The Pirate Queen (32 page)

She had me shuffle and cut the cards. “No one shuffles cards like an American,” she'd laughed. “It's like you're playing poker on a riverboat.”

The Viking cards had brightly colored drawings, a northern tarot of Thor and Odin, ravens and dragons and Norns. I'd said I had only one question to ask the cards—not should I change my name, for I knew I had to, but what did it mean to do so? Soon I was talking about my father, the orphan, and how Wilson had been his name for us, for the three of us who had survived my mother's death.

A bowl had turned up in my reading; it signified abundance and my difficulty accepting it, and then the Sweat Lodge, swirling with mist and steam. “All you need to do is to open the door and clear your head,” Gudrún had said, smiling. “Easier said than done, yes? But that's how you get out of the mist.” She'd watched me turn over another card, this one the Shield. “That's good. A shield is something you can hold in front of you. It will protect you when people ask you why you're changing your name.”

“You have your shield, and here, yes! When you come out of the sweat lodge, the ship will be waiting for you,” she'd said as I'd turned over the card with a Viking ship on it. “The Ship card indicates the exploration of new worlds. A new name might be just what you need to make the journey.”

“They say that when we reach seven times seven years
we're ready for our life's purpose,” Gudrún had added as she'd collected and stacked the cards after the reading. Gulli had come tiptoeing noisily back from the sauna, sweating, red and merry, but at a look from Gudrún, he'd vanished into their bedroom. “You're forty-nine. You can have a new name. You don't have to ask permission. But you have to be willing to get onboard. When the Vikings went out in their ships, they had no idea what was ahead of them. You have to be willing to leave the harbor. Like the women you're writing about.”

Now, down by the water, I considered the rowboat thumping gently against the pier. If it had been a kayak, perhaps I would have been tempted. Helga hadn't even used a ship; she'd gone by iceberg, by chance of course; yet all the same, she'd arrived.

“Ocean, ocean, ocean,” I said, and then louder—much louder: “Wind, wind, wind.”

CHAPTER XIV

LEIF'S UNLUCKY SISTER

Reykjavík and Glaumbær, Iceland

J
ULY
17, 1006:
A tall woman, red-haired, stands at the bow of her ship, looking back at the vivid green banks on either side of Eiríksfjord. The barren gray mountains of Greenland seem so close in the bright summer air; the icebergs, in fantastic shapes and sizes, sail serenely in the turquoise water. The ship is jammed with livestock and everything they'll need to sustain themselves for the journey and to recreate their lives on the other side of the ice-strewn deep waters, far south of here. Vínland, her brother Leif has called it. Axes and stone lamps, wooden barrels of dried mutton and porridge oats, casks of water, even a loom
—
all make it hard to move around the ship. The woman wears a long woolen shift, with an apron front and back, attached by shoulder straps with oval brooches high on her chest. From a chain strung between the brooches hang scissors, knife, needle case, and keys. The farms she has known since childhood are receding in the distance; the icebergs grow larger, the wind stronger. The sail fills. They are away.

A
THOUSAND
years ago Freydís Eiríksdóttir set off from Greenland on a summer's day, with her husband Thorvard and crew, in a wooden clinker-built ship with a single square woolen sail she'd most likely helped to weave. Following the route Leif Eiríksson had pioneered, they sailed north from their home in
Eiríksfjord, in the southerly Eastern Settlement, up the coast of Greenland, and crossed over to Baffin Island, where the Davis Strait was narrowest. Keeping land in sight, they worked their way down the coast of Labrador to the northern tip of Newfoundland. There, at the site the sagas call Straumfjord, now known as L'Anse aux Meadows, Freydís, Thorvard, and the others moved into the turf houses that Leif had constructed and left for members of his family and other Norse settlers to use as they further explored the region he called Vínland.

Freydís Eiríksdóttir was an adventurer at sea and a leader on land. Like Grace O'Malley, she came from a clan of skilled and courageous seafarers who ranged across the northern seas. Her father, Eirík the Red, had colonized Greenland with his followers; her three brothers explored the coasts of Greenland and Atlantic Canada. One of them, Leif Eiríksson, is the first known European to have landed on the North American continent; he predated Columbus by five centuries. Freydís is one of the most vigorous women in the Icelandic sagas, but her name isn't always mentioned in connection with the famous Vínland voyages described in
The Saga of Eirík the Red
and
The Greenlanders' Saga.
When her name does come up, it's often with a nervous laugh or a shudder. For if history is written by the victors, it's also written by those who can write. By the time the tales of the Norse, who made those perilous voyages across Davis Strait, were carefully inscribed on vellum in the thirteenth century by Christian scholars in Iceland, Freydís Eiríksdóttir's accomplishments were ignored in favor of the terrible deed she'd allegedly instigated while in Vínland.

Unfortunately, all we know about Freydís comes from these two sagas. In
The Saga of Eirík the Red,
she's described, depending on the translation, as “arrogant,” or “very haughty,”
“a virago,” “overbearing,” or “man-like,” with a husband who is “rather feeble,” “not a very imposing person,” or “nobody.” We are told that she “had been married off to him mainly for his money,” and also that she was pagan, like all Greenlanders of this era. Although her brother Leif was celebrated for having converted Greenland to Christianity around the year 1000 A.D., it's likely his reasons were more political than religious; the Greenlanders continued their allegiance to the old Norse gods for some time.

If Freydís was haughty, that pridefulness would doubtless have come from being one of Eirík the Red's children. A hot-tempered Norwegian who'd been banished for murder, Eirík fled to Iceland, where he was soon causing trouble as well. After several murders he was banned by the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He made an exploratory trip to Greenland, and returned to convince others to return with him to a country of lush virgin meadows, and fewer testy relatives demanding revenge. In Greenland Eirík was at the top of the heap, and so were his sons. Things were a little different for Freydís, a girl born out of wedlock. Haughty she may have been, but probably also resentful.

Freydís, like her brothers, no doubt sought to better her social and financial standing in the community. It wasn't easy to become rich—or even comfortable—in Greenland. Unlike the rest of the Norse, who traded and farmed from the Baltic to Normandy and Ireland, the Greenlanders had little arable land (though, in fact, they had more arable land per capita than the Icelanders). The lush virgin meadows were only a narrow strip along the southern coast of Greenland, and would soon be grazed over; there was no timber for ships, and no nearby trading partners. When Bjarni Herjolfsson was blown off course on his way to Greenland from Iceland, he ended up farther west and south, in sight of an unknown shore. Bjarni sailed north until he reached the latitude of Greenland, then east. It was Leif Eiríksson who, fifteen years later, set off to explore what Bjarni had only glimpsed: a land of forests, a sea of abundance.

The voyages of Freydís and Gudríd

The forests of Canada, with rich pastures, rivers, and bays teeming with fish, seals, and whales, must have seemed a magnificent opportunity for Leif and those who came after him. They may originally have thought of colonizing, but unlike many of the places where the Norse had staked a claim—the Faroes, Iceland and southern Greenland—the new country was inhabited. The Norse most likely used their base at Straumfjord in northern Newfoundland as a gateway to further explorations down the coast to Nova Scotia and New England or inland to New Brunswick (all of which have been proposed as possible sites for Vínland).

Freydís's expedition was only one of several to Vínland, and possibly one of the last, though we can't count on the authors of the sagas for strict chronology. According to
The Greenlanders' Saga,
she undertook this journey in conjunction with two brothers from Iceland, Helgi and Finnbogi, who'd arrived in Greenland by ship. Freydís visited them over the winter and asked “if they would join her with their ship on an expedition to Vínland, sharing equally with her all the profits that might be made from it. They agreed to this.”

Freydís and Thorvard had their own vessel and crew, and together the two ships departed. Already Freydís is depicted in the saga as underhanded, taking thirty-five able men, when the agreement had been for each ship to take thirty. Women, who may have been servants, slaves, or concubines (or perhaps all
three), were presumably not part of this equation. The Icelandic brothers made land at Straumfjord first and moved into the houses Leif had left. Upon her arrival Freydís protested this arrangement, arguing that Leif had lent them to her, not the brothers. Haughtiness perhaps, but also a sense of her family's social standing and its bonds.

When Freydís told them to leave, Helgi responded, “We brothers could never be a match for you in wickedness.” In a huff, they abandoned Leif's buildings and constructed new houses farther away. The summer and fall were spent in felling timber, fishing, hunting, and exploring the new land. What the sagas don't tell us about daily life, archaeology can. The original site at L'Anse aux Meadows was discovered in the 1960s by Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian writer, and excavated under the direction of his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad. They found remains of three turf longhouses, and a few objects, among them a needle and a spindle whorl. There was work for the Norse to do, but not as much as in the warmer months, and a winter could be long, especially if there was bad blood.

When winter set in, the brothers suggested that they should start holding games and other entertainments. This was done for a while until trouble broke out and ill-feeling arose between the two parties. The games were abandoned and all visiting between the houses ceased; and this state of affairs continued for most of the winter.

Eventually, as
The Greenlanders' Saga
tells it, Freydís set up a situation in which she was the innocent victim of the two brothers. She went to Finnbogi early one morning and asked if the Icelanders would exchange ships with her, as theirs was
larger and she was eager to go away. “I shall agree to that,” Finnbogi said, “if that will make you happy.”

Rather inexplicably, seeing that Finnbogi had agreed to her demand, Freydís returned home, woke her husband and said that the brothers knocked her around when she offered to buy their ship. She goaded her husband to avenge her honor, threatening to divorce him if he refused. He and the other men then marched over to the Icelanders' camp, broke in, tied the men up, and dragged them out of their turf house. The saga continues:

Freydis had each of them put to death as soon as he came out.

All the men were killed in this way, and soon only the women were left; but no one was willing to kill them.

Freydis said, “Give me an axe.”

This was done, and she herself killed the women, all five of them.

After this monstrous deed they went back to their house, and it was obvious that Freydis thought she had been very clever about it. She said to her companions, “If we ever manage to get back to Greenland I shall have anyone killed who breathes a word about what has just happened. Our story will be that these people stayed on here when we left.”