Vikings in America (11 page)

Many reasons have been put forward for the demise of the Greenland colony. Most of them do not withstand scrutiny. The reasons suggested are as follows:

1) The Vikings were defeated by a worsening climate, and starved to death.

2) The Vikings were killed by plague; alternatively their crops were destroyed by a pestilence.

3) The Vikings were swamped by the Inuit, and became Inuit.

4) The Inuit killed all the Vikings in an act of genocide.

5) The Greenland Vikings emigrated.

6) Pirates or other Europeans killed the Vikings.

The climate of the North Atlantic region did indeed cool in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The average change was in the region of
2° C cooler both summer and winter, which in areas of marginal agriculture can be significant. In Iceland this deteriorating climate caused years of poor harvests and times of famine. Nonetheless the Icelanders survived, and continued to live in all parts of Iceland including the most marginal. If they could survive it is very hard to see why the Greenland Vikings could not. Indeed the Icelanders, who were almost entirely dependent on husbandry for their food, were more vulnerable than their kin in Greenland, whose diet was supported by hunting – and while the cooling climate caused difficulties for agriculture it also created a proliferation of the fish, birds and sea mammals that were a major source of food. Climate change alone cannot explain the demise of the Greenland Vikings, and probably was not even a contributory factor. In view of the Arctic paradox whereby colder temperatures result in more wildlife as food, the cooler temperatures may actually have helped the Greenlanders.

Nor can plague be the explanation. The Black Death may well have come to Greenland, as it did to Iceland, but in all plagues there are survivors. The isolated nature of farmsteads in Greenland would have acted as a barrier to the spread of infection, while the climate created an environment largely free from animals which spread plague. Greenland has no rats, the animal that spread the plague through Europe. The presence of plague in Iceland, another country without rats, argues for an infection route other than rats and the fleas they harbour, though this transmission route has so far not been identified. Even with this proviso, Greenland, with the isolation offered by its vast distances, was not a country that should have suffered substantially from plague. The concept of crop blight is similarly unrealistic. The Vikings in Greenland grew a range of crops, and while the failure of one crop through pestilence is possible, the failure of all, and in all locations, is most unlikely. As with plague, the distance between farms provided a barrier for the spread of pestilence. Plague and pestilence, like climate change, cannot explain the disappearance of the Greenland colony after over 400 years. At the most these factors somewhat weakened the population, though even this is speculation.

The idea that the Greenland Vikings were swamped by the Inuit is again problematic. Greenland had a mixed population. In their west-coast settlements the Viking population numbered in the region of 5,000; the Inuit population for the whole of Greenland was in the region of 5,000, but distributed throughout the ice-free areas of Greenland, including a population on the north-west and north coasts. In south-west Greenland the
Inuit were a minority. Perhaps intermarriage between the two groups occurred, but the balance in numbers between the two groups is such that the result would not be that the ethnic Norse would vanish, subsumed within an Inuit population. Later Europeans visiting Greenland discerned no trace of European characteristics in the Inuit they encountered there. This supposed process, which has been termed ‘Eskimo-isation', cannot explain the disappearance of the Greenland Vikings. Indeed, were the process to have happened at all it can even be suggested that the direction would have been for the Inuit to be swamped by the Vikings, for relative numbers in the areas of Greenland that both Vikings and Inuit inhabited were such that the Inuit were in the minority.

The idea that the Inuit carried out genocide against the Greenland Vikings has to be considered as there is at least some evidence to support the idea. The Icelandic sagas make it clear that the writers believed the Western Settlement was destroyed by people. The term that is used is ‘skraelings', a term certainly sometimes applied to the Inuit. However ‘skraeling' is not a racial description, but rather a term of contempt, meaning something like ‘wretches', applied to many different races, and the sagas cannot be taken as stating specifically the Inuit killed the Vikings – rather that a people the saga writer held in contempt killed them. Notwithstanding this, Hans Egede,
⁹
the first missionary to Inuit Greenland, believed on the basis of the Icelandic sagas that the Inuit had killed the Vikings. He asked the Inuit about this, and believed that he gained confirmation from their answers. A researcher today would say that his methodology was suspect in that he asked leading questions; additionally, he was struggling to communicate in a language he understood imperfectly. The Inuit in recent years have been observed to have a cultural tendency to give answers they feel are those wanted by the person they are speaking to, irrespective of whether they are correct. Whatever the Inuit may have told Hans Egede cannot be regarded as safe evidence. It is also doubtful how much Inuit oral history could be expected to remember of events that took place hundreds of years previously. There have been claims for long folk memories among the Inuit, and some of their stories do seem to be centuries old. Yet there must be doubts as to the validity of claims that folk history extends over many hundreds of years, and it is hard to prove that the Inuit of the eighteenth century would have known anything about events in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Greenland Vikings and the Inuit had coexisted for perhaps 400 years. Their lifestyles were complementary. The Vikings were farmers,
seeking land at the head of fjords, while the Inuit were hunters, making their settlements by open water, frequently close to headlands. The two groups were not in direct competition for the same resources. There was no inevitability of conflict, but rather a history of centuries of tolerance and trade. Each group gained benefit from the other. If conflict should have arisen, the Vikings were better armed, for they were metal users, while the Inuit, despite centuries of contact with the Vikings, were still predominantly a Stone Age culture. In theory the Vikings could have been attacked farm-stead by farmstead, with the Inuit forming a large party for the purpose of destroying each farmstead one after the other. In practice, it is hard to see how they could have completely destroyed all the Viking settlements. The Vikings were not outnumbered by the Inuit in Greenland, and in the southwest it was the Vikings who had the advantage of numbers. They should not have lost in a war.

The Inuit people throughout the Arctic have an exceptionally peaceable history. They are not prone to carrying out wars against other Inuit groups, nor against other peoples. If an aggressor is to be sought to explain the demise of Viking Greenland, then the Inuit are not likely suspects.

Emigration is an idea that must be taken seriously. As it happens, the very last sure record of Greenland is of a migration – of a couple who moved from Greenland to Iceland. Iceland at that time had suffered a substantial fall in population, and did have vacant land available for the taking. It was able to accommodate a population from Greenland. Similarly, Greenlanders could have migrated back to Norway, or elsewhere in Europe, or even, in theory, to lands to the west of Greenland. Emigration as a theory is possible – but we have no evidence that this took place. It is not clear that Iceland or anywhere else in Europe was a more attractive location, nor that Greenlanders whose families had lived there for up to 15 generations would have any wish to leave Greenland. While we are not in a position to say that emigration did not happen, it does seem implausible.

The root cause of the destruction of Viking Greenland is most probably that of pirate raids. The official ‘royal ships' from Norway came primarily to extort taxes, and became little better than thieves. Over and above these state-sponsored raids, Greenland was increasingly subject to the attentions of pirates. Such ships were numerous in Europe, acting without the overt support of a nation state, trading where they could, and stealing with impunity. For centuries isolated communities on the European littoral feared the arrival of an unknown ship. The Greenlanders were especially vulnerable,
for their tiny scattered settlements put them at the mercy of any visiting ship whose crew outnumbered them.

European Christendom condemned the activities of pirates, but only when they were directed against Christians. There were no restrictions imposed upon pirate activities against non-Christian people, whom the Church explicitly stated could be killed or enslaved, and their property seized. This was the way the Church recommended treating non-Christians. Proselytising zeal, a feature of the expansion of the early Church, and of the Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scarcely existed at the end of the Middle Ages. Christendom had reached an accommodation with European Jews, though one which was often breached. They had fought to a stalemate against Islam in the Middle East and to the south of the Mediterranean. These exceptions aside, to be a non-Christian was almost to be non-human. Within this context it is striking that towards the end of the Greenland colony the popes began to assert that the Greenlanders had returned to paganism and the worship of the Norse gods. The import of this view is that it justifies the actions of the pirates, giving papal sanction to the killing and captivity of Greenland Vikings.

Records of pagans sold into slavery certainly exist. In Bristol in 1429 five boys and three girls, all from Iceland, were sold into slavery, while in the same year in Kings Lynn the visiting Icelandic bishop of Skalholt dramatically rescued eleven Icelandic children who were on the point of being sold in a slave market. In 1448 Pope Nicholas V makes reference in a letter to an attack on the Greenlanders ‘30 years before' (1418) in which many Greenlanders were taken captive. Now, after 30 years of captivity, in Europe, they had been freed, presumably on an intervention from the Pope, and were returning home. The Pope commented on their ‘fervent piety'. By becoming Christians – fervent ones – they had become unfit for the status of slaves. It is not recorded whether these survivors of captivity ever reached their homes in Greenland.

The balance of probability is that the Greenland colony in its last years was over-run by European pirates. They operated from Britain, Flanders, Denmark, and even, in 1453, a ship from Portugal. What we are seeing is the systematic destruction of a people by Church- and State-supported pirates through theft, through carrying the Greenlanders into captivity as slaves, through burning of farmsteads and through murder. This genocide was justified on the grounds that the Greenlanders had relapsed into the pagan faith, and were therefore considered scarcely human. Pirate raids do
not seem recorded much after the middle of the fifteenth century, which might be because there was nothing left to raid. In 1492, the very year that Columbus set off to America, Pope Alexander IV repeated the papal view that the Greenlanders had sunk into ‘heathen practices', which might possibly suggest that some Greenlanders at least were then left – or perhaps that the Pope's sources were old.

The pirate voyages provided a conduit of sorts through which knowledge of Greenland and lands to the west could be transmitted to Europe. One such example is provided by the
Zeno Voyages
,
¹⁰
a confused narrative which is best understood as an account of such a voyage, though the text has in recent years been subject to much fanciful interpretation. In its day the
Zeno Voyages
was one of the most influential sources for fashioning views of the geography of the North Atlantic. The account, along with a map, are both found within a book published in Italian in Venice in 1558.

What we have in the
Zeno Voyages
is a poorly written and often confused account of voyages from Europe to Greenland in the late fourteenth century, written by a sixteenth-century Venetian, Nicolo Zeno, who claims as his source letters preserved by his family and which detail voyages made by his ancestors, the Zeno brothers. Nicolo Zeno's narrative based on these letters is muddled, as perhaps might be expected from a story written by a Venetian who knew little about the North Atlantic. When it was published it had a political purpose in asserting that Venetians – the Zeno brothers – visited America a century before Columbus, and this propaganda distorts the text throughout. While some today have been prepared to take at face value this story of an Italian voyage to America, a sober reading must discount it. Yet while a visit to America is fiction, there is at least some truth in part of the story set out. The Zeno brothers are known from numerous documents as Venetian merchants, and there is proof, for example, that one of the brothers, also called Nicolo Zeno, made a voyage to England and Flanders. At least some of the places they are supposed to have visited exist, though many do not. Much attention has been given to the name of the prince under whose authority the Zeno brothers make their voyage – an improbably named Zichmni. The name is so strange that Zeno is presumed to have based it on something in a source text, for if he were creating a name he would at least have come up with something pronounceable.
The credulous have sought to equate Zichmni with Prince Henry Sinclair of Orkney, an idea without a shred of support. More plausible is that from Zichmni we should remove the Italian ending in –i, and insert the essential unstressed vowel, giving Zichman. This much is sound philology; Italian is a syllable-timed language (which puts equal stress on all syllables) while the Germanic languages of northern Europe are stress-timed (they have stressed and unstressed syllables). Representing an unstressed syllable from a stress-timed language in the spelling conventions of a syllable-timed language is problematic; one method is simply to leave out the vowel, which is what the Italian seems to have done here. Philology also suggests that the use of Z in Italian suggests a sound that in English would usually be represented W. Zichmni is perhaps an effort to represent in Italian what would be spelt in English ‘Wichman'. Brian Smith, a leading critic of the identification of Zichmni with Sinclair, suggests that a more plausible identification for Zichmni is Wichmann,
¹¹
a known North Sea pirate in the late fourteenth century – though Smith feels that such an identity cannot be proved. I suggest that Smith has understated his case – Wichmann and Zichmni are philologically identical, which is a significant finding, and the identification of Wichmann with Zichmni a credible one.