Vikings in America (17 page)

This vast island is almost uninhabited. The 2001 census records a population of 168 living in the three settlements of Alert, Eureka and Grise Fiord. Of these the first two are military and scientific bases, with no truly permanent inhabitants. Alert is the northernmost year-round human habitation in the world; Eureka, the second most northerly. Alert was built as part of the Cold War early warning system – the name echoes its function in alerting North America to incoming Soviet missiles flying over the Pole – and is still a Canadian Forces Station (CFS). Eureka, too, is a military base, with a weather station and an observatory alongside. Grise Fiord is different, being a civilian settlement of around 100 people, mainly Inuit, supplied by a once-yearly supply boat which visits in late August, and by light aircraft that fly in from Resolute, a flight of about 90 minutes. Grise Fiord is also controversial. The people living there today were resettled from locations further south by the Canadian government as a way of asserting its rule over Ellesmere Island.
²
There was no economic or cultural reason to resettle
people so far north, and while the settlement has continued, and rejoices in the designation ‘town', there is very little employment and seemingly little reason other than Canada's land claim for it to be there.

The lack of people on Ellesmere Island in recent years may be contrasted with a surprisingly extensive history of settlement. For thousands of years Stone Age peoples lived in Ellesmere Island. The Vikings were there. Archaeology, both of the settlements of the Arctic peoples and of the Vikings, has been exceptionally productive, and in view of the little field work that has so far been done, there is every reason to expect that much more is waiting to be discovered. Despite this legacy of millennia of settlement, history records 1616 as the year of the supposed discovery of Ellesmere Island, when William Baffin sighted the coast as part of his exploration of what we today call after him Baffin Bay. Only in 1852 did the island receive its name, in honour of Francis Egerton, the 1st Earl of Ellesmere, a patron of Sir Edward Inglefield's expedition that charted part of its coast. Thus the world's most northerly island is named after an English lord's estates in the English county of Cheshire.

Much of the island is glacier covered, though in contrast to the single ice cap of Greenland, Ellesmere Island has many smaller and distinct glaciers. Along its north coast is the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, in parts as much as 80m thick, which abuts the frozen Arctic Ocean, providing a continuous ice bridge to the pole. It is from Ellesmere Island that many polar expeditions have set out, and from Ellesmere Island that Robert Peary made the journey that took the first man to the Pole.
³
To future generations Ellesmere Island may well be seen as one of the pivotal places in the advance of climate change, for in the summer of 2002 the Ward Hunt ice-shelf experienced a massive and unprecedented break-up in what may come to be regarded as an irreversible step on the road towards global warming.

Ellesmere Island has a remarkable local climate. The name for climates of its type is ‘polar desert'. It receives on average less than 6cm of precipitation per year, which is even less than the Sahara Desert. As a consequence, the land is without a cover of snow even in midwinter. What little snow falls is blown by the wind, leaving virtually all of the unglaciated land free of snow. Because it is free from snow, Ellesmere Island may be regarded as a polar oasis. Thus, for example, in the vicinity of Eureka the summer sun remains above the horizon for 147 consecutive days, with around 70 days frost-free – the temperature comfortably above freezing for all 24 hours of the day – and there are almost as many days again which have some hours
of above freezing temperatures. At Grise Bay on the south of the island late August temperatures are typically between 10°C and 15°C, and with the intensity of the polar sun it is perfectly possible to get sunburn.

In these conditions Arctic plants grow extremely well, particularly Arctic poppy, mountain aven and campion, along with sedges, lichens and moss. Without snow on the ground animals can graze year round. Musk oxen and Peary caribou are the larger grazers, once numerous, though both have suffered in the twentieth century from over-hunting. Musk oxen are now very rare, reduced to an estimated 60 animals, at long last with protection, and their population now considered stable at this low level. At the start of the twentieth century the musk oxen numbered many thousands. The Peary caribou is a dwarf form of the familiar caribou found throughout the American Arctic (and under the name reindeer in the Asian and European Arctic). Peary, after whom the animal is named, was also responsible for the start of its decline through over-hunting. There are now just a few hundred Peary caribou, with their numbers still declining. Fox, ermine, lemming and polar bears are found on Ellesmere Island. Birds are represented by around 30 nesting species, which on this most northerly of islands are all inevitably at the northernmost extreme of their range. Here can be found the gyrfalcon, the great northern diver – also known as the loon, in which guise it appears on the Canadian $1 bill – the snowy owl, the jaeger, and several species of goose and duck. The interior of Ellesmere contains remarkable Lake Hazen, one of the world's largest fresh-water lakes, surprisingly with ice-free areas for most of the year.

In the sea immediately to the south of Ellesmere Island is the North Water polynya,
⁴
an example of an Arctic phenomenon where warmer water from hundreds of miles away wells up, keeping an area of sea ice-free even in winter. The North Water polynya, or polynias – it may variously be regarded as one phenomenon or a series of related phenomena – is an area roughly the size of Switzerland, and has an enormous impact on the ecology of Ellesmere Island. This is one of the world's most bountiful seas, teeming with life. Among the larger mammals are polar bears, seals, walrus, beluga and narwhal; fish abound, and the expanse of open water modifies the climate of the region. This amazing feature of the far north makes the area not only habitable for man, both today's Thule Inuit and the Vikings, but also desirable in terms of the resources it offers.

On the Greenland shore facing Ellesmere Island is the Thule or Qaanaaq district of north-west Greenland, which is populated. The airport built by
the USA during the Second World War was given the name Thule, echoing the name the Roman geographer Pytheas of Marseilles gave to the furthest point north in the fourth century
BC
. It is off-limits to visitors, and exists in a world of direct supply of everything it needs by cargo plane from the United States. Around 130 miles north is the town of Qaanaaq, the main community of the Thule Inuit, with five villages in the vicinity. These are all modern communities in terms of the infrastructure of transportation links (mainly scheduled helicopter), shops, schools and clinics, but unlike Ellesmere's Grise Fiord they are the successor to much older communities. The Thule Inuit have been occupying these lands for centuries. There are traditional occupations for the people who live there, giving them a reason to live where they do. The contrast with until recently uninhabited Ellesmere Island is striking.

Ellesmere Island offered much to the Vikings. First of all, the land offered a mild climate for such a high latitude, with the ice-free sea moderating the air temperature even in the most severe winters. The Vikings would have found it an attractive spot for summer camps, while over-wintering and even settlement were possible. The seas were navigable. Baffin Bay is ice-free for the summer months, the North Water polynya ice-free year round, and the coasts of Ellesmere and Devon islands ice-free for much of the year. The land provided ample food for summer, and some food for winter. Peary caribou and musk oxen have been mainstays of the diet of later explorers as they presumably were to the Vikings; seal, narwhal and perhaps beluga and polar bear supplemented fish and seabirds. The North Water offered a bonanza.

Probably the main reason for the Vikings venturing this far north was the whales, particularly the narwhal. The whales of the area are numerous today both in terms of the number of animals and the range of species, yet in Viking times they were even more common. Great whales in these waters are today represented by the Greenland whale, the sei whale, and the humpback whale; white whales by the narwhal and the beluga whale; and toothed whales by the orca, the white-beaked dolphin, and the harbour porpoise. In Viking times the grey whale may also have been found in Ellesmere waters; it was certainly in the North Atlantic, but today the Atlantic population has been destroyed by whaling; a small population survives today in the North Pacific. The blue whale is still found in the North Atlantic though reduced
to just a few hundred animals worldwide; in Viking times it was far more common in the North Atlantic and presumably ventured into Baffin Bay.

The great whales were all too big to be hunted. The blue whale is famous as the largest animal on the planet, though the Greenland whale – also called the bowhead – is very little smaller, and sei and humpback whales still enormous. Accidental strandings doubtless provided an occasional bounty, as they have done over the centuries to northern populations in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Scotland, but the Vikings could not hunt them. The toothed whales presented special hunting problems, in that the carcass of a slaughtered toothed whale sinks, and as a consequence of its great weight cannot usually be hauled into a ship. This problem was faced by whalers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who learned to ignore them, concentrating instead on the great whales, which they called ‘right' whales – the right whales to hunt because they do not sink.

For the Vikings two whales were particularly sought. The beluga whale, a glorious white whale, grows to around 16 feet in length, making it one of the smaller whales. It is a whale of shallow waters, eating mainly fish, which it finds close to shore and in river estuaries. Belugas are generally unconcerned at the approach of a small boat, which can come within touching distance of a beluga resting on the surface. For the Vikings it was an easy whale to hunt simply by approaching in a boat and spearing it. Its dead body floated and could be recovered. No particular skill was needed to slaughter a beluga, and the weapon was a simple spear, not a harpoon, and therefore readily to hand. While belugas can be found all along the west coast of Greenland, they are prolific in the north.

Despite the beluga's value, the real reward for Viking hunters was the narwhal. This whale is a little smaller than the beluga – growing to about 14 feet – and has a complementary distribution. Both whales are fish eaters, but while the beluga feeds in coastal waters, the narwhal usually remains in deeper waters. It was harder to hunt than the beluga because its range was not as easily accessible. However the narwhal was considered worth the effort because it has a feature unique among whales – a horn.

Narwhal horn is a specially developed tooth. Usually found only in males, a single incisor tooth in the upper jaw – usually the left one – erupts into growth as a tusk often up to 9 feet in length, and spiraled.

The tusk is ivory, and may be carved with the facility of elephant or any other ivory. Its great length represents a significant quantity of material, far more than can be harvested, for example, from a walrus. In terms of its
ivory value the narwhal was much prized. Yet hunting the narwhal posed the Vikings enormous difficulties. As a deep-water whale it was encountered only well out to sea in the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, and then only as occasional sightings. It was difficult to get close enough to kill the whale, then difficult to tow a massive cargo perhaps hundreds of miles to shore. While butchery at sea may have been possible, Viking ships were not designed for such work, and the operation would have been difficult – certainly impractical and perhaps impossible.

The one place where the narwhal could be hunted close to shore was in the North Water polynya off Ellesmere Island. Here, and uniquely here, the narwhal come close to the shore, and gather in great numbers, feasting on the bounty of this northern oasis. Here the narwhal appear to play, the males skimming the surface and fencing with their tusks. The sight is spectacular.

To the Vikings the narwhal ivory represented the most valuable item they could trade back to Europe. The spectacular spiral tusks were sold in Europe not as whale teeth, but as unicorn horns.

The unicorn is familiar to us all today from countless images, and perhaps also from stories. Few mythical beasts have entered so fully on the western consciousness, and none has the entirely positive connotations of the unicorn. Today the unicorn is represented as a creature in the form of a white horse but with the addition of a single white horn growing from its head. This is the image for example which is the heraldic beast of Scotland, and which today in Britain supports the Royal Arms.

The mediaeval world was more varied in its portrayal of the unicorn. While the horse shape is a standard feature, frequently it is adorned with the beard of a billy goat, the tail of a lion and the cloven hooves of a bull. The unicorn symbolised redemption and rebirth, and was even taken, along with the lamb, as a metaphor for Christ. The single horn was given a name – the alicorn – and attributed with healing properties, particularly the ability to neutralise poison.

The ultimate source of the unicorn is in Greek natural history, which presents the animal as actually existing, in contrast to the many fabulous beasts of Greek myth. So Ctesias in his
Indica
⁵
describes the unicorn as an Indian wild ass which is fleet of foot, and has on his head a single horn a cubit and a half long (less than 3 feet), coloured white, red and black. Drinking vessels made from this horn were a preventative against poisoning. Aristotle appears to have been copying Ctesias when he describes a unicorn
simply as an ‘Indian ass' (in
Historia anim
. ii.1 and
De part. anim
. iii.2). Pliny the Elder provides a later Latin account of the unicorn, which clearly draws on sources other than just Ctesias and Aristotle. To Pliny (
Natural History
viii:30 and xl:106) the unicorn is an Indian ox – not an ass – and is ‘a very ferocious beast, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, a deep, bellowing voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length, standing out in the middle of its forehead' which ‘cannot be taken alive'. This is the text upon which later views of the unicorn were ultimately based.