Vikings in America (20 page)

The Vikings' Arctic boundary was never political, but rather the geographical one of the edge of the multi-year ice. In Ellesmere Island they were right up against this boundary, just as they were in Spitsbergen and the White Sea, proving that they could go every mile that is theoretically possible. There is no reason to think that the Vikings would not have had
the physical ability to sail any waters of the Arctic which are open during the summer months. They even had one great advantage over the ships of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – their ships were smaller. Paradoxically a small ship is much safer in these waters. It is more manoeuvrable and therefore has a much better chance of escaping encroaching pack ice and avoiding becoming iced in. It is also possible to pull a small ship up onto a beach to escape storms. The violence of Arctic storms in waterways full of rocks and ice has frequently wrecked large ships which must remain at sea in the absence of a harbour, and this one expedient of beaching a ship is a vital advantage that the Vikings had over nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century explorers with their much larger ships.

There are two major routes west from Greenland: the northern route of the Parry Channel, and the southern route of the Hudson Strait.

The Parry Channel appears on a map as a straight east–west channel situated at around 74° north. It is not as far north as Ellesmere Island, and the Ellesmere Vikings must have passed its entrance. The channel as a single geographical feature exists more in the minds of map-makers than in reality. It is a sequence of channels and areas of open sea ranging from ten to fifty or more miles in width, bounded not by continuous shore but by numerous islands. To nineteenth-century mariners it was a maze in which many simply got lost. With their rudimentary navigation it must have been even more challenging to the Vikings. Today its western end is virtually blocked by multi-year ice, though a ship might just navigate past the ice in late summer. While the climate in the early Viking Age was a little milder than today, this channel would still have been only barely open for just a few weeks in late summer, and presumably only in some years. In theory the Vikings could have made this journey, and there is even some ethnographic evidence which suggests we should give the possibility serious attention. Nevertheless, penetration of anything more than the entrance of Parry Channel would be surprising. Before the Ellesmere Island finds, the idea that the Vikings might have been here at all would have seemed incredible; today we must modify this view.

The other route east from Greenland is the Hudson Strait, with its mouth across the Davis Strait and directly opposite the Eastern Settlement on Greenland. With its entrance at 61° north, this is much less extreme than the Parry Channel, though still with all the perils of Arctic waters, and it ices over every winter. The mouth of Hudson Strait was in the backyard of the Vikings in the Eastern Settlement, and in the centuries of their occupation there, it is
reasonable to expect that exploration, both planned and accidental, would have taken place. A journey in the region of 1,000 miles – roughly the distance from the Eastern Settlement to L'Anse aux Meadows or the Western Settlement to Ellesmere Island – reaches to Hudson Bay. We know that within a very few years of settlement in Greenland the Vikings had reached Vinland. It is not a tenable proposition to presume that in the nearly 500 years of their settlement in Greenland they did not penetrate the Hudson Strait. Indeed, the balance of probability is that Hudson Bay was discovered around the same time as Vinland.

The name ‘Hudson Bay' is misleading. With a breadth of 500 miles and a maximum length of 800 miles, anywhere else in the world this stretch of water would be called a sea. In winter Hudson Bay freezes almost in its entirety, and ice may be found on the east coast year-round. Yet it is in the middle of a continent and has the continental climatic extremes, so while the winters are cold, much of Hudson Bay has a relatively warm summer. A summer sailing season would have been sufficient to take the Vikings from Greenland to Hudson Bay and back again. This was well within their capability without reaching any physical barrier.

Technically they could have travelled further. The ice that millennia ago scoured the central region of the North American continent has left a vast area of mostly level land – the Hudson Bay Lowlands – characterised by acidic, waterlogged soils, of the sort called in the Cree language
muskeg
and in English
peat bog
. The rivers which flow into Hudson Bay are mostly navigable, or have modest falls and rapids which could have been managed through portaging of ships. The technology which enabled Viking ships to travel the rivers of Russia was adequate for the rivers of the Hudson Bay catchment. From the point of view of the technical capabilities of their ships, the Vikings could have made Hudson Bay the departure point for numerous journeys deep into the interior of North America. There was, in theory, nothing to have stopped them.

Elsewhere in the world, Vikings demonstrated that they would travel as far as their ships could take them. It is worth investigating what evidence there is of Viking travel to Hudson Bay and into the American heartland.

A plausible source of information about Viking penetration into the Canadian High Arctic should be the stories told by the Inuit. It is the Inuit who
gave early explorers stories of Europeans in Ellesmere Island, and reasonable that they would remember Europeans elsewhere in the Arctic. Yet there is a problem. While the stories of Europeans in Ellesmere Island represent events perhaps no more than a generation or two before the storyteller, any Inuit stories of Europeans in the Hudson Strait or Hudson Bay area would be looking back many centuries.

Inuit stories from many centuries ago may be remembered by the Inuit, but within a cultural framework so different from that with which the Western world is familiar that interpretation is problematic. There has been a tendency for commentators either to see clear evidence of the Vikings in the Inuit stories, or to dismiss everything that these stories say.

Part of the problem is that the Inuit people do not have a mythology in the way that this is understood in most cultures. They do not separate myth and history in the way that western culture does. One modern Inuit writer, Rachel Attituq Qitsualik,
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expresses this concisely: ‘The Inuit cosmos is ruled by no one. There are no divine mother and father figures. There are no wind gods and solar creators. There are no eternal punishments in the hereafter, as there are no punishments for children or adults in the here and now.'

There is nothing comparable to the complex stories of gods and men found in Western mythologies. Nor do the Inuit have the concept of traditional stories containing within them some recollection of real events. Expressed in Western terms, there are no gods of Mount Olympus and no siege of Troy. Yet there is a religious imperative, expressed through animism, the belief that all living things have souls, and all life is therefore precious. As the reality of life in the Arctic is that living things must be killed for food and clothing, there is an Inuit cultural problem of reconciling their own existence with belief in a vengeful spirit world where every animal has a soul. Knud Rasmussen reported his Inuit guide as replying to a question on Inuit beliefs with the comment ‘We don't believe. We fear.' Inuit stories predominantly describe rituals and taboos by which a ferocious spirit world is pacified, and these stories mix perceptions of the natural and supernatural world to an extent that it is not clear whether something is a man or an animal or a spirit or a monster – or even a Viking!

The manner of story-telling in Inuit society has been that women, typically grandmothers, relay the stories to the children. As the stories are very similar throughout the Inuit area, it is reasonable to assume that they are centuries or millennia old. They address themes which are enduring characteristics of the
Inuit lifestyle. Stories told throughout the Inuit world include the abused orphan who takes revenge; the woman who prospers following separation from a husband who mistreats her; the man, rejected by a woman, who takes a bird as a wife; children raised by animals; the wise, old man who encounters evil spirits and escapes by outsmarting them. While a few characters have names – Kiviuq and Sedna are the most frequently encountered – there is no suggestion that they were ever real people, rather they are archetypes created to embody the taboos expressed. The stories reflect a lifestyle which is as old as the Inuit people, and as the interest is in the unchangeable realities of the spirit world there is little interest in creating new stories or modifying old ones to reflect real events. The framework is not promising for finding references to the Vikings. Indeed, what little is found may be all the more significant because of its unlikely location.

What is found in Inuit stories from the Canadian High Arctic (but seemingly not further west) are stories of giants – Tunit. These are described as real, just as animals in Inuit stories are real – and in contrast with spirits, which are clearly identified as such. The giant Tunit are physically strong, sometimes peaceful and sometimes aggressive, and there is interaction between them and the Inuit. The Tunit seem to be a non-Inuit people with whom the Inuit came into contact, and it does seem that the stories describe real encounters.

The Inuit certainly encountered indigenous people in North America, particularly around the tree-line, where Inuit settlement and culture were supplanted by peoples inhabiting a different environment. None of these people can reasonably be called giants. It has been suggested that the Inuit stories refer to people belonging to the Dorset Culture, which they would have encountered to the north of Baffin Bay, and that the Dorset Culture people are the Tunit of the Inuit stories. Indeed the equation of Tunit with Dorset Culture, and even with the last surviving Dorset Culture tribe, the Sadlermiut, has been repeated so often that it has gained respectability. Yet the identification is imperfect.

A plausible interpretation of Tunit is that the name applied simply to non-Inuit peoples who were taller than the Inuit. Stories told by the Inuit refer not just to the people of the Dorset Culture, whom they certainly encountered, but also to other non-Inuit people, possibly including the Vikings. Standing an average of four inches taller than the Inuit and with a heavier build, the Vikings do fit the description of the stories in a way that the Dorset Culture do not. Accounts of the last surviving Tunit tribe stress
their peaceableness, and seem hard to equate with the aggression often associated by the Inuit with the Tunit. Given that the archaeological finds now indicate that the Vikings were present in the Canadian High Arctic, the possibility that some Tunit were Vikings must be seriously considered.

Within the immensity of the Canadian High Arctic, very little territory has even been adequately surveyed, and only a tiny number of archaeological excavations have been carried out. That Viking remains have been found at all is truly remarkable. The relative frequency of such finds suggests a widespread Viking presence, and in some numbers.

The most common Viking find in North America is iron ship rivets. These are distinctive to Viking ships, and finding one on a shore demonstrates that at some time a Viking ship was pulled up on the beach. Metal detectors are beginning to locate these rivets, though bearing in mind the thousands of miles of coastline, and the inaccessibility of most northern areas, it may be presumed that only a tiny fraction of the rivets have been found, and that a much fuller picture will in time emerge.

One Viking rivet has been found on Axel Heiberg Island.
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That the Vikings reached this island is staggering – though what they were doing there is far from clear. Axel Heiberg is west of Ellesmere Island, but lacks the polynias and open water that make the Ellesmere Island climate attractive. Discovery is usually attributed to Otto Sverdrup and his Fram expedition of 1898–1902, and it is Sverdrup that named the island after one of his sponsors, a brewer in Oslo. Though in the top 30 islands in the world in terms of size, it remained virtually unexplored until the 1950s, and today is a corner of the world that has been largely forgotten. One of the world's great wildernesses, Axel Heiberg lacks any form of formal protection as a National Park, though perhaps has the best possible protection through its inaccessibility. Today it has no permanent population; there is a tiny scientific base at Expedition Fiord. There is some scant archaeological evidence of Inuit settlement on the east coast, presumably summer camps that were made by hunters from Ellesmere Island. In terms of resources the island has little that would have been of interest to the Vikings. Its climate is a little more extreme than that of Ellesmere Island. While Peary caribou and musk oxen are found there the island lacks the former prolific animal populations of Ellesmere Island. A curious feature of Axel Heiberg Island is the many
square miles of mummified wood, believed to be the remains of a 45-million-year-old forest. The wood is mummified – not fossilised – and will therefore burn. Conceivably this mummified wood was seen as a resource, though firewood that burns but poorly seems a disappointing cargo for a long voyage.

There is open water to Axel Heiberg for just a few weeks in some summers. The Vikings came, perhaps exploring, perhaps even lost. At least one Viking ship was dragged onto an Axel Heiberg beach and deposited a rivet there.

The Axel Heiberg Island find is remarkable for its location. By contrast, the High Arctic can offer finds which are surprising in themselves. On Baffin Island at an excavation of a Dorset Culture site a three-metre length of cord has been found, spun from the fur of the Arctic hare, and dating from around 1200. This cord is not compatible with Dorset or any other American culture – where spinning and yarn manufacture were virtually unknown – but it is directly comparable to textile fragments found in Viking Greenland. It is widely accepted that this is evidence of Viking presence on Baffin Island: a European yarn-making technique utilising a local resource to produce a Viking Arctic product.