The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (8 page)

Outside of L’Anse aux Meadows, the settlement discovered by the Ingstads in Newfoundland, we do not have proof of any permanent settlements in the New World. The Norse sagas report several trips to Vinland, but all had lasted three years or less. The long distances between New England and more established settlements in Greenland might have hindered the Norse ability to establish regular contact and trade on any long-term basis. Nova Scotia and Labrador at least were much closer. Because the Norse settlements in Greenland lacked one important commodity, lumber, trade was established between the new lands and Greenland. Just how many Norse settled in America we will never know. In Greenland, however, a modern archeologist found the remains of two large Viking settlements at Godthaab and Julianehåb, so it is possible
that L’Anse aux Meadows was not the only North American community. The Norse maintained a presence in North America for three centuries, although Leif Ericsson might have stayed for only three years. During his stay, a son was born to Gudrid, Leif's sister, and her husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni. The child named Snorri is the first recorded birth of a European in America.

One of the reasons why historians have been reluctant to accept other claims of discovery such as those of several Norse voyages, is that such claims, until our present century, were followed with claims to territory. It was never simply a question of whether a particular group had the ability to cross the ocean, it was more a question of who was there first. It is then significant that besides the Norse claims made in the sagas, a neutral party also recorded their voyages to the New World. Even before the publication of the various sagas, a German historian, Adam of Bremen, writing in
A.D.
1070
(Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis),
told of a land called Vinland where wild grapes were found, as well as self-sown wheat.
¹⁰
Today we are not completely certain why the Norse settlements in America died out. Defeat by Native Americans is one strong possibility—the Norse indeed recorded skirmishes with natives they had met. A second factor might be the bubonic plague in Europe, which wiped out at least one third of the population of Europe. The reasons to sail west for new lands were no longer valid, since there was plenty of land after the plague decimated the European population. The plague also might have impaired trade. Reduced trade with the western lands would have cut off the colonies in Vinland and Greenland, and new colonists were not forthcoming. The Norse who remained, isolated from their home, may have intermarried with North American natives or the
skraelings
, as they called the Inuit peoples. They also may have been wiped out by them.
¹¹

Besides the sagas and Adam of Bremen’s text, the Roman Catholic Church has preserved written records of their far-flung outposts in Greenland and Vinland. Thirteen bishops had served in Greenland starting in
A.D.
1112. These bishops were always referred to in the Vatican as the bishops of Greenland and Vinland. And at least one, Erik Gnupsson (known as Henricus), was sent to Christianize the Norse settlers in America.
¹²
In 1112, Henricus traveled three hundred miles across land from Maine to Rhode Island as a missionary. Another bishop, Olav, visited the Arctic lands to tend to the Christian flock.

Later, the pope in Rome became concerned for his missionaries in the Norse lands because of the prevalence of piracy. He instructed King Magnus to send an expedition westward and offered him half the tithes collected in Sweden and Norway for his efforts. The king sent Sir Paul Knutson to find out what had become of the western outposts. Knutson left in 1354, never to return. The next year, King Haakon, the successor to Magnus, took over the quest. He sent another expedition, which encountered piracy among the Inuit peoples in Greenland. This second expedition returned with two kayaks, which the bishop of Oslo hung in the cathedral of that city, a memorial to those who had not returned. With the Norse outposts in Greenland gone, trade ceased, and the cold barren islands toward the west were forgotten.

If the Norse sagas, published in 1837, and the earlier writings referring to Vinland did not advance what we know about the early history of North America, then the discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad in 1960 made the literary evidence all the more believable to those critics demanding more proof. Following the stories in the saga known as the
Flatey Book,
which described the settlements in Greenland, the Ingstads were led to believe that Newfoundland would yield proof of a Norse colony. They traveled from one remote village to another until a local man, George Decker, told Helge of ruins that he had seen. There, at L’Anse aux Meadows, the Ingstads uncovered the foundations of eight structures, including several of the “longhouse” style with six rooms. Nearby were cairns used by the Vikings as time markers, most likely as a primitive counting method. They also discovered a spindle whorl of Norse design, a soapstone whorl used for weaving.
¹³
The Newfoundland settlement was typical of the Greenland settlements, which also had houses, each with five or six rooms and a central hall in the same longhouse design.

In 1981 another archeologist, Peter Schledermann, reported on chain mail found on Ellesmere Island in the Northwest Territories and other Viking finds in Canada.
¹⁴
Such physical evidence as the artifacts found
in the Arctic and in Labrador corroborated the literary evidence, and it became impossible to deny that Norse settlers and traders had traveled the new lands. Just how extensive were these wanderings of the Norsemen is still the subject of debate. While historians now accept the ability of the Norse to reach and settle Newfoundland and Labrador five hundred years before Columbus, further proof is required to accept Norse explorers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, or farther west. The camp in favor of further explorations has documentation in the recent studies of linguistics that indicate the Norse not only reached these areas but also stayed and even intermarried. In separate studies, at least two writers, Arlington Mallery and Barry Fell, have come to the conclusion that northeastern native tribes had commerce with Europeans before Columbus.

Arlington Mallery was a navigator and engineer by trade.
¹⁵
In 1951 his work
The Rediscovery of Lost America
was published, detailing the connections between Amerindian peoples and the Norse. His thesis was that the Iroquois and neighboring Huron peoples had encountered and borrowed technology and even language from the Norsemen. The Norse word for “devil,” for example, is
loki—
and the Huron word is the same. In both cultures he was considered to be not the horned, tailed demon of Christianity, but the “trickster” god, evil yet comical at times. To the oceangoing Norsemen, Niord, a sea god, was of primary importance among a host of deities. In Huron, he survives as Niyoh. Barry Fell, in
America
B
.
C
.,
compiled an extensive list of Celtic and Algonquin words that he thinks rules out any coincidence of similarities between the languages.
¹⁶
He believes that even earlier crossings than those of the Norse traders and Irish monks took place. The Norsemen may even have given the Iroquois their style of dwelling. As the Norse built their communal longhouse, so did the Iroquois, separating themselves from the other tribes of the United States and Canada.

Linguistic evidence alone cannot be accepted as proof, since it is at best an inexact science. There is ample evidence to substantiate the ability of pre-Columbian Europeans to sail to America; not only could the Norse make the journey, but so could Irish sailors from even earlier dates. The primary source for this information is the Norse themselves. In the sagas, there are several references to monks and Irish-speaking peoples who reached America first. The
Landanamabok
tells of the Icelander Ari Marson, who was driven by storm to Hvitramannaland, or Greater Ireland. The land is described as being near Vinland, and Marson found Irish Catholics there.
¹⁷

Another written record of an Irish crossing of the Atlantic is the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis,
or the Voyage of St. Brendan. This work is preserved in the library of the British Museum and tells the tale of Saint Brendan, dubbed the “Navigator,” who crossed the Atlantic in
A.D.
539. Brendan is one of Ireland’s most important saints, and features of his life and his numerous travels are extensively documented.
¹⁸
Saint Brendan sailed to the Shetlands, the Faeroes, and Brittany. His greatest adventure was transatlantic. The
Navigatio
describes his leaving Ireland from County Kerry with eighteen monks. It also provides modern readers with wild descriptions of the sights seen by these medieval monks. While his descriptions seem fantastic, to monks who had never before been aware of the Arctic, its icebergs, glaciers, whales, volcanoes, and native Inuit might have been truly fantastic.

From the written description left behind by Brendan, we learn that he and his monks first landed on Saint Kilda, an island in the Outer Hebrides, and then sailed to the “Sheep Islands.” These islands are now known as the Faeroes, and they are still famous for sheep raising. From there to Iceland is a short hop equal to the distance between Scotland and the Faeroes. It was a dangerous voyage, however, to sail the cold Atlantic in boats made of skin, but the Saxons had sailed to Great Britain in such vessels, and archeologists have determined that humans have used such vessels for five thousand years. From the islands north of Scotland, it is estimated that the journey required two days on the open sea. The peaks of Iceland could be seen for half the way. In Iceland, Brendan and his group were treated to their first view of a volcano. Volcanic activity in Iceland exists today, an unforgettable sight for modern travelers as well as medieval monks. From Iceland to Greenland is another equally short hop, not without danger. Whales and giant ice floes could be both fatal hazards and incredible visions for any visitor.

Where did Brendan make landfall? One intriguing site preserved on
ancient maps is the island of Icaria, which since has disappeared (though there is another of the same name in Greece).
¹⁹
Although there are several theories concerning the location of Icaria, the name itself may be a clue. Kerry in Ireland was Brendan’s home, I Caria, and may have been the name given to the site where Brendan and his party landed. In Brendan’s time the Church in Rome became afraid that the religion of the Celtic Christian Church did not always conform to their own dogma. The Celtic priests wore their hair in an ancient style more closely resembling the pre-Christian Druids, for example, and they celebrated major feast days on days different from those set by Rome. They resented the intrusion that Rome seemed to force on their Irish ways.

Later, the Celtic priests of the Celi Dei, a monastic organization, came to believe themselves to be more closely following their God than did the bishops and pope in Rome who they often considered corrupt. They isolated themselves from the main Church and fled as other monastic groups had, to remote outposts. From the Norse descriptions of the dress of the Irish they met in Vinland, it seems that the Celi Dei might have followed Brendan across the Atlantic. Brendan’s voyage might have paved the way to Iceland for other Irish Christians. The Norse recognized that the Irish had settlements there and preserved records of the Irish in Iceland. The sagas refer to Papay, an island off the southern coast of Iceland, named for the Papars.
Papar
was a term the Norse used to describe the Christians who adhered to the doctrines of the pope in Rome. The suffix “-ay” or “-ey” indicates an island. The records of the Norse add credibility to such annals of the Irish.

Iceland and the islands to the west had their own rise and fall. In 1347 the Black Death (bubonic plague) made its way to Iceland. It decimated the population, and the reports that one third of Europe had died from the plague might have sent some settlers farther west instead of east. The combined effect of the plague and the depopulation due to fear left Iceland much less populous. After a second plague in 1402, the monasteries of Iceland were abandoned. But the country was not forgotten, and Columbus visited Iceland before his voyage to America. By the time Columbus sailed to Iceland in 1477, he must have been aware of the stories of Norse voyages to western lands. That same year he had
also been in Ireland, and while he was visiting in Galway, two flat-faced bodies washed ashore. They might have been Inuit or North American natives who drowned while fishing, but Columbus decided they were Asians. Columbus was a mapmaker and seller during the years he lived in Portugal, and he collected the tales of pilots and seafarers from all over the world. He even visited the Azores, islands in the mid-Atlantic that were governed by the family of his wife, and may have known about the existence of Vinland. Columbus, however, was not looking for a better fishing ground or lumber; he was searching for the riches of China, known to him as Cathay.

Others, however, did travel west looking for the better fishing grounds of the Grand Banks of Labrador and Newfoundland. In
Newfoundland
, Harold Harwood says that the Basques had fished there for whales since 1450.
²⁰
Orkney fishermen had fished in “Estotiland,” believed to be the Maritime Provinces of Canada, from 1371. British ships from Bristol had fished in Icelandic waters from the early 1400s, and despite the lack of records (fishermen have not been known to keep written records), Bristol’s history tells of exploring the seas west of Ireland in 1480 for better fishing grounds. The French ships from La Have that met Jacques Cartier on his voyage of exploration had been sailing west for years. European knowledge of Iceland and points west had been unbroken from at least
A.D.
1000. It was, in fact, a fisherman from the Faeroes who first told a Scottish earl and a Venetian shipowner about the place called Estotiland that lay one thousand miles west of Frislandia (northern Scottish Islands). The Scottish earl and his new friend, the shipowner from Venice, were impressed. They decided to find this new land. And they did.