Vikings in America (3 page)

The one thing missing from Greenland was timber. Even the best efforts of our age have scarcely produced in Greenland trees more than six feet high in experimental plantations, while for the Vikings, trees were confined to the knee-high scrub of dwarf birch and dwarf willow. Driftwood does sometimes float onto beaches in Greenland, and while it is of use as firewood, its condition is such that it is not suitable for building houses or ships. The Viking Greenlanders had an enormous need for wood, and finding this resource drove their expansion.

It is a short voyage from Greenland to Canada's Baffin Island, a short voyage from there to Labrador, a short voyage from there to Newfoundland. The Vikings made it to Newfoundland and beyond by about the year 1000, just fourteen years after establishing their colony in Greenland. There they found the timber they needed in abundance. From Iceland we have sagas which tell of some of the first voyages to this new land. The Vikings explored what they called Markland – Forest Land – which is usually identified with southern Labrador and the island of Newfoundland. The land is therefore named after the resource that the Vikings were seeking. Further south is the land they called Vinland, usually regarded as New England. L'Anse aux Meadows, the most remarkable American Viking archaeological site, is in Newfoundland; not in Vinland as often suggested, but rather in Markland.

Over the years the Greenland colony developed. There were two major settlements there – both on Greenland's mild west coast facing the Davis Strait, and called simply the East Settlement and the West Settlement. Between them a smaller settlement later developed – the Middle Settlement. These settlements comprised farmsteads that were widely scattered, each farming many square miles of the coastal strip between sea and ice cap. They had their religious institutions provided through several dozen churches, the appointment of a bishop, and the development of both a monastery and a nunnery. Politically Greenland functioned as a commonwealth. Each farmstead appointed a representative – usually the head of the household – to periodic local meetings, which in turn appointed representatives to a yearly parliament. The system is an early democracy, a style of government shared with Iceland and some of the more isolated Viking settlements in the Faroe Islands, Shetland, Orkney, Scotland's Western Isles and the Isle of Man. Contact with Europe was maintained, with Greenlanders taking part in the Crusades, and European ideas finding expression in Greenland. Trade from Greenland brought the resources of the Arctic – furs, ivory, oil – to the countries of Europe, while ensuring that the Greenlanders kept abreast of the latest European fashions, and received the manufactured goods of the European High Middle Ages. Ultimately Greenland became a part of the Norwegian kingdom, and later the Danish kingdom. This distant rule appears to have done Greenland little good. The decline of the colony and its fifteenth-century extinction occurred while the colony was part of the kingdom of Denmark.

Almost from the start of the Greenland colony the Vikings were exploring and settling the eastern coast of America. A Viking ship could manage a distance of up to 125 miles on a good day – a day when the wind blew steadily in the right direction as a stiff breeze but not a storm. Against the wind their progress was negligible. As a rule of thumb, taking into account good days and bad days, the Vikings seem to have managed about 1,000 miles in two weeks to a month. In a summer sailing season of around three months they could comfortably manage a journey out and back of 1,000 miles on each leg, perhaps a little more. The American east coast was therefore within easy reach of Greenland.

A thousand miles south of Greenland took the Vikings to the northern tip of Newfoundland. Here is L'Anse aux Meadows, where excavations in the 1950s and 1960s uncovered a substantial Viking settlement. About 200 people lived at L'Anse aux Meadows at any one time. They arrived about the year 1000, built their shelters, and abandoned the settlement around 1025. Curiously, the settlement was not a village. It is best regarded as a travellers' inn, a staging post for people on their way somewhere else. L'Anse aux Meadows offered accommodation, in what we would regard as barrack blocks. Most importantly, it offered a boat-building yard, and a smithy and workshop. This was the place to get boats repaired. Here there was wood, and copious iron available from the local bog-iron to make the essential rivets that held Viking ships together. L'Anse aux Meadows was the service centre of the Viking Age: not only could boats be repaired here, accommodation and over-wintering were also possible for Vikings who had left it too late to get back to Greenland. But L'Anse aux Meadows was never regarded as home by its population. Thousands of Vikings passed through, but not a single body was buried there. In an age where every settlement had its graveyard, the absence of even a single skeleton at L'Anse aux Meadows is striking. The Vikings believed it important to take their dead home, and clearly L'Anse aux Meadows was not home. The dead were taken back to Greenland or on to Vinland.

There is evidence of Viking travel south from L'Anse aux Meadows. Butternut squash, which grow nowhere north of New Brunswick, have been found at L'Anse aux Meadows, demonstrating travel further south. With L'Anse aux Meadows as a sound base-camp, travel another 1,000 miles south is plausible, and seems required if the Viking name of Vinland – whether it means ‘Fertile Land' or ‘Grape-Vine-Land' – is to be seen
as truly descriptive. In Maine, a Viking coin has been found within a pre- Columban Native American site. The Vikings were clearly on the east coast of North America for centuries before Columbus.

Yet the Vikings struggled to establish permanent settlement on the fertile east coast of America. The reason for their problems in maintaining settlement was simply the North American natives – a people the Vikings rather rudely called Skraelings, meaning ‘wretches'. North America was fully settled by the Native Americans millennia before the Vikings arrived, and they did not take kindly to the newcomers. In contrast with Greenland, North America was not an empty land. The Native Americans were hunter-gatherers, living from the resources of the land but not farming. Their lifestyle created a mobile population which at certain times of the year could collect together into large, well-armed groups. These are the Red Indians who resisted the much better armed later European colonists who sought to settle the American continent. Faced by such a mass of numbers the Vikings did not have a chance. The small numbers that could settle in a farmstead would be overwhelmed by the Native Americans. Colonisation of the whole American continent was just not possible, though some settlement was practical and did happen.

The Viking expansion from Greenland led also in another direction. One thousand miles north of the Greenland settlement is the coast of Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic. This is the northernmost land mass in the world, almost as big as the British Isles, and with its northern tip just a few hundred miles from the North Pole. It should come as no surprise that Ellesmere Island has a most severe High Arctic climate. Summer temperatures do manage some days above freezing point, but the long winters have the full vigour of the High Arctic cold and wind. Today Ellesmere Island is populated only by a handful of hardy souls, for example at the military listening station of Alert, part of the United States' DEW-line early warning system. As recently as the nineteenth century, Ellesmere Island had a tiny Inuit population, though even the Inuit found it unrewarding and moved to Thule in northern Greenland, where their descendants still live. Yet before even the Inuit were in Ellesmere Island, the Vikings were there.

Viking archaeological finds on Ellesmere Island have been made sporadically over the last 30 years, for example in a series of digs by the University
of Manitoba from 1998 to 2002. Finds have included the round bottom of a barrel, a piece of chainmail, fragments of swords and knives, and the ever-present iron rivets that Viking ships seem to have dropped whenever they were hauled out onto a beach. A clear 1,000 miles north of the northernmost Viking settlement in Greenland we have firm evidence of Viking occupation with at least occasional over-wintering and probably year-round settlement. Seven to eight hundred years ago the Vikings were living in a land now uninhabited, which we had supposed unvisited by Europeans before 1818. That the few archaeological studies that have so far been made in this enormous land have already yielded some amazing finds gives hope that there is much more to find. No-one could have guessed at Viking visits this far to the north, while settlement of any sort is staggering.

From Greenland the Vikings voyaged 1,000 miles and more south to Newfoundland. They voyaged 1,000 miles and more north to Ellesmere Island. In both these areas they established settlement of which we have archaeological traces. They also explored at least as far to the west. West from Greenland is the Hudson Strait, leading through to Hudson Bay and the heart of the North American continent. The climate is characterised by the extremes of a mid-continental location. Hudson Bay experiences winters far more severe than those of Greenland, but also summers that are much warmer. Hudson Bay was no place to spend a winter, but was an ideal summer destination, for wood, for hunting, perhaps simply for the experience of weather warmer than Greenland. Archaeological remains of Vikings in the Hudson Strait are persuasive, though not without their detractors; those in Hudson Bay itself and further south, controversial. Enough has been found to demonstrate that the Vikings were present in Hudson Bay.

As Greenland declined in the fifteenth century, its off-shoots in Vinland, Ellesmere Island and Hudson Bay failed. Vinland and Hudson Bay presumably did not survive the end of the Greenland colony, though there are some who would argue otherwise. The Ellesmere Island presence is puzzling. There is some slight evidence that it or a settlement near it still existed in the 1570s, well over a century after the Greenland colony had failed, which suggests that the settlement was self-supporting. When Europeans visited in 1818 there was no sign of a Viking presence, though the Inuit of nearby Thule have stories of European people living there no more than a generation before the 1818 rediscovery.

America was reached by the Vikings; parts were explored, and parts were settled. This furthest reach of the Vikings was dependent upon Greenland as the key link in the stepping-stone route across the Atlantic, and Viking America failed when Viking Greenland did. This is no footnote in history – the Vikings have a long and important history in three widely separated locations in America.

THE sea routes created the Viking identity. It is on voyages first across the North Sea and later across the North Atlantic that the character and values of the Vikings developed. From Norway a series of short voyages, rarely out of sight of land, led to the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. While Christopher Columbus and sailors that followed him went straight across the Atlantic in one leap, the Vikings crossed in a series of short voyages from stepping stone to stepping stone. From Greenland, itself part of the North American continent, the stepping stone principle took the Vikings to Baffin Island, Labrador, Newfoundland, New England and, perhaps, New York's Long Island. The American voyages were the Vikings' furthest reach, and their exploration of a distant land a demonstration of what courage, skill and the Viking ideals of democracy and personal independence could do. The North Atlantic, with its island stepping stones all the way from Norway to America, was the world of the Viking.

The Vikings didn't at first call themselves Vikings. Rather the name they used was
Northmonna
, meaning North-men, or Norse-men, or just Northerners. Their identity was that they lived far to the north in Europe. Indeed they even made this a boast. We have on record a Viking adventurer, Othere by name, who appeared at the court of the English King Alfred with the claim that of all the North-men he lived the furthest to the north. The coast of the land in which they lived they called
Norway
– the north shore – while the language they spoke they called
Norrona
– north speech, literally north rune-ing – the language we today call both Old Norse and Old Icelandic, closely related to Old English, Old High German and several other old Germanic languages. These people of the north were proud in their claim to
be North-men. Just about everyone else lived south of them. Furthermore they had a simple system for dividing up the world between four great races, corresponding to the four quarters of the heavens.

The North-men were first of all the peoples of Scandinavia, the people whom today we call Norwegians, Swedes and Danes. The term was applied more widely than just to Scandinavia, to include people who spoke dialects of the North Speech – the English in England, the Germans in Germany and the Low Countries, and the Goths in Eastern Europe. When the North-men invaded part of France they called it Normandy after themselves, and the people of Normandy were treated as North-men. To the people of the north, North-men meant simply ‘our people'. So when the Norwegian Othere from the furthest north of Norway appeared at King Alfred's court he readily acknowledged King Alfred as his
hlaford
, his lord and protector, a title that no northerner would give to someone who wasn't also a northerner.
¹

After the North-men were the East-men. These were the Slavic speaking peoples of eastern Europe. The North-men travelled extensively in the east using the network of rivers which run through European Russia, complete with well-established haulage routes where ships were dragged across watersheds between a north-flowing and a south-flowing river. These are the routes which took them to the Caspian and Black seas. For the North-men the lands of the East had a special draw. In their legends the homeland of their people was in the East, somewhere in the steppes of Russia. Somewhere in the East was the mythical city of Asgard, the city of the Norse gods. Many of the North-men who adventured east found wealth and power in Russia, in the Eastern Roman Empire and in the Middle East. In Russia, where they found unorganised tribes, they created the first Russian kingdom, with Norse rulers, so that today even the very name ‘Russia' is a Norse word, meaning the kingdom of the red-haired North-men.