Vikings in America (13 page)

Understood in these terms the sagas can be given their proper worth. So, for example, they are specifically not a history of Greenland. Were our knowledge of Viking Greenland limited to the saga story we would have a picture of Greenland settled just by Eirik and his colonists, and assume that the colony vanished after a generation, when in fact we know Greenland continued for nearly five centuries. Our knowledge of Viking America would be similarly partial. We would have – indeed until recently we did have – a view that Leif Eiriksson and his companions visited America for a few years around the year 1000, and that that was an end to the exploration. Instead what we are seeing in the sagas is a loss of interest by Icelanders in the affairs
of Vinland when the people involved are Greenlanders or Vinlanders rather than Icelanders. The audience of the Icelandic sagas wanted to hear about Icelandic heroes. Stories of Greenlandic and Vinlandic heroes were doubtless told – but in Greenland and Vinland. So far we have not discovered these.

The Icelandic sagas of Greenland and Vinland were never forgotten in Iceland. It was, however, as late as the 1830s before translations were made into Danish and English, and then in rather obscure scholarly books, and it was the 1880s before the stories reached a popular audience.
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Suddenly Viking mania gripped America. Vikings were to be found everywhere from Newfoundland – where they certainly were – to California, where they certainly were not. Within this mania the real story told in the sagas is frequently lost.

A careful reading of their sometimes confusing narrative shows that the Icelandic sagas record six distinct voyages to America.

The first voyage and first recorded European sighting of mainland America is credited to Bjarni Herjolfsson and his crew. Their discovery was accidental, made as they were voyaging the Iceland–Greenland crossing. The year was 985, just after the Greenland settlements had been established. Through a combination of bad weather and simply not knowing where he was going – it was Bjarni's first voyage on this route – he sailed too far south, thereby missing Greenland's Cape Farewell, and instead sighting forested land, presumably in what is now southern Labrador. Bjarni is reported in the sagas to have made the decision not to make a landing, but rather continued first northward until the correct latitude was reached, then due east to his intended destination in Greenland, at Herjolfsnes, his father's farm. In making this voyage he sighted American land twice more, but again it is stressed that he did not land. This story has the mix of fact and fiction that is characteristic of the sagas. Bjarni has all the appearance of being a real figure. No-one has seriously doubted that he made the voyage described. Yet it is absolutely incredible that he did not land. When he sighted America he had been at sea for around two weeks, much of it fog-bound, and around another two weeks and two American land-sightings were to pass before the ship arrived in Greenland. Drinking water was an acute problem on any Viking voyage of more than a very few days both because of limited storage space and the difficulties of keeping water fresh. While Viking ships did make the direct passage from Greenland to Norway, these voyages were substantially shorter than Bjarni's marathon; furthermore, these ships were
equipped with food and water for a long voyage. Bjarni was expecting a journey of about four days, and while as a prudent mariner he surely took more than four days' supplies it is unlikely that he took a month's supply. Add the problem of damp and cold endured by the crew of an open boat through days of freezing fog off south Greenland, the impossibility of lighting a fire on board ship for hot food, and the discomfort of overcrowding: all these point to an obvious conclusion: Bjarni landed.

In landing, Bjarni implicitly established a land claim to the land he had discovered, just as Eirik the Red had established a claim to the whole of Greenland by his landing there. In this can be seen the motivation in insisting that he did not land. The saga writers or their sources seem determined to deprive him of this claim. The reason becomes clear in the subsequent action of Leif Eiriksson. Leif visited Bjarni in Herjolfsnes, 15 years after Bjarni's voyage. In those years Bjarni had not returned to America, so any claim he had to that land, while legal in terms of Norse custom, was not being exploited. Rather he had worked developing his father's farm, and trading with Norway, both presumably more profitable than an unknown land further to the west. He still had his ship, and presumably this ship had now made a dozen or more annual return trips to Norway and was old. Leif negotiated with Bjarni, and according to the sagas he bought this ship. Doubtless this is correct; I suggest that in doing this he additionally bought out Bjarni's land-claim to America. The stated reason for wanting Bjarni's ship was that it was a lucky talisman and that the ship itself would know the way to America. This is fine as a saga story, but the Viking mariners of Greenland knew that navigation required more skill than luck, and were well aware of the limitations of a ship as old as Bjarni's.

The second voyage to America, and the first official European landing on the continent of America, took place in Bjarni's boat, captained by Leif Eiriksson, and with a crew of 35 Greenlanders, including two Irishmen. Leif's first voyage is usually dated 1000, though the sources allow for a year or two of flexibility either side. Leif deliberately retraced Bjarni's steps, and thus encountered the three lands sighted by Bjarni.

The first, west across the Davis Strait from the Greenland settlements, he called Helluland, or Slab Land. There is general agreement that this name applies to Baffin Island, whose slabs of exposed rock make this an obvious descriptive name. The second, a few days' sail to the south, is Markland, or Forest Land. This is described as a land with a low coast and extensive forests. The description fits southern Labrador and Newfoundland, and the
identification of this land with Markland has again received general agreement. South again is Vinland, described as a fertile land with good pasture and timber, and where wild grapes grew. Countless scholars and amateurs have attempted to place Vinland, and with a remarkable range of different locations proposed.

Ultimately, attempts to locate Helluland, Markland and Vinland seem to work better on a modern map than they would in reality. The equation of Helluland with Baffin Island is too simple. Baffin Island has an east coast which extends around 800 miles, and that so deeply indented as to treble the miles of actual coastline. For the first Vikings there was no way of knowing that this was a discrete entity, one island. Indeed two indentations on the east coast of Baffin Island – Frobisher Bay and Cumberland Sound – are so vast that the land they divide appeared to later European mariners as if completely different lands. Frobisher Bay is named after the sixteenth-century explorer Martin Frobisher who believed it to be the entrance of the Northwest Passage. That Helluland was a name for a part of Baffin Island is a reasonable assumption; that it was the name for the whole of what we now know to be one island is not. The second name from the sagas, Markland, is plausibly identified with southern Labrador – though identification with the island of Newfoundland is equally possible. In order to follow the sailing directions set out in the sagas it is necessary to sail from Baffin Island across the mouth of Hudson Strait and along the coast of north Labrador. This intervening, treeless land could hardly have been called Markland, yet must have had a name which has not been remembered.

In the land he called Vinland, Leif established a series of booths – temporary shelters made with turf or stone walls and roughly roofed with whatever temporary roofing materials are available. The term is familiar from Thingvellir in Iceland, where the representatives attending the parliament set up booths as summer shelters for the duration of the parliament. Leif over-wintered in Vinland, at a place he called Leifsbudir, noting that the winter there was exceptionally mild, and in the spring he set out for Greenland with a cargo of timber, as well as something which the saga writers identify as grapes. En route to Greenland Leif rescued 15 Vikings from a ship he encountered wrecked on a reef, a remarkable case of being in the right place at the right time which earned him the nickname ‘the Lucky'. Perhaps the incident should indicate that even as early as 1001 the waters off the coast of Greenland were busy with many Viking ships, so that there was a realistic chance of shipwrecked mariners finding a passing ship to rescue them.

The third voyage was led by Leif's brother Thorvald, with a crew of 30. The sagas do not date the voyage, but the context makes the following summer – 1002 – seem likely. Thorvald went direct to Leifsbudir and set up his camp there, which was occupied for two summers and the intervening winter, presumably 1002–1003. During this time Thorvald undertook an orderly exploration both north and south, building on the exploration accomplished by his brother, Leif. It was Thorvald who first encountered the Native American people.

The encounter is a key moment in human history. Millennia of human dispersal had brought the ancestors of the Native Americans from Asia across the Bering Strait, possibly over a land bridge or more probably simply over the winter sea ice. From Siberia, Asiatic peoples crossed to America in three great waves, and colonised the whole of the American continent. Their eastward movement brought some ultimately to the east of the continent, the shore of the Atlantic. By contrast it was a westward drive from Asia that had brought the ancestors of the Vikings to Scandinavia, then in the Viking Age another westward drive had led across the stepping stones of the North Atlantic, until around the year 1002 east met west in America, a remarkable meeting which signified that the human race had circled the globe. The first encounter was unhappy. The Vikings felt they were being attacked – perhaps indeed they were being attacked – and killed eight of the Native Americans. Subsequently the Native Americans attacked Leifsbudir, and among the Vikings Thorvald was killed, according to the sagas the first European to die in America. As a convert to Christianity he was buried with crosses set up both at his head and feet, and the headland on which he was buried was named after these crosses Krossanes.

Following the return of Thorvald's crew to Greenland the fourth of the Vinland voyages was planned. This set out presumably the next summer, therefore in 1004, and was led by Thorstein, another of Leif's brothers. Thorstein attempted the direct route to Vinland which Thorvald had used, but because of storms and adverse winds failed to reach Vinland, instead returning to Greenland. He and his crew suffered from exposure, and he died in Greenland a few months later. His widow Gudrid married a merchant, Thorfinn Thordarson Karlsefni, and it is this Karlsefni who made the fifth Vinland voyage.

Karlsefni is no blood relative of Leif – rather he is Leif's brother's widow's new husband – and Leif does not accord him the same support he has previously given his brothers. The sagas record that Leif lends Karlsefni
the Vinland property of Leifsbudir. These booths were of negligible value; rather in this gesture we should see that Leif is agreeing with Karlsefni a lease on the land of Vinland which Leif considers to be his property. Karlsefni travelled with 60 men, five women and livestock, with the intention of founding a colony. This is the model of the colonisation of Greenland begun a generation earlier, and in Karlsefni's day still ongoing. Attractive through Greenland was, the best farming sites were already becoming full, and a new territory in Vinland was of interest to colonists.

Karlsefni's voyage is not dated precisely, though it could hardly have been before 1005, and may have been a few years later. The colony was successfully founded at Leifsbudir, and the group over-wintered there. In the spring they had their first encounter with the Native Americans, which was peaceful. The sagas are not works of anthropology, yet they do give many scraps of information about the North American people encountered. The Vikings call them simply skraelings – literally wretches, perhaps in this usage cognate in meaning with Kipling's savages. There is enough information for us to make at least a tentative identification between the people described in the sagas and a tribe of the Algonquin Indians. Physically the people described have black hair and broad cheekbones, certainly correct for the Algonquin Indians. A staple of Algonquin diet was pemmican, while the sagas describe the skraelings as eating deer marrow mixed with blood, an accurate description of pemmican. The Skraelings have a weapon which appears to be the ballista of the Algonquins. The ballista is a heavy rock placed in a skin bag and tied to a pole. This device was used sling-shot fashion to catapult the rock at the enemy. Trade between Vikings and the Algonquins is described, whereby the Vikings gained furs, trading for them small strips of red cloth and measures of milk. Possibly the Algonquins regarded the exchanges as presents to establish friendship, for if this were truly trade, the Algonquins did very poorly from it.

The first meeting of Karlsefni's group with the Native Americans was peaceful, but it nonetheless prompted Karlsefni to build a defensive palisade. The brief description in the sagas suggests that Karlsefni was following a policy of ‘ness-taking', the familiar Viking technique for establishing a bridgehead on a hostile coast which was to fortify the tip of a headland. Their ship would have been pulled up on a beach immediately below the headland. The palisaded area of the farmstead would have been tiny, for the intention was for the defensive wall to be held by the 60 or so settlers. Grazing for cattle and sheep was outside the wall, as were the farmed fields. This
describes the very beginnings of what the colonists intended to be a permanent settlement. In the summer a son was born to Karlsefni and Gudrid, named Snorri, whom the sagas describe as the first Viking to be born in Vinland. There is no reason to doubt this story; around 1,000 years ago the first ethnic European was born on the American mainland.