their weight
and became easily stored, woodlike planks. Cod became the Norse hardtack, broken off and chewed calmly in the roughest seas. It was no coinci dence Norse voyagers passed from Norway to Iceland, Greenland and
North America, along the range of the Atlantic cod. Cod and the Norse
were inextricably entwined.

The explorations of the Norse, otherwise known as Vikings or "Northmen," were a product of overpopulation, short growing seasons, and
meager soils in remote Scandinavian fjords. Each summer, young "rowmen" left in their long ships in search of plunder, trading opportunities,
and adventure. During the seventh century, they crossed the stormy
North Sea with impressive confidence, raided towns and villages in eastern Britain, ransacked isolated Christian settlements, and returned home
each winter laden with booty. Gradually, they expanded the tentacles of
Norse contacts and trade over huge areas of the north. Norsemen also
traveled far east, down the Vistula, Dnieper, and Volga rivers to the Black
and Caspian seas, besieged Constantinople more than once and founded
cities from Kiev to Dublin.

The tempo of their activity picked up after 800. More raiding led, inevitably, to permanent overseas settlements, like the Danish Viking camp
at the mouth of the Seine in northern France, where a great army repeatedly looted defenseless cities. Danish attackers captured Rouen and
Nantes and penetrated as far south as the Balearic Islands, Provence, and
Tuscany. Marauding Danes invaded England in 851 and overran much of
the eastern part of the country. By 866, much of England was under the
Danelaw. Meanwhile, the Norwegian Vikings occupied the Orkney and
Shetland Islands, then the Hebrides off northwestern Scotland. By 874,
Norse colonists had taken advantage of favorable ice conditions in northern seas and settled permanently in Iceland, at the threshold of the Arctic.

The heyday of the Norse, which lasted roughly from A.D. 800 to about
1200, was not only a byproduct of such social factors as technology, overpopulation and opportunism. Their great conquests and explorations
took place during a period of unusually mild and stable weather in northern Europe called the Medieval Warm Period-some of the warmest four
centuries of the previous 8,000 years. The warmer conditions affected
much of Europe and parts of North America, but just how global a phenomenon the Warm Period was is a matter for debate. The historical consequences of the warmer centuries were momentous in the north. Be tween 800 and 1200, warmer air and sea surface temperatures led to less
pack ice than in earlier and later centuries. Ice conditions between
Labrador and Iceland were unusually favorable for serious voyaging.