Vikings in America (18 page)

Pliny's remarkable animal might have become no more than a curiosity for classicists had the animal not been taken over by the fathers of the Church as a symbol for Christ. Tertullian, writing in
AD
200, makes the earliest recorded use of this allegory, and he is followed by Ambrose, Jerome and Basil. To the Church Fathers, the unicorn comes to symbolise salvation and rebirth to everlasting life, and mankind's quest for these is allegorised as the hunt for the unicorn. To the early mediaeval world the unicorn could not be captured by a man, but will lay his head in the lap of an honourable maiden, often considered an allegory for the Virgin Mary. Once captured by the maiden, the unicorn can be killed by the hunters, but phoenix-like will live again.

The image presented by the Church Fathers had popular appeal within literature and art. The best preserved visual presentation is the series of seven early renaissance Brussels tapestries now exhibited in New York's Cloisters museum.
⁶
These tapestries present the stylised view of the unicorn hunt. The final panel shows the unicorn chained to a tree, bloodied, but very much alive, perhaps an allegory of Christ on the cross bringing everlasting life, perhaps simply an exuberant working of what was by 1500 a familiar theme. Other unicorn tapestries exist, notably the
Dame á l'alicorne
in Paris's Cluny Museum – about the same time as those in the Cloisters and of a similar provenance – suggesting that unicorn tapestries were a commonplace of the period. Today the unicorn is a part of our culture, an animal readily recognised by all.

When the Vikings traded narwhal horns to Europe there was ready acceptance that these were unicorn horns. Their size and spiral pattern is impressive, and it is easy to see how an age that believed in unicorns would make the link. Europe had no comprehension of sea creatures with horns, and readily assumed that the single horns were from land animals. Perhaps the Viking traders did little to educate their buyers. In Denmark, unicorn horns provided by Viking traders were used to make the royal throne, while
the Scottish court and aristocracy acquired many of the horns as curios. In both Denmark and Scotland, cups were fashioned from ‘unicorn' horn and were claimed to ward off poison.

In Britain, such was the fame of the unicorn that it influenced even the translators of the Bible. Readers of the King James Bible will find a string of references to this animal: Job xxxix. 9–12; Psalms xxii. 21, xxix. 6; Numbers xxiii. 22, xxiv. 8; Deuteronomy xxxiii. 17; Psalm xcii. 11, and even a reference to the ‘horns' of a unicorn. Yet every one is a mistranslation. The Hebrew word is
re'em
, which poses translational problems, but which certainly doesn't mean
unicorn
. A better translation would be
bull
or
ox
, or even
auroch
. The argument that the Hebrew word
re'em
is related to Assyrian
rimu
, meaning a
wild bull
or
mountain bull
, may well be persuasive. Yet the translators of the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible were so convinced that the unicorn existed that they allowed it to be a translation of a Hebrew word they did not understand. The narwhal horns circulating in England provided the proof they required.

Thus the King James Bible presents a view of the unicorn as a powerful and untameable beast, as in Job xxxix: 9–12:

Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? Or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?

Today European museums and stately homes are full of unicorn horns brought to Europe in the Middle Ages. The seas off Ellesmere Island are the only place they could have come from, providing an enduring witness to the trade the Vikings carried out from the world's northernmost island to the cultural centres of Europe. A base on Coburg Island gave ready access both to the North Water polynya and the smaller Lady Ann Strait polynya. The coasts of Coburg Island are ice-free June to October, while the polynias usually maintain open water through the winter. Its climate is moderated by the proximity of the polynias, ranging from a summer maximum of around 4°C down to a February low of -28°C – cold, but survivable. In contrast with Ellesmere Island, Coburg Island is not a desert, again reflecting the influence of the polynias.

Another island off the coast of Ellesmere is Washington Irving Island.
⁷
In 1875 Sir George Nares, commander of an expedition attempting to reach the Pole, visited the island and discovered two cairns there, clearly ancient. The supposition that they are Viking has been generally accepted, largely because there is no Inuit tradition of building such cairns, and it is hard to see who, other than the Vikings, could have built them. There is, however, no way of proving the age of a cairn. On nearby Norman Lockyer Island the same expedition encountered a stone-built eider duck shelter. This is described by Edward L. Moss, the ship's doctor, in his account of the voyage,
Shores of the Polar Sea
:
⁸

It consisted of four stones piled together like a miniature ‘Druid's altar', so as to form a chamber large enough to shelter a nest. Generations of eider-duck had been hatched in it in security since the last wild hunter left the shore. When we found it, it held a deep nest of eider down with three eggs, fresh but cold, probably belonging to a duck we had killed before landing.

Eider duck shelters are found throughout Scandinavia, and have not changed in construction for 1,000 years or more. While it is possible to collect eider down from a natural nest, it is not practical. Far easier to encourage the ducks by providing suitable nest sites, and having a structure which keeps the eider down from blowing away.

Otto Sverdrup also found eider duck houses in several locations on the shores of Jones Sound, particularly on St Helena. In
New Land
(1899) he describes them:

. . . well sheltered under the sides of the mountain were long rows of eider-duck's nests. The sites of several tents told us, too, that some time or other the Eskimo must have been here. As far as I could understand, they had even built nests for the ducks of the same construction that is the vogue to this day in Nordland [the Nordland section of Norway]. Certainly I have never heard that the Eskimo were in the habit of protecting the birds in this fashion.

Sverdrup was writing for an age which believed the Vikings had not travelled much further north than the Western Settlement, and assumed that
these structures had to be Inuit. He correctly notes that the structure and form are distinctly Scandinavian.

The Vikings were drawn to Ellesmere Island, to the North Water and associated polynias. They certainly had a presence there, and while the implicit assumption of writers is that the settlement must have been summer only, we really do not have the evidence to know for sure whether Ellesmere Island was purely a summer settlement, or whether there was year-round occupation – whether Ellesmere Island was in effect a new settlement, self-sufficient and independent of Greenland's Eastern and Western settlements. Nor do we have evidence to suggest what ultimately happened to Ellesmere Island.

There is room, however, for cautious speculation. Realistically, over-wintering in Ellesmere Island must have occurred. With hundreds of years of exploitation of this region it is inevitable that sooner or later a ship would decide that an early onset of winter made the voyage south perilous, and that it was safer to stay. We have seen evidence for over-wintering at Upernarvik at 73° north on Greenland where the world's northernmost runic inscription was found, and while at these latitudes the jump to 76° north for the southern tip of Ellesmere Island represents a significant increase in the length of unrelieved winter night, it does not necessarily represent a comparable fall-off in temperature. Today the winter temperatures of Greenland's Upernavik and Ellesmere Island's Grise Fiord are remarkably similar. The Vikings, by over-wintering at Upernavik, demonstrated their ability to over-winter on Ellesmere Island. Over-wintering would have offered the advantage of a longer season in which to harvest ivory, and would have made economic sense.

Ellesmere Island provides a year-round food supply. While a diet consisting of meat, seabirds and fish and almost entirely without grain, fruit or vegetables seems strange to the Western world, it has for centuries been the diet of the Inuit, and even in the twentieth century a diet not so far removed from this was followed by the inhabitants of Scotland's remotest island, St Kilda. The vitamins that we associate with fruit and vegetables can be obtained from other sources, particularly the liver of seal and the flesh and oil of the fulmar. There is no reason why Ellesmere Island could not have fed the Vikings, as it has for millennia fed the Inuit and other northern peoples.

The primary purpose for Viking presence in Ellesmere Island was the narwhal, which was of value as a trading commodity. Being in Ellesmere meant being a trader, and therefore travelling. The Ellesmere Vikings were
used to making long sea journeys to trade. Amongst the shortest journeys they made was the thousand miles or so to the Greenland settlements. Despite the distance, contact with the Greenland settlements must have been regular, presumably every season, whether we see Ellesmere Island as a summer settlement of Greenlanders, or as an independent settlement trading to Greenland. It was their only route to the rest of the world. And crucially Greenland was the only place where ships could be repaired and rebuilt. Greenland had addressed its own wood shortage by import, from Europe and from America, and had the ability to supply the needs of the Ellesmere Island Vikings. Timber supplies kept Ellesmere Island linked to Greenland.

Of course, the destruction of the Greenland settlements would have been catastrophic for Vikings on Ellesmere. As the Western Settlement was destroyed in the summer we may be sure that there were Vikings at Ellesmere Island at this season. Speculation becomes strained, yet there are two sources which might give some insight into the ultimate fate of Ellesmere Vikings.

The first source is Inuit stories. These are full of references to Europeans who once lived in this area of the Arctic. Knut Rasmussen's accounts of Inuit stories, particularly the Thule Inuit, asserts specifically that the Vikings were in the vicinity of Smith Sound, the strait which separates Ellesmere Island and the Thule Inuits' Greenland home. The Thule Inuit, living closest to Ellesmere Island and visiting annually for hunting, include in their stories abundant references to Europeans. While the possibility exists that these stories might have been told for approaching 500 years, this is out of keeping with the conventions of Inuit storytelling. It would be truly remarkable if an Inuit cultural memory extended back over so long a time span, as there is nothing else in Inuit stories to suggest that there is a folk memory of history over this length of time. Rather, the stories suggest that the Ellesmere Vikings survived the destruction of the Greenland colonies.

European records give strong corroboration to the concept of survival of the Ellesmere Vikings. By 1500 at the very latest, the Greenland colony had been extinguished. Yet in 1721 Denmark sent a Norwegian missionary, Hans Egede, to Greenland with the stated intention of preaching the gospel to the Norsemen they were convinced were there. The story of Viking settlement in Greenland was, of course, known to the Danes, but so too was the story of the destruction of Greenland. There are many accounts of the destruction in Danish, for example from a 1632 description of Greenland by Peder Claussen. There is an odd dichotomy between, on the one hand,
knowledge of the extinction of the Greenland colony and, on the other, a view that there were still Vikings there, and in need of a Christian missionary.

Denmark had for long asserted her claim over Greenland. Thus in 1648 when King Frederik III ascended the joint throne of Denmark and Norway the royal arms were revised. The new arms included a polar bear (in blue), a stockfish (i.e. a dried cod), and a sheep, representing respectively Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Around the same time the Danes proposed the view that a northern land ran from the north-east coast of Greenland across the far north of the Atlantic, and touched the coast of Russia around the Kara peninsula. Such a land does not exist, though the Danes were aware of the boundary of the Arctic Ocean sea ice which is found in roughly this position. The whole of this fictitious northern land they called Greenland, and when in 1596 William Barents discovered Spitsbergen, Denmark asserted sovereignty over that land on the grounds that it was part of Greenland. In such an action we see Denmark ambitious to assert her claim to the whole North Atlantic.

So what had changed by 1721? The Sunday school story of the worthy missionary is that Hans Egede himself conceived a wish to travel to Greenland and preach there, yet the facts scarcely back this up. The decision to send a missionary to Greenland was an intensely political one made at the Danish Court. The mission was fraught with danger for Denmark. Should the descendants of the Norse not be found there, Denmark would in effect have weakened her own claim to Greenland. The man chosen subsequently demonstrated many admirable qualities, yet the motivation for his selection seems to have as much to do with his accent and place of birth as his missionary zeal. Hans Egede was from Sengen in the north of Norway, and spoke a language close to that of Old Norse, and therefore close to the speech of Iceland and that presumed for the Greenland colonies. His background in a northern farming community gave grounds for believing he could farm in Greenland. He was an admirable choice as missionary, and by all accounts enthusiastically embraced the challenge. Politically the decision to transport Egede to Greenland made sense only if Denmark was sure that there really were Norse there. Financially Denmark was committing three ships to the mission, settling just over 40 people, and making a commitment to supply them for many years. Whatever missionary zeal may have existed in Denmark, it is clear that this project was driven by political ambition, supported by a firm belief that the Norse still lived there.