Vikings in America (19 page)

In the early eighteenth century, European sailings to Greenland were
sporadic, but they were occurring. Most sailings were to south-western Greenland only. Voyages were sponsored by commercial interests, seeking quick profits – though few profits seem to have been made. The cost of equipping a ship for the lengthy and dangerous voyage to Greenland could not be recouped by the scant cargos they brought back. The Inuit they encountered had little to trade of any description and nothing in bulk, and trade was further frustrated by the lack of a common language. We have only fragmentary records of the few official voyages to Greenland which took place from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and almost no record of the voyages of failed traders, many of them little better than pirates.

Yet something one of these voyages discovered seems to have brought about a change of view in Denmark. From a belief in the mid seventeenth century that the Greenland colony had completely died out by at the latest 1500, Denmark switched abruptly to a belief that Norse people still lived there. Egede's voyage was conceived as a voyage to re-establish contact with these people.

A hypothesis may be advanced. As yet there is not the evidence to test it, but it may be hoped that archaeological surveys of Ellesmere Island will turn up materials that can do just this. It may be suggested that by the early fifteenth-century Viking presence had become well-established on Ellesmere Island. The settlement was dependent on trade with Greenland and Europe for timber and for luxury goods, and was characterised by summer camps and smaller over-wintering groups, but had generated a basic self-sufficiency in food. The destruction of the Viking settlement in Greenland cut a vital trade route for the Ellesmere Vikings. Supply routes now become at the minimum 2,000 miles, and all directions in their different ways problematic. Iceland, the nearest surviving Viking land, required a crossing of the Denmark Strait, particularly perilous for Viking ships. If any Ellesmere Vikings made the voyage to Iceland they would have found that Iceland had no direct need for the northern produce they wished to trade, and a poor supply of the timber the Ellesmere Vikings required. Alternatively, voyages to the eastern seaboard of America, perhaps in the vicinity of L'Anse aux Meadows, offered the prospect of timber, but not of manufactured goods. Direct trade from Ellesmere Island to Europe adds another thousand miles each way to the established, but already well-extended, trade routes from Greenland to Europe.

Perhaps the obvious solution was evacuation. It is perfectly possible that
one or more shiploads of Ellesmere Vikings settled in Iceland or Norway or somewhere else. European records are just not complete enough or detailed enough for there to be much chance of finding a reference to refugees landing on a lightly settled European coast. Yet perhaps too there was disbelief amongst the Ellesmere Islands that the events in Greenland would result in an end of Norse presence, and a conviction that the Vikings would soon be back in their old settlements, farming good land.

The hypothesis is that a group of Vikings in effect became marooned on Ellesmere Island, and as their last ship sailed or fell to bits they became utterly dependent on the arrival of a ship that never came.

There is evidence for this assertion.

1) In 1540, more than 40 years after the end of the Greenland settlements, a Hamburg sailor known to history as John ‘Greenlander' made a voyage to Iceland during which he was blown off course, finding himself instead in Greenland. He described settlements comparable to those he later saw in Iceland – and therefore Norse rather than Inuit – but abandoned. Yet he found one recently dead body of a European, dressed in leather and cloth and with a knife. A possibility is that this body might have been a Viking from Ellesmere.

2) Europe was convinced that somewhere in Greenland there were still Vikings living. In 1605 and 1606 King Christian IV sent two expeditions to Greenland with the intent of finding the Norse Greenlanders. Expeditions were expensive, and were not mounted without a belief in their likely success.

3) In 1623 in Iceland a report was made of pieces of a ship of Greenlandic design washing ashore.

4) In the Thule Inuit stories recorded by Knud Rasmussen there is frequent assertion of European peoples living in Ellesmere until the late eighteenth or just into the early nineteenth century. However, Sir John Ross's 1818 voyage to Thule and the Smith Sound found no trace of Norse people. Plausibly, the mini ice age of the mid eighteenth century was the end of the Ellesmere Vikings.

5) The missionary Hans Egede was not sent to the known location of the Viking Greenland settlements, but to a point well north of the Western Settlement. This puzzling decision seems to have received little comment from historians. Denmark knew the location of the Greenland settlements, yet sent their missionary somewhere else. When Hans Egede landed in 1721 in the vicinity of present day Sisimiut he found no Norse
people. He searched for them for many years, travelling extensively from Cape Farewell to around 66° north. He found plenty of Viking ruins – all south of Sisimiut – but no sign of the Norse. Yet the hypothesis set out here suggests that they were indeed in the region, but many hundred miles further north than Sisimiut.

Archaeology tells us that the Vikings were in Ellesmere Island. The narwhal horns found throughout Europe come from this location, and provide a purpose for Vikings being so far north. This much is secure. Speculation concerns what happened to these northernmost Vikings, though a case of sorts can be made for their survival, perhaps to the eighteenth century. Hopefully one day archaeology will provide evidence.

THE north-centre of the North American continent is a vast area running from the Canadian High Arctic through Hudson Bay, and south to the Great Lakes and Great Plains of North America. Within this enormous area is to be found some of the globe's worst weather. Winters are particularly cold. Yet there is also enormous climatic variation, and during the summer season many locations have surprisingly warm weather. This is the third direction in which the Vikings penetrated. Today we are familiar with communication routes through Canada and the USA which run predominantly east–west, linking Atlantic with Pacific. However, the natural route into the heart of the continent made by the sea is from the Arctic through Hudson Bay. This was the route used by many nineteenth-century migrants to the American Midwest, and it was the route accessible to the Vikings.

Popular views of this part of the globe emphasise the winter cold. The misfortunes of so many nineteenth-century expeditions to the area encouraged the stories, which are an aspect of the climate, but by no means the whole story. British popular opinion on the Arctic was first captivated and then shocked by the story of the Franklin Expedition, and American views in many respects followed those of Britain.
¹
For the Franklin Expedition should not have failed. Setting out in 1848 the expedition aimed to glorify the British Empire by discovering a passage by sea around the north of America to the Pacific and the Far East. It was considered the best-equipped expedition of its age, and with two specially strengthened ships travelling together, success was confidently predicted. The ships, the
Erebus
and the
Terror
, crossed the Atlantic, put in briefly on the west coast of Greenland, and then vanished into the labyrinth of the Northwest Passage. Only after a wait of three years did search parties set out to seek the fate of the expedition, and found a harrowing tale of ships trapped for two successive winters in the ice, and finally a grim, corpse-strewn march south as the survivors made a last effort to escape. All died.

So much of what we know about the area is associated with expeditions that were sent to discover the fate of Franklin that some description of that catastrophe is useful. The tale of the Franklin Expedition has been unearthed slowly over the centuries, and a consensus view has emerged as to what went wrong. A crucial flaw is now believed to lie in the then-new technology of tin cans, and it may well be that this one technological fault alone destroyed the expedition. At that time tin cans were considered to be the solution for storage of food for many months, but the technology was fatally flawed in that the cans were closed with a solder of lead and tin. We now know that the lead seeped into the food, poisoning all who ate it. Lead poison weakens, though it is unlikely in itself to have killed within just a few years. Rather, it appears that the sailors on the Franklin Expedition, as a result of lead poisoning, became lethargic and prone to illness, particularly tuberculosis. The crew soon became incapable of the work of running their ships. Furthermore, lead poisoning causes violent temper along with an inability to make reasoned decisions. Thus the Franklin Expedition was doomed by physical lethargy and mental instability.

Yet even without this unique problem there were fundamental weaknesses in the planning of the expedition. Early European expeditions to the Arctic had little success in living off the land. While modern guns are effective in killing seal, bear, musk oxen, caribou and other Arctic wildlife, the weapons of the early nineteenth century lacked the accuracy to make a kill from the closest distance to which the animals could usually be approached. Early European hunters with guns went hungry. Trapping would have been more successful, but this seems rarely to have been practised. Along with hunger they faced cold. The clothing of the European expeditions was inappropriate for the Arctic winter, as if those in Britain responsible for equipping the expedition were unable to comprehend the winter cold of the High Arctic. Furs were not worn; while wool can in theory be adequate if worn in a sufficient number of layers, the men were not so equipped. Rather, they had naval uniforms which had been designed more for the parade ground than for practicality. Even their boots were of thin leather; for their hands, many had only fingerless woollen mittens.

With their ships marooned the officers decided on an overland march south in the hope of reaching civilisation. The final march of those of the Franklin Expedition who sought to walk out of the Arctic is a chilling tale of mistakes and desperation. Afflicted by weakened health through lead poisoning and
facing hunger and cold, the officers added breathtaking stupidity. The men were required to drag over the rough ice life-boats which they had mounted on skis, and filled with provisions, most of which they didn't need: formal dining crockery and cutlery and many cooking pots, a meal gong, button polish and curtain rods. The work of pulling these crude sledges of excessive weight would have been exhausting – it was not a practical undertaking, as should have been apparent from the first yards of transportation. One by one the men died. Ultimately the expedition sank to cannibalism, confirmed by recent examination of knife marks on recovered human bones.

The death of the Franklin crew was witnessed by the native Inuit, who for many years afterwards told tales of men who died as they walked. There is evidence that the Inuit made an effort to help the crew, but faced with many dozen sick and starving men were unable to prevent their deaths. Inuit stories record their amazement that these men were dying, surrounded by the bounty of the Arctic summer. The Franklin Expedition, the best-equipped expedition of its age and the glory of the British Empire, perished in a land where the Stone Age Inuit found abundant food and shelter.

Britain reacted to the fate of the Franklin Expedition by stressing the dangers of the High Arctic. Perhaps this was easier than facing up to the catalogue of mistakes that had caused the disaster.

The reality is that Franklin and his men were not equipped for the conditions of the Arctic – in contrast to the Vikings, centuries earlier. For example, Eirik the Red and his band had lived from the land and sea when they over-wintered on Breithafjordur, and many of the early Greenland settlers would have had comparable experiences. They knew how to find food. The Vikings used furs as well as woollen garments, and they trapped animals for food. They had a familiarity with the lands of the north and how to live there. Greenland was to them an attractive land; Hudson Bay was survivable.

Evidence of Viking penetration of the Central Arctic, Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, and even further south is patchy and problematic. We do not have indisputable archaeological remains of the sort found in Newfoundland or Ellesmere Island, nor do we have a tale of exploration of the region from the sagas. However, evidence for Viking presence does exist. It comes from the following sources:

1) Our awareness of where the Vikings had the technological ability to travel to.

2) Inuit stories

3) Archaeological find which are not disputed

4) Archaeological finds which are disputed

5) Genetic traces

Taking these sources together something can be said about the Viking reach in this area.

So far it has been difficult to set bounds on the abilities of the Vikings to travel. Their ships were seaworthy across the North Atlantic, including the difficult seas of the Denmark Strait, a challenge to shipping even today. In Europe the same ship design took the Vikings through the great rivers of Russia, to the Caspian and Black seas, and on to the Mediterranean. Most dramatically, the Ellesmere Island finds show the Vikings sailing the High Arctic right up to the edge of the multi-year ice. The ice edge was familiar to the Vikings not just from the vicinity of Ellesmere Island but from the whole of the North Atlantic, where the edge of the Arctic ice runs from Greenland to Spitsbergen. The North Atlantic ice edge even entered into Viking religious belief, where the ever-frozen ice-ocean is seen as one of the two principal elements of creation – the other being the heat of the south. Viking voyages took place along the edge of the ice, with Spitsbergen known to be visited by Icelanders in 1194 and quite possibly earlier – a land that was supposedly discovered by William Barents in 1596. To the northeast of the Atlantic the Vikings travelled as far as the White Sea, and in the Arctic Ocean east to the pack ice. The Vikings went as far as it is physically possible to go in a boat before the invention of ice-breakers. In the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Russia the boundaries of Viking expansion were political rather than geographical. Settled land presented a challenge. Yet even here the Vikings penetrated as merchants and mercenaries, with significant presence in cities including Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Tehran.