Vikings in America (24 page)

Around
BC
1400 a third migration into Greenland occurred, using the Smith Sound ice bridge. Again these are a non-Inuit people, with a completely different culture to the Inuit, and like Independence I without boats, dogs or igloos. They occupy the land previously held by Independence I, and as the early evidence of this culture was found on the shore of Independence Fjord overlying the remains of Independence I they are called Independence II Culture. Like Independence I, they are a Stone Age hunting community, though they must have possessed a strategic advantage which enabled them to swamp a population that had been present for many centuries. While initially established on the north coast, towards the end of its period Independence II moved south on both east and west coasts, indicating that they had learned the use of boats, perhaps from contact with Saqqaq Culture peoples.

The final chapter in pre-Viking settlement of Greenland is the Dorset Culture. A climatic disturbance around
BC
500 disrupted hunting patterns and weakened both Saqqaq and Independence II Cultures. Shortly after
BC
500 the more advanced Dorset Culture replaced both Saqqaq and Independence II Cultures. The Dorset Culture take-over of Greenland may be a new migration into Greenland from around
BC
500 – a view conventionally held – or it may be the expansion of a culture which had already gained a toe-hold in Greenland. Recent excavations at Qeqertasussuk (in the Disko Bay area) have unearthed remains (as yet unconfirmed) of Dorset Culture from as early as
BC
2000. Assuming these results are confirmed,
they suggest a migration of the Dorset Culture into one or more localities, including Disko Bay, prior to
BC
2000, and the subsequent spread of this culture throughout Greenland following
BC
500, when climatic disturbances caused difficulties for Saqqaq and Independence II Cultures. Dorset Culture appears heavily influenced by both Saqqaq and Independence II Cultures, which is consistent with coexistence of the cultures in Greenland in the period
BC
2000–500. The Dorset Culture, like those that went before it, was a Stone Age culture of hunters, but modified through some use of iron, made possible through collection of iron meteorites from the ice cap. In the early centuries of the first millennium
AD
climatic changes in the form of a gradual warming led to a slow decline of the Dorset Culture, especially in the south. As Stone Age hunters they flourished better where seal and walrus were more common, and as the climate warmed the seal and walrus numbers declined, and with them the Dorset Culture. Well before the Vikings arrived, the Dorset Culture had relinquished occupation of south and west Greenland. At the very latest they survived in the north and east of Greenland to
AD
1200, though even here they may have vanished by
AD
1000. There are no accounts in the sagas or archaeological evidence for interaction between the Vikings and the Dorset Culture; rather, there is just one brief encounter on the east coast, the visit to the Scoresbysund area by Thorgils Orrabeinfostre where he reports an encounter with ‘witches'.

The early cultures show a surprising pattern of settlement expansion in Greenland in that it was north-to-south.
¹
The earliest settlements are all in the north, with a gradual spread down the east and west coasts. Only the last wave of the early settlers reached as far as the south of Greenland, and this was the first area they deserted as the climate warmed. Hunters flourished on the resources of the High Arctic, but found areas further south to be marginal for survival. For such communities the boundary between ice and open sea, with the rich fish and seal life this margin supported, was essential for survival, and the northern and eastern areas were therefore more attractive. The climatic disturbance that led to the extinction of the Dorset Culture was not a cooling but rather a warming, which disrupted their food supply. By contrast the Vikings, as farmers, were equipped to occupy the south-west Greenland area that was no longer able to support hunter-gatherers. The different niches inhabited by the pre-Viking hunter-gatherers and the Viking farmers are illustrated from the very beginning.

The distribution patterns of three of the early cultures – Saqqaq, late Independence II and Dorset – indicates that they had boats, though what they
were made from is not known. Presumably the boats were used in the fjords of Greenland and along the sea ice-edge, even crossing Baffin Bay by hugging an ice-edge. There is no evidence that early peoples from Greenland made voyages further east, for example to Iceland, and presumably their boats were not capable of such a crossing. Yet they must have known of the existence of Iceland, for the ice-capped mountain of Snaefelsness can be seen from Greenland. The Denmark Strait served as an absolute barrier. The special achievement of the Vikings is that they were the first people to have ships capable of crossing this barrier, the most challenging gap between the North Atlantic stepping-stones.

When the Vikings arrived in Greenland the very last of the Dorset Culture there was on the point of extinction. The few members of that people briefly encountered on Greenland's east coast represented a tribe that vanished within a few years. Throughout the High Arctic the Dorset Culture was in decline. On Baffin Island it may have survived for a little longer – at Cape Dorset, for example, the archetypal site from which the Dorset Culture takes its name, and where the people were most securely established. Yet even on Baffin Island the Dorset Culture was in fast decline. Presumably the Vikings must have encountered them here, though there is no record. Possibly the presence of a people on Baffin Island may be the reason why there seems to have been no Viking settlement there.

The very last survival of Dorset Culture was on three islands in the north of Hudson Bay: Southampton, Coats and Walrus islands. Here a people, called by the Inuit the Sivullirmiut, meaning ‘first inhabitants', existed until into the twentieth century, and some description of the people and their lifestyle has been preserved. As their own name for themselves has not been noted, the Inuit name Sivullirmiut is the only one available.

The Sivullirmiut were clearly not Inuit. They lacked the artefacts central to Inuit culture: dogs and dogsleds, kayaks, igloos and toggled harpoons. The earliest description is from Captain George Francis Lyon,
²
a whaler who visited the area in 1824 and noted that they spoke a ‘strange dialect' – presumably meaning that his Inuit interpreter could not translate. He describes the people in the following terms: ‘. . . mild manners, quiet speech, and as grateful for kindness, as they were anxious to return it'.

Contact with Westerners led to Western diseases, and by 1896 it was noted that the population had declined to around 70 people. A 1902 visit by a whaling ship, the
Active
, resulted in an outbreak of disease, probably typhoid or typhus, with the result that the whole community died with
great speed, so that before the
Active
sailed at the end of the winter this people was extinct.

Lyon gives us a description of a crude boat used by the Sivullirmiut, which was made from three inflated seal-skins tied together with seal intestine and rowed with a paddle of whalebone. This is completely different from the finely crafted kayak and umiaq of the Inuit. Reports note distinctive hairstyles. Men wore their hair gathered into a ball on their forehead. Women twisted their hair into two heavy ‘clubs' hanging from each temple. Both men and women were tattooed. They wore mittens made from bird skins, and trousers from polar bear hide – this last fashion found also in some Inuit groups. Material culture, mainly from excavations, show a prevalence for tiny stone blades.

In the Sivullirmiut we have a survival into the twentieth century of a Stone Age culture. It is, of course, possible that there was intermarriage between the Inuit and the Dorset Culture, and in this way the present-day Inuit may claim the Dorset Culture as their kin. Yet it should be stressed that the Dorset Culture are a completely different ethnic and cultural group, and the modern trend in Greenland and Canada to label the Dorset Culture as ‘Inuit Culture' or even just ‘Inuit' is simply wrong.

After all these cultures in Greenland it is a coincidence that the Vikings arrived at just the time when Greenland was uninhabited – at least in the areas where the Vikings settled. Save for the last remnant in Greenland of the Dorset Culture people on the east coast, the Vikings had the whole of an enormous land to themselves. Had their migration been a few hundred years earlier or later they would have found the land occupied, just as they did on the American mainland. Had timings been different it is unlikely that the Greenland colony would have been established because it was not then an empty land, and hence unlikely that the Viking American adventure would have happened.

The empty land of the High Arctic and Greenland proved attractive to another group, the Inuit. Their expansion in the region corresponds with the Viking Age.

The present-day distribution of the Inuit is vast. In the west they are found in Siberia on the Chukov Peninsula facing the Bering Strait. Across the Bering Strait in Alaska the Inuit have settled most of the coast including the Aleutian
Islands. Their distribution includes the coast of the Barren Lands of northern Canada, many islands of the Canadian Arctic archipelago, the northeast and west shores of Hudson Bay, and the Labrador coast. In Greenland today Inuit are found on the west coast from Thule to Cape Farewell, and on the central east coast. This is a truly remarkable spread through the Arctic. In so many areas the Inuit are unique. They alone in historic times have maintained wholly self-supporting settlements in the far north, as far north as Thule at 78° north. They alone have settled the High Arctic both summer and winter. By contrast in Siberia, the Chukchi and Samoyed people visit the High Arctic in the summer, but migrate south into the shelter of the forests for the winter – the Inuit are the only habitual year-round inhabitants of the far north.

The Inuit expansion is a recent one.
³
Archaeology confirms this. While writers hesitate to consider the question of Inuit origins to be completely solved the consensus is that the Inuit have spread from Siberia. Ethnically they are an Asian people related to the Mongolians, whom they most closely resemble. The date of their expansion out of Asia is still a matter of conjecture, with dates proposed ranging from around 6,000 years ago to around 1,500 years ago. The issue seems capable of a solution in language terms. Linguistically a divergence much more than 1,500 years ago is simply not possible. From Siberia to east Greenland they have one language, which is mutually comprehensible, though divided into dialects. The isolation of Inuit communities would be expected to promote the development of linguistic variation and therefore the rapid development of different languages. That this has not occurred suggests that the expansion of the Inuit is recent – scarcely more than 1,500 years old. Indeed, the proposed dates of up to 6,000 years ago seem to be part of an effort to see pre-Inuit peoples of Greenland, Baffin Island and elsewhere in the Arctic Archipelago as Inuit.

Approximate key dates in Inuit migration have been established by archaeological evidence. Migration into the coast of the Barren Lands around the MacKenzie Delta can be dated to around the year 1000. A century later, around 1100, there is an expansion west and north-west to Victoria Island and to the Thule region of Greenland. Migrations south occurred to Baffin Island and the Melville Peninsula around 1200, to south-west Greenland perhaps around 1350, to Labrador and much of Hudson Bay around 1500, and to the Chesterfield Inlet region as late as 1800. Much of the Inuit expansion therefore took place at precisely the times that the Vikings were exploring these same territories. Interaction of the two groups
was inevitable, and it may even be that each group in effect facilitated the expansion of the other.

Where the Vikings and Inuit met depends on the speed of their expansion. Everything that is known about Viking expansion shows it to be remarkable for its rapidity, so for example the Vinland voyages were undertaken by the son of the first colonist of Greenland. My own view is that with no factor to limit their expansion, the Vikings would have explored very quickly. We know that the Vikings reached Ellesmere Island and perhaps Victoria Island, though not when; we know that the Inuit reached these same islands around 1100, passing through Ellesmere for Thule in Greenland. A meeting of Viking and Inuit early in the twelfth century seems the best fit for the evidence available.

The Inuit expansion was rapid. From the Barren Lands around the Mackenzie delta to Thule is in excess of 1,500 miles by any plausible route, yet was accomplished in a generation or two. While the decline of the Dorset Culture may have facilitated the expansion, it is not in itself sufficient to explain it. A hypothesis may be advanced that the factor which explains the Inuit expansion comes from contact with the Vikings – and plausibly this factor is metal-working.

Inuit culture in the West is a Stone Age culture. Only in the High Arctic of the Canadian Archipelago and in Greenland is metal used, which suggests a discovery of metal working around 1100, and carried east following the direction of Inuit migration. The Inuit in the east use both copper and iron, in effect jumping in a generation or two from the Stone Age not to its natural successor, the Bronze Age, but direct to the Iron Age. Metal-working may be a skill learned through contact with the Vikings.

Metallurgy – the smelting of ores to extract metal – is unknown in Native American cultures anywhere north of present-day Mexico. Even south of Mexico, where the cultures of Central and Southern America did develop metallurgy, it was used predominantly for working gold and silver into ornament. The production and working of bronze and iron, central to the cultures that followed the Stone Age, is found nowhere in North America. The nearest approach to conventional metal-working was in locations where copper occurs naturally in its pure form, for example in the Upper Midwest, where there was some use of the metal to produce ornaments. The
metal was worked through hammering, which creates brittleness, making the metal unsuitable for functional uses as tools. Closer to the Inuit area, the Eyak people of Alaska had access to copper, which can be found as pure nuggets in river silt, and used these nuggets as decorative beads. Even the Dorset Culture in Greenland is known to have made some rudimentary use of meteorite iron. But all these processes are without smelting, and are using metal as a malleable stone rather than truly working the metal.