Vikings in America (23 page)

Stefansson was the pre-eminent Arctic explorer of his generation. It is largely thanks to his copious writings on the Arctic that the nineteenth-century picture of the inhospitable Arctic was challenged, with his concept of ‘the friendly Arctic' providing a useful balance. In every area of Arctic
studies his observations are accurate, and his work a corner-stone for all subsequent studies. Stefansson's visit to Victoria Island was as part of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, a large-scale project which was well-resourced and well-supported. His observations, agreed by his colleagues and meticulously written up, deserve to be taken seriously. Indeed, in his work on Victoria Island he is frequently credited with providing the best study of any Inuit group before frequent contact with people from outside the area changed their lifestyle and culture.

Stefansson did indeed observe Inuit who had features not usually associated with them. While the majority of the Victoria Island Inuit had characteristic Inuit features, including brown eyes and black hair, a very few people did display precisely the features that Klengenberg had described: blue or grey eyes, fair hair and fair skin. These features are simply not characteristic of the Inuit or any indigenous North American people. Effectively, they are specific characteristics of European ethnicity.

Stefansson identified three possible reasons for the ethnic characteristics he observed, and even a century later his three possibilities do seem to be the only ones. He suggested:

1) It may be that in antiquity a European people moved through Siberia and across the Bering Strait into the Canadian High Arctic, and that an echo of this European ethnicity was observable on Victoria Island.

Stefansson gives little credence to this theory, and today we are able to discount it. In a century of study of the indigenous peoples of North America, no evidence has been found to suggest a European migration across the Bering Strait. This cannot be the answer.

2) It may be that European whalers visiting Victoria Island had left behind their genetic signature, and that the Inuit showing European features were testament to such recent contact.

There is ample evidence of such contact elsewhere in the lands inhabited by the Inuit. Greenland in particular has had four centuries as a Danish kingdom, and has had a resident Danish administrative and trading population throughout. Many Greenlanders today do exhibit European features. Clearly it is possible that the whalers who were in the vicinity of Victoria Island were responsible for the ‘blond Eskimos'. However, Stefansson gives two powerful counter-arguments. First, the Inuit who displayed European features did not believe they were descended from whalers. Elsewhere in the Arctic, Inuit groups
made no secret of descent from Europeans, and there is no reason to distrust the beliefs of the Victoria Island Inuit on this point. Second, Stefansson compared the position of the Inuit in the eastern Canadian Arctic, where whaler contact had been far more extensive and for a far longer period. In these areas Inuit with European features were occasionally found. However, such individuals were (according to Stefansson) far less frequently encountered than on Victoria Island.

3) Stefansson's third possibility was that in the Victoria Island Inuit he was seeing the product of a mix of Inuit and Viking blood.

The idea received a lot of newspaper attention, with headlines proclaiming that ‘Blond Eskimos' had been found in the Arctic. Indeed, the media exaggerations and the subsequent academic unease with the subject did little to help solve the questions raised by the physical appearance of a few Victoria Island Inuit. Nevertheless, Viking origins is a plausible explanation for the ethnic features noted.

The story for a time became little more than a footnote in Arctic research. However the new understanding of DNA appears to offer a way forward, and a project has recently been conducted by two Icelandic geneticists, Agnar Helgason and Gisli Palsson. They sought to compare the DNA of about 100 Victoria Island Inuit with that of Icelanders. Published in 2003, their result was that they could not find any trace of Icelandic (or indeed European) DNA in their sample.

Their result indicates that neither the Vikings nor European whalers nor any other European group are part of the gene stock of their sample. They can offer no explanation for the ethnic features observed first by Klengenberg, then by Stefansson and his whole team. Nor did they themselves see any evidence of such ethnicity. Indeed the implication of their work might be to suggest that Stefansson could not have observed Inuit with European ethnicity as he reported. Yet with a source as reliable as Stefansson, this seems unlikely.

A solution seems to lie in the depopulation and movements of the Inuit throughout the Canadian Arctic. In a nutshell, the Inuit of Cambridge Bay today, the people studied by the Icelandic team, are simply not the same people as those observed a century ago by Stefansson. The DNA tests need to be carried out on Inuit living in the other modern settlement on Victoria Island, or DNA needs to be sought within analysis of human remains from archaeological sites.

At the moment we don't have the evidence to know whether the Vikings did visit Victoria Island. Stefansson's account raises the possibility. Perhaps Victoria Island was the extreme distance reached by the Vikings. Further west, south and north the ice presents a barrier that was surely beyond the capabilities of a Viking ship, yet Victoria Island, given favourable conditions, is technically just reachable in a summer of voyaging from Greenland.

Viking traces in the Canadian High Arctic and Hudson Bay are in areas where we would once never have expected to find them. This is one of the last corners of the earth to have been explored in modern times, and in the nineteenth century was perceived as a near-impenetrable wilderness. It would have been remarkable had a single Viking ship made a voyage into the Canadian High Arctic. Yet these voyages were of such a number that they have left archaeological traces which we have found even in the immensity of the Canadian High Arctic. No one seems to have attempted to extrapolate from the number of Viking archaeological finds an estimate of the number of Viking ships that voyaged in the Canadian High Arctic. The supposition must be that numbers were substantial. The Vikings had the ships and skills to sail these far northern waters, and they travelled as far as their technology would permit.

The Inuit may remember them – though it would seem that they had little interest in the Vikings. There may or may not be Viking genetic traces in some Inuit populations – with the increasing frequency of DNA testing, time will tell.

Most problematic are the disputed Viking archaeological finds, particularly the Kensington Runestone. Of course it has to be a fake – anything else would be just too big an upset to received history. Though we cannot suggest how it may have been forged or why, scholarly caution must regard it as a fake, and it is hard to imagine the acceptable test or evidence that could prove it genuine. Nevertheless, Viking archaeological remains could exist in the vicinity of rivers which drain ultimately into Hudson Bay – the sort of location in which Kensington is found. There should be Viking remains along the passages into Hudson Bay and on its shores, particularly the south-west. There should be evidence of Vikings along the rivers that drain into Hudson Bay, including those that provide access to the great plains of North America. The people whom we know voyaged to
such extreme destinations as Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island and perhaps Victoria Island plausibly made journeys to the Great Plains, which were more attractive in terms of climate and resources. Sooner or later such archaeological remains must surely be found, and which will satisfy the most stringent tests of authenticity to which they will be subjected.

A generation ago, the idea of Viking presence in the centre of the North American continent was gaining both academic and public support. The Minneapolis-based American Football team, the Minnesota Vikings, took its name in 1960 reflecting in part the Scandinavian heritage of many of the nineteenth-century settlers in the region, in part the scholarly acceptance that finds including the Kensington Runestone were then enjoying. Today the pendulum has swung towards greater scholarly caution, to the extent that it is possible to wonder just what evidence the scholarly community would need to consider Viking presence in the region proved.

Some of the evidence of the possible Viking penetration of the Canadian High Arctic, Hudson Bay and the American Great Plains will surely be shown to be false. But already we have sound evidence in even less hospitable High Arctic regions, and if the Vikings could sail such difficult waters, they certainly had the ships to reach Hudson Bay and the rivers that drain into it. Surely time will show that the Minnesota Vikings are well-named, and the world will come to accept that the Vikings penetrated as far as present-day Minnesota.

GREENLAND was the lynch-pin of the trans-Atlantic route, and the peaceful interaction of Viking and Inuit within Greenland crucial to keeping open the passage from Europe to America. Curiously, Viking interaction with the Inuit is a topic which has received little attention, with almost all that has been written on the subject devoted to the questionable theory that the Inuit were responsible for the extinction of the Greenland colony. While the evidence remains sparse, enough now exists to establish a broad picture of the two peoples who lived side-by-side in Greenland for around four centuries.

Since 1977 the term ‘Inuit' has been used in place of ‘Eskimo', a term now deemed offensive. Eskimo is a Native American Micmac tribe name meaning ‘raw-meat eaters'. Inuit, as used today, designates one ethnic, linguistic and cultural group. Ethnically the Inuit people are of Asian origin and cognate with the Mongolians; linguistically they speak one of three closely related Inuit languages; culturally they have a highly developed and specialised culture which enables survival in the High Arctic. The dog team and dog sled, the kayak and umiak boats, the toggled harpoon and the igloo are all unique developments of Inuit culture.

A fair measure of confusion has been brought to the field by the tendency to label many non-Inuit groups who lived in Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic before the Inuit as ‘Inuit'. Popular books on Greenland abound with assertions that the Inuit have occupied the country for millennia, yet this is simply not the case, for while Greenland has a long history of occupation, the early peoples were not Inuit.

There is a pressing need for a consolidated study of the prehistory of all the Arctic peoples of northern America and Greenland, along with work on the
prehistory and history of the Inuit. The many misconceptions relating to the peoples of the Arctic and Greenland need to be addressed. At present, while there is work on the history and archaeology of the prehistoric peoples of Greenland, the work which is most reliable tends to be restricted to one group or archaeological site, while the remainder is for the most part overly broad in its scope.

The west coast of Greenland was without people at the time of the Vikings' arrival. Probably there was a small settlement of a pre-Inuit people on the mid east coast – and possibly there were people on the northern coast. The part of Greenland that the Vikings occupied and the surrounding regions were empty, and had been for some hundreds of years. Yet while the land was without people at the time of the Vikings' arrival, it had once been populated. The story of these early peoples in Greenland gives clues to the ways in which their successors stood to flourish or decline, and suggests how the Inuit and Vikings would have interacted.

The earliest people of Greenland are known from scanty archaeological remains, and are called simply the ‘Independence I Culture' after the area – Independence Fjord – in which the first recorded archaeological remains have been found. The very earliest remains of people of the Independence I culture date from around 3000
BC
. Five millennia before our time and four millennia before the Vikings arrived, man had reached Greenland. Independence I Culture people entered Greenland from the opposite direction to the Vikings. In the far north-west, Greenland comes close to the Canadian Arctic islands, and the winter ice of Smith Sound provides a bridge from Ellesmere Island, at its closest just 12 miles from Greenland. This is the route that the people of Independence I Culture took, and from their landfall at Greenland's north-west corner they spread along the north coast. The inland ice meets the sea in north-west Greenland, presenting an effective barrier to southward expansion on the west coast to this people, who are believed to have been without boats; the poor hunting resources of the north-east coast appear to have been similarly effective in preventing southward development of Independence I Culture down the east coast. The first human settlement in Greenland was therefore in the extreme north, and at latitudes as far north and further north than those inhabited by anyone today or in historic times. Indeed, with the exception of the Nord scientific station (which is no-one's permanent home), no-one in Greenland now lives as far north as the territory occupied by these first settlers of Greenland. Their population is estimated at about 500 people, stable for a millennium
and a half; they were Stone Age hunters. They were not Inuit in terms of either ethnicity or culture. Independence I and all other pre-Viking cultures did not make igloos, keep huskies or sail in kayaks, and had no connection whatsoever with the modern Inuit culture. Their ethnicity may have been related to the Plains Indians of North America.

Around
BC
1800 another culture is found in Greenland, the Saqqaq culture. People belonging to this culture are found inhabiting land south of that occupied by Independence I on both east and west coasts, suggesting that these new migrants had boats. Indeed, it has been suggested that their migration into Greenland was by boat across Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait from Baffin Island rather than across the Smith Sound ice bridge from Ellesmere Island, though this route remains little more than speculation. Independence I and Saqqaq peoples coexisted, occupying different parts of Greenland. Their culture was separate, and they appear to have lived within different ecological environments.