Vikings in America (25 page)

Within this American context of no true metallurgy, the Inuit's use of metal is all the more surprising. On Victoria Island the Inuit group is known today as the Copper Inuit,
⁴
accurately reflecting their use of copper. Pure copper can be found in the Coppermine River and in the vicinity of Coronation Gulf, which are areas accessible to the Inuit, though requiring journeys of considerable length. For Inuit in the vicinity of the present-day settlement of Holman this is a trip of more than 100 miles in each direction, and that the Inuit have undertaken the journey on a yearly basis until recent times emphasises the value they place on copper. The copper is used for spear-heads, knives of all descriptions, and for a variety of inventive functions. For example copper is used as a staple to fasten together the pieces of a broken pot. Copper that was simply hammered to make the implements would be brittle. The Copper Inuit have mastered annealing, a process of slow heating which hardens the metal. Annealing is not smelting, and is not true metallurgy, but it is a significant step further along the road of metal-working than is exhibited by other Native North American peoples.

Further to the east, copper does not occur naturally. In Greenland the Inuit, particularly the Polar Inuit of Thule, discovered a source of iron in meteorites. Most meteorites are composed almost entirely of iron, and in theory could be used anywhere in the world as a source of workable metal. However, in most parts of the world they are not easy to find. By contrast in Greenland the central ice cap produces conditions which do make them easy to find. The ice cap is completely without terrestrial rocks or debris on its surface. Winds blow away what little snow falls, leaving anything that falls on the ice clearly visible. A black meteorite on the ice sheet is readily found. The Polar Inuit made use of meteorites to produce much the same range of metal tools as the Copper Inuit. The process was one of chipping away excess metal, and hammering to produce the required shape and blade. This is laborious, but it does result in serviceable tools.

In addition to naturally occurring copper and meteoric iron the Inuit had access to salvaged metal. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
offer numerous examples of European and American shipwrecks that were stripped by the Inuit, with the iron nails and metal fitments particularly valued. The Viking Age would have provided some scrap metal.

The thesis has not elsewhere been considered that the Inuit learned to value metal and to work it through contact with the Vikings. Alone among the indigenous peoples of North America the eastern Inuit developed metal-working skills sufficiently advanced to produce functional tools. This advance occurred at the time of contact between the Vikings and the Inuit, and is associated with a sudden, rapid expansion of the Inuit east from Victoria Island. That the Vikings taught the Inuit to work metal is plausible.

One remarkable feature of Inuit culture in Greenland is their use of iron from one specific, massive meteorite.
⁵

In 1818 John Ross made the discovery that the Thule Inuit of Greenland were using iron for knife blades, harpoon points and engraving tools. He seemed to be seeing a Stone Age people who had advanced direct to the use of iron without the usual intervening stage of copper-working – a people that had by-passed the Bronze Age as they moved direct from stone use to iron use. He enquired as to the source of the iron, but received no answer, perhaps because the Inuit wished to safeguard their supply. It was not until 1894 that Robert Peary discovered the source, in the form of a nickel-iron meteorite.

Named the Cape York meteorite as it was found on an island just off this cape, this is one of the largest meteorites to have hit the earth. It is believed to have fallen around 10,000 years ago, well before any human settlement of Greenland. The meteorite broke up as it fell, resulting in a scatter of large rocks as well as smaller pieces. The biggest fragment was called by the Inuit
Ahnighito
– ‘the tent' – and is around 11 feet long, with a weight of 31 tons. Other fragments, called by names such as ‘the woman' and ‘the dog', would on their own be large meteorites. Their composition is nickel-iron, and they have been a source of metal for the Thule Inuit since the Viking Age. The primary technique used was to break off fragments of the meteorite – aided by its pitted and irregular shape – and hammer these into a tool. The task was aided somewhat by heating the metal fragment by putting it in a flame from a whale-blubber or seal-oil lamp, though little heat could have been achieved compared with that of a forge. The technique is fundamentally
cold-hammering. The resulting tools lack the hardness and durability of commercially produced iron, but they were better than anything else then available to the Inuit.

The jump from Stone Age culture to one which made use of found metal to produce iron tools was assisted by cultural interaction. The Inuit saw the Vikings using iron tools, acquired these tools, and came to value them. They learned to scavenge for scrap metal in abandoned Viking settlements, and to hammer metal they found into tools they could use. The technique was then extended to using the naturally occurring scrap metal of the Cape York meteorite. The tools which John Ross saw the Inuit using were evidence of cultural interaction with the Vikings enabling a new technology to develop.

Sadly the Inuit lost their meteorite. Robert Peary managed to transport most of the pieces to ships through the expedient of constructing a short length of railway, the only one ever built in Greenland.
⁶
He sold the meteorite for $40,000 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where the Cape York meteorite can be seen today. Imported iron tools, available to the Inuit from the time of Peary's visits, were indeed superior in quality to those made from the meteorite, though available only at a cost, and it is hard to see that the Inuit did other than lose by its removal. There must have been a cultural impact too, as the meteorite had an accretion of stories around it.

BETWEEN the end of the Greenland colony in the early fifteenth century, and with it the breakdown of the North Atlantic stepping-stone route, and Columbus's ‘discovery' of the New World in 1492 is around two generations of apparent interruption of European awareness of North America.

History has repeated the myth of the Columban discovery of North America, and helped to diminish awareness of the many contacts across the North Atlantic prior to 1492. Yet in the years before Columbus, Europe did not forget the existence of the New World.

For the people of Iceland, knowledge of Vinland was never lost. The sagas continued to be read. A survival from the sixteenth century is an Icelandic map which clearly shows Vinland. The well-verified Skalholt Map, named after the place where it was drawn, is dated
c.
1590 and shows, in the manner of a sketch map, the North Atlantic. It is, of course, a century after the Columban voyages, yet on the American continent are four Viking names: Helluland, Markland, Skraeling Land and the Promontory of Vinland. In contrast to the Vinland Map, this map is universally acknowledged to be genuine. Although a century after Columbus and at a time when reasonably accurate maps of the east coast of North America were being produced, this map takes no notice of these maps whatsoever. Rather it is a map which draws entirely on Icelandic sources, and presents America within an Icelandic tradition. Between the first Vinland voyages around
AD
1000 and this map of around 1590 stretch some 600 years of continuous knowledge of Vinland. On the basis of Icelandic sources, the Skalholt cartographer knew the continent was there.

Recently scholars in Iceland have begun to assert that Columbus actually visited Iceland some years before 1492, and that he over-wintered in
Olafsvik on the Snaefelsness peninsula, as set out in parish registers from Olafsvik.
¹
Olafsvik is the closest harbour to Greenland, and the point of departure for many Icelandic boats voyaging to Greenland. Eirik the Red's first voyage to Greenland departed from nearby Breithafjordur, and the manuscript of
The Vinland Sagas
was preserved on Flatey, an island in the vicinity. Behind Olafsvik is the glacier-covered peak of Snaefell. In certain weather conditions it is possible to glimpse the ice of Greenland from this mountain; a ship which sails west from Olafsvik can, in conditions of good visibility, see Greenland before Iceland is lost to view. If the Columbus who visited Olafsvik is accepted as the same man who made the 1492 voyage, then a clear link between the Viking mariners and Columbus has been established.

Iceland's knowledge of Vinland was never really lost. As the centuries passed Iceland became more and more remote. While the Danish and Norwegian languages developed, Icelandic remained exceptionally conservative, thereby becoming progressively less and less comprehensible to the outsider. With over-population came poverty, and a great waning of scholarship in Iceland. Before the Second World War, Iceland was almost unknown to the outsider, while in the decades following independence it was geographically isolated. Even today Iceland boasts a well-stocked Mediaeval Studies library at Reykholt which is without a proper catalogue and virtually without scholars, though it is readily open to academics who wish to work there. Icelandic sources have simply been overlooked. That Columbus visited Iceland before 1492 and stayed in the very fishing village from which boats to Greenland and America set out seems to be established by Icelandic records – yet this information has not generally found its way into popular accounts of Columbus.

Denmark's memory of the New World is tied up with the market for narwhal horn in Europe. Even today narwhal horn has a surprisingly high value. In 1994 the London auction house Christies sold an old narwhal horn for just under half a million pounds – the seller had acquired it among a job lot of old walking sticks he had purchased from Hereford Cathedral. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century unicorn horn prices were astronomic. There is a 1553 valuation of one belonging to the king of France at £20,000; in today's money the equivalent is many millions. Queen Elizabeth I of England was presented with one by Martin Frobisher; around
1580 it was valued at £100,000. Recorded prices include £24 an ounce (in 1609) and 128 florins an ounce (in 1612) – roughly comparable prices. The cost of narwhal horn per ounce was about 20 times that of gold, far higher than the prices ever attained for elephant ivory. Thomas Decker, writing in 1609, makes the expansive comment that a unicorn horn was worth ‘half a city'.

The value of unicorn horn was a function both of its scarcity and the high demand for it. The word used to describe its properties was
alexipharmic
, a word in the dictionary but perhaps not in most people's vocabularies. Alexipharmic means that it acts as an antidote to poison in food and water, and as a cure-all for maladies, particularly stomach complaints. Its use was predominantly medicinal, and for this purpose it was powdered and ingested. That so few unicorn horns have survived from the Middle Ages is simply because the nobility ate them! There is a similarity with the Chinese practice of ingesting powdered jade because it was believed to give long or even everlasting life, and jade, like unicorn horn, was accorded value because of these perceived medical benefits. An important difference is that jade is a poison; ‘unicorn' horn (at least in small quantities) is harmless.

Unicorn horn was a major source of wealth for Denmark throughout the High Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Symbolically this was recognised by the throne of the kings of Denmark, which was constructed of unicorn horn and gold. In practical terms the Danes safeguarded their wealth by restricting the supply, assisted by their
de jure
monopoly of trade with Greenland. Their supply continued even after the end of the Greenland colony, indicating continuing voyages from Denmark to Baffin Bay. It is curious to speculate how much the kings of Denmark and their advisors might have known about the true origin of the horn they were selling as unicorn horn.

In narwhal horn the Greenland settlements had access to a commodity that was of phenomenal value. The restrictions placed on trade by the Danish monopoly were undoubtedly onerous, but the value of the commodity was such that wealth must have flowed back to Greenland. That Greenland broke the monopoly by trading with other countries was inevitable when the Danish price was not the market price, and it would seem that at least some trade with Scotland did take place.

What emerges is a motivation in Denmark for keeping quiet about Greenland. The trade was of immense value, a very major source of Denmark's wealth, and was therefore worth the effort to protect it. The trade
routes to Greenland were not made public, nor was information about the lands beyond Greenland, either north and east into the Canadian Arctic or south to Vinland. Greenland, Canada and America were trade secrets – and even Iceland, as a key stepping stone of the North Atlantic. This mercantile motive for secrecy backed by the power of king and court goes a long way to explain why there is so little written about Greenland and the lands to the west in the High Middle Ages.

The Vikings of Greenland had every incentive to circumvent the Danish monopoly on their trade. If the price the Danish offered through their monopoly was not high enough it was inevitable that merchants would look elsewhere, and as there was no effective policing of the North Atlantic, the monopoly could be breached. The easiest alternative destination was Scotland, and there is evidence that a trade took place.

Unicorn horn is the most obvious item for trade from Greenland. By weight it is by far its most valuable export. It is presumably significant that around the time when trade with Greenland would have occurred the unicorn makes its appearance as a symbol for Scotland. The unicorn is not frequently encountered as a heraldic beast, and does not seem to exist at all in the earliest heraldry of Europe. Its first appearance in Scotland is at the end of the fourteenth century, when it is used as the official seal of Robert III (
r
. 1390–1406). It is during the reign of his son, James I (
r
. 1406–37) that the unicorn is first used as a supporter to the royal arms of Scotland, replacing the dragon. Subsequently the unicorn becomes a symbol of Scotland, for example as the decoration on the unicorn and demi-unicorn gold coins, valued at eighteen and nine shillings respectively. When James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England in 1603 he created arms for his new United Kingdom which symbolised England by a lion and Scotland by a unicorn. Heraldry tells us that from at least the reign of King Robert III, unicorns mattered in Scotland.