Vikings in America (26 page)

Trade between Greenland and Scotland is magnificently exemplified by the Lewis Chessmen, now acclaimed as one of the greatest treasures of the United Kingdom.
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The Lewis Chessmen were found in 1831 at Uig, Isle of Lewis, one of Scotland's Western Isles. Following a storm they were discovered by Calum nan Sprot among the debris of a piece of sea-meadow – called machair in the Western Isles – that had fallen onto the beach. He saw
the faces of these tiny figures, thought they were goblins and fled in terror. The Presbyterian minister for Uig, Alexander MacLeod, exorcised the site, retrieved the chessmen, and sold them to the British Museum. Subsequently other chessmen were found, up to a total of around 120. Of these, 81 are now in the British Museum and 11 in the National Museum of Scotland. The hoard consists of 8 kings, 8 queens, 16 bishops, 15 knights, 12 rooks, and 19 pawns, as well as some other gaming pieces. The kings, queens, bishops, knights and rooks are presented as human figures, finely carved.

The carving shows exceptional detail and a sensitivity that makes them truly works of art, such that they are now popularly regarded as one of the very top artistic treasures of Britain. The date for the chessmen has been set as 1150–1200, predominantly on the basis of the clothing styles of the pieces – a date closer to 1150 is usually favoured, though conservative fashions wherever they were made might suggest a later date. There are pieces from at least four chess sets. The plausible assumption is that the chess sets were part of a merchant's stock; why they were concealed is a matter for conjecture.

In the Viking world the ancient game of chess developed in a distinctive form called
taefel
. Dating back to Germanic prehistory, certainly at least as far as the first century
AD
, it was an unusual variant of chess in that the two sides were of unequal numbers. The king and his associates were the smaller group, situated in the centre of the board, while the larger group was the attacking army. The object of the game was for the king to reach safety at the edge of the board, and for the attacking army to prevent him doing so. The Vikings were passionate about
taefel
, with almost everyone playing it, and they considered proficiency in the game to be a required skill of a noble – indeed it was considered that
taefel
embodied the heroic ideal. When Leif Eiriksson over-wintered in Vinland it is a virtual certainty that he and his men whiled away the winter evenings playing
taefel
. The game that we know as chess reached the Viking world around the early twelfth century, where it blended with
taefel
, the same pieces often being used for both games. The Lewis Chessmen are pieces from the game of chess, but heavily influenced by the Viking styles of
taefel
pieces. Thus for example the rooks are depicted as berserkers, the maniacal warriors of the Viking period, biting their own shields.

The Chessmen are almost all made from walrus ivory, with the remainder being carved from whale tooth. The walrus ivory must be from Greenland. The walrus has a distribution which is circumpolar, living predominantly at
the edge of the ice pack and moving north in summer and south in winter as the ice-edge moves. In Europe walrus are found only in Spitsbergen and along the edge of the Arctic Ocean ice. In these areas they were unmolested by man in Viking times as the area was too remote. Populations accessible to hunters are found in Greenland, both north-east and north-west coasts, and in the Arctic archipelago. The walrus ivory of the Lewis Chessmen was either harvested in Greenland or transported via the Greenland colonies. In artistic style the chessmen cannot be precisely attributed to any area; indeed, they are artistically unique. Both Trondheim and Dublin are among the places suggested for their production, though without any real evidence for either. The scenario most writers envisage is that the ivory was exported from Greenland to either Norway or Ireland, carved there, then somehow found its way to a west-facing beach on Lewis – a location that in European terms is on the way to nowhere. A far simpler explanation is that the walrus ivory was taken from a Baffin Bay hunting ground to the Greenland settlements, carved there, then brought to Scotland as a luxury good for trade. Uig on Lewis is more or less the closest Scottish landfall to Greenland, and precisely where a ship from Greenland might reasonably have landed. The simplest explanation for the unique style of the Lewis Chessmen and the location of the find is that they are a product of Viking Greenland. Quite how this thesis might be tested is unclear. Perhaps they should be regarded not just as a treasure of Britain, but also as a treasure of Greenland.

A hint as to the existence of trade between the British Isles and Scotland is provided by early maps. One such is by Petrus Bertius, the
Descriptio Britanniae Magnae
of 1616. This postcard-sized map draws on a long tradition of mapping the British Isles, and like most of these early maps shows the island of Rona. Rona is an island which today has been left off almost all maps of the British Isles. It is a speck of land with an area a little over half a square mile, part of it a cliff-bound hill rising 355 feet, part a plateau of rock at sea level. The whole island is rock-bound, and has no anchorage. It is not on maps because of its extreme remoteness, for at 44 miles NNE of the Isle of Lewis and a little more NNW of Cape Wrath, it is the extreme north-western point of Britain, and is simply off the page for most maps. Of the few that mark it, some call it North Rona to distinguish it from another Rona in the Inner Hebrides. The island is virtually unknown. Although even more remote than St Kilda, evacuated in 1930, or Foula, currently Britian's most remote inhabited island, there has been little recent interest in the island, largely because of its inaccessibility. At least until the 1950s an
annual boat visited from Lewis to harvest seabirds, but with the decline in popularity of the Highland goose and other seabirds on British tables the harvest has ceased. Rona has a Norse name – Ron Ay, or Seal Island – and is believed to have been inhabited continuously from the eighth century until 1885, when its last two inhabitants died on the island.

The surprise is that this scrap of land should play such a prominent part on early maps. A solution is available within the context of the sea routes to Greenland. Sailors leaving the Viking settlements on the west coast of Greenland travelled south along the coast until Cape Farewell, Greenland's southernmost point, was rounded, then due east across the north Atlantic. Cape Farewell is at 59° north, precisely the latitude of Rona. The high hill of Rona makes the island visible from a distance – at least in good weather – in theory even from as much as 50 miles away in the pollution-free atmosphere of the Middle Ages. If Rona was missed a ship might well be in trouble. If the ship passed to the north of Rona it might make a landfall on Orkney, the Fair Isle or Shetland; if it missed to the south the landfall might be Scotland's north coast around Cape Wrath, or the west coast of Lewis – specifically Uig, where the Chessmen were found.

Rona is no place to land a ship; rather it is a direction indicator. A ship from Greenland on the due east heading we know was used and turning due south at Rona drops neatly between Cape Wrath – a key Viking direction headland – and the Butt of Lewis, into the more sheltered waters of the Minch, and can find a harbour there, perhaps at Dunvegan.

The greatest archive of European history is held by the Vatican. Completely separate from the Vatican Library which routinely admits scholars, the collection has the official title of ‘L'Archivio Segreto Vaticano' – The Secret Archives of the Vatican.
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It is an immense collection, the most important single mediaeval and renaissance archive anywhere in the world. There are at least 50 miles of shelving of materials covering all periods of European written history, and for most periods the Vatican's collection is believed to be the largest.

Restrictions on access to archives do exist in most national collections. The motivation is the preservation of the privacy of individuals, maintenance of commercial secrets, and restrictions on the publication of the deliberations of governments. Generally there is a maximum duration of 100 years
on restrictions to access, and frequently the duration of restriction is 30, 50 or 70 years. At the moment there is a global trend to avoid secrecy, and fewer and fewer archives are unavailable. Thus for example in the United Kingdom the Freedom of Information Act grants considerable access rights to individuals and to groups.

The Vatican by contrast restricts access to all records. It is certainly possible to apply for access, and access is even sometimes granted. Yet the process is byzantine. The decision on access is made in theory by the Pope himself, in practice by the Prefect of the Archive, a priest who oversees the archive. The Prefect takes into account criteria which include the academic credentials of the applicant and their reason for visiting the archive. If there is already a scholar who has been granted access who is deemed to be working in a similar area then the application is likely to be refused. If the research is considered inappropriate, or the indication of what the scholar wants to see is not precise enough, then the application will probably be refused. Almost all applicants are refused. Almost all successful applicants are Roman Catholic priests. In 1999 a total of 1,444 scholars gained access to the Archives, the largest number in one year ever. This is comparable to the number of people visiting a small-town archive office in Europe or North America – somewhere with records primarily of local interest only.

As far as I am aware no request for access in order to investigate Vatican records of Vinland and Greenland has ever been approved. In a Kafkaesque move it is not even possible to access the highly imperfect index – for the index is available only to those who have been granted access, and draconian measures are in place to stop copying.

A scholar who actually gains access to the Secret Archives is faced with innumerable practical problems. In the words of Maria Luisa Ambrosini, the leading writer on the Secret Archives, ‘The difficulties of research are so great that sometimes a student, having enthusiastically gone through the complicated procedure of getting permission to work in the Archives, disappears after a few days' work and never shows up again.' In the restrictions presently in place for access to the Vatican Secret Archive we have a system which suggests that the Vatican believes it has something to hide, and a level of secrecy that in the legal systems of European nation states would tend to be illegal.

Without access being granted for scholars it is hard to be sure just what the Vatican did and did not know about America before Columbus. Yet they knew something! Take for example the monument to Pope Innocent VIII,
which was erected first in the old St Peter's Basilica, then moved to the new, with the following inscription added, where it remains today. The inscription reads as follows:

D.O.M.
INNOCENTIO VII CYBO PONT MAX
ITALICAE PACIS PERPETVO CVSTODI
NOVI ORBIS SVO AEVO INVENTI GLORIA
REGI HISPANIARVM CATHOLICI NOMINE IMPOSITO
CRVCIS SACRO SSANCTAE
REPERTO TITVLO
LANCAE QVAE CHRISTI HAVSIT LATVS
A BAIAZETE TVRCARVM IMPER TYRANNOI DONO MISSA
AETERNVM INSIGNI
MONVMENTVM VETERE BASILICA HVC TRANSLATVM
ALBERICVS CYBO MALASPINA
PRINCEPS MASSAE
FERENTILLI DVX MARCHIO CARRARIAE ETC
PRONEPOS
ORNATIVS AVGUSTIVSQ POSVIT ANNO DOM MDCXXI

To God, the Best and Greatest, and to Innocent VIII Cybo, Pope, perpetual guardian of the Italic peace, distinguished for the glory of the New World discovered in his time, for having imposed the name Catholic on the King of Spain, for having recovered the most Holy Cross and the spear that pierced the side of Christ sent as a gift by Bajazet tyrant of the Turks, this eternal monument was moved here from the old basilica by Alberico Cybo Malaspina, prince of Massa, duke of Ferentillo, marquis of Carrara etcetera, his great nephew, who, with great decorum and magnificence, placed it here
AD
1621.

The Holy Cross and the spear that pierced the side of Christ are relics recovered by Innocent VIII, while the title of Catholic Kings was indeed granted by him to the rulers of the newly united Kingdom of Spain. Most curious is the reference to the New World as ‘discovered in his time'. Innocent VIII died nine days before Columbus set out on his first voyage. This monument with its new inscription was set up in the most prestigious spot possible, the
Basilica of St Peters in Rome. A mistake is scarcely possible as an explanation. Even were Innocent VIII to have been alive when Columbus made his voyage it is difficult to see how the popes could have claimed any credit for it – the voyage was funded by the Spanish monarchs. Rather the claim seems implicit that the popes sponsored voyages to discover the new world prior to 1492. Columbus's voyage was not a discovery, but rather a piece of propaganda by which the newly unified Spain could lay claim to the New World.

The key link between Viking exploration and later British exploration is the voyage made by Nicholas of Lynne, who took part in an expedition 1360–64, and made a report of this voyage to the King of England, Edward III. The report should be seen within the context of the expansionist ambitions of Edward III (
r
. 1327–1377), one of the longest reigning English monarchs, whose policy set the direction for England for centuries to come. Edward III saw himself as king not just of England, but also of France, and his assertion of this claim precipitated the Hundred Years War in which England initially consolidated its claim to much of what is now France. His wars against Scotland sought to extend English power to the north. Something of the spirit of English nationalism can be set out in his plans to revive King Arthur's ‘Round Table' – an idea proposed in 1344 but not directly acted upon – and his subsequent creation in 1348 of the Order of the Garter as a chivalrous military order in part inspired by the stories of King Arthur. The report given by Nicholas of Lynne would have been seen as a description of lands over which England could seek to extend its influence and perhaps its rule. It is a foretaste of the colonial age, and the expansionist spirit that would create the British Empire.