Vikings in America (28 page)

England became fixated on the idea of a Northwest Passage. John Cabot's son Sebastian grew up in Bristol, and in 1508 was commissioned by Henry VII to undertake a voyage in the wake of his father. Sebastian Cabot explored to the north of Labrador, and is now usually credited with discovering Hudson Strait. While the voyage was a success as an exploration, it brought no tangible benefits, and English interest waned. Indeed, it is only at the end of the century that funding was again made available for voyages to America, sponsored by Queen Elizabeth I. The drive was again to the north, putting into action the British claims made by John Dee. This phase commenced with Martin Frobisher's voyages to Baffin Island (1576–78), and the three successful voyages of John Davis (1585, 1586 and 1587) charting the Davis Strait. Under the Stuarts, exploration continued: Hudson (1610), Button (1612), Bylot and Baffin (1612, 1613 and 1616), Foxe (1631) and James (1631–32), all motivated by an absolute conviction that a Northwest Passage existed, though there was no overt evidence to back up this belief. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw expeditions almost without number setting off from England in search of
the Passage. Today we know it does exist, although as a maze of ice-choked channels which can be navigated only in late summer and which have never offered a commercial trade route.

Recent scholarship has given scant consideration to this remarkable English belief in the existence of a Northwest Passage. By the early sixteenth century, exploration of the New World had discovered a coast running for thousands of miles, a whole continent standing between Europe and Asia. What little knowledge was available, supplemented with guesses, suggested that Greenland arched across the whole of the North Atlantic and joined Russia, and that Greenland was itself joined to the New World. An alternative view, not consistent with the first, was the belief in a northern ocean of open water, through which it would logically be possible to sail to get to Asia. Depending on which view was held, either there was no Northwest Passage to Asia, or Asia was to be reached through a broad northern ocean. Neither concept can be equated with the idea of a Northwest Passage. Yet for 400 years first England and then the United Kingdom sent out numerous expeditions to explore and penetrate this supposed Northwest Passage. There was absolute conviction that such a passage existed, and that it would provide a short-cut to Asia.

The mediaeval world had a concept of the very map of the world reflecting the order of God's creation. Jerusalem takes its place in the centre; the land mass of the world forms a great circle, with Asia comprising half the circle and Europe and Africa each a quarter of the circle. The whole is surrounded by the ocean. In seeking an explanation for the English insistence on the existence of a Northwest Passage it may be that an extrapolation of this concept of cosmic order was extended to the New World. With the discovery of a passage through the south of America – the Strait of Magellan – there was an assumption based on cosmic order that there must be a matching strait to the north of America, the Northwest Passage. Yet this sort of reasoning does not stand up to scrutiny. While the mediaeval world certainly drew maps of the world as a Jerusalem-centred circle, they were aware that the world was a sphere and that this was not literally how the world looked. Their maps were not intended to be an accurate representation, but rather a way of conceptualising their understanding of the universe. The English belief in a Northwest Passage cannot be seen as a relic of mediaeval thought, as mediaeval thought does not need to imagine a passage to the north of America. Nor is the idea tenable of a mirrored creation, in which a strait in the south has a comparable strait in the north. Magellan discovered the
strait that bears his name in 1520; the first English voyage looking for a Northwest Passage took place in 1508.

Why the English should have been so certain of the existence of a Northwest Passage is therefore a puzzle. Certainly it would have been convenient, but an open ocean would have been even more convenient. An explanation is that they knew it existed, and knew because England had information about Viking voyages. Some support for this idea can be found in the later Frobisher voyage of 1576, and the sailing directions with which Frobisher was furnished.

Were even the Pilgrim Fathers travelling in the footsteps of the Vikings?

The story as told is that of a first settlement in America by 102 Puritans, many of whom had endured persecution in their English home village of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire.
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They fled first to Holland, where they lived for 11 years – without managing to learn Dutch – and, dissatisfied with the religion there, they sought a solution, and found it in the form of a grant from the Virginia Company giving them permission to settle on the Hudson River, in the vicinity of today's New York City. For transport they hired the
Mayflower
, and after their last English landfall of Plymouth set out across the Atlantic. After a rough and very slow Atlantic crossing of over two months, they landed many miles from their intended destination at a place on the coast of America they called Plymouth, New England.

The Pilgrim Fathers were the most unlikely colonists. Their occupations were those of the city dwellers they had become in the Netherlands: tailors, merchants, a printer, a shop-keeper, a hatter and so on. They had not brought livestock with them, had little seed for crops, and few materials for building their settlement. The
Mayflower
remained berthed in the bay over the winter, with little interaction between the crew aboard and the Pilgrims on land. The crew had rations and were prepared for the winter, and seem to have had few problems. When spring came the
Mayflower
and her crew left for England. Of the 102 Pilgrims on land, 48 had died in that first winter, most of them of consumption. Just 54 remained, half of them children.

The survival of these remaining Pilgrims is explained by the help they were then given by the local Native American tribe. The story relates that they first met a Native American called Samoset, who explained that he was himself a stranger in the region, but that he had a friend called Tisquantum
who was a native there, belonging to the Wampanoag tribe. The Native Americans helped the Pilgrims plant corn and find food. And, of course, at the end of the year Native Americans and Pilgrims sat down together to the first Thanksgiving meal.

This story has received an unthinking and uncritical reception. First of all, most Native American peoples were hunter-gatherers who did not practice agriculture. It is strange indeed for supposed non-farmers to be showing the Pilgrim Fathers, who came from an agricultural village, how to farm. Then the Wampanoag tribe spoke the Algonquin language. This is as different as a language can be from English or any European languages that the Pilgrim Fathers might have known. Can we really believe in a speaking knowledge of this language from a group of poorly educated English who had largely failed to learn Dutch despite 11 years' residence in Holland? People who had never before encountered the Wampanoag tribe or the linguistic complexity of any agglutinative language? Indeed, even after years of friendship the Pilgrims were still struggling with the name Tisquantum, calling him instead Squanto.

The puzzle is solved by the account which the Pilgrim Fathers themselves have left us: both Samoset and Tisquantum spoke English. Furthermore they note that Tisquantum's English was fluent, Samoset's less good, and that Tisquantum spoke Spanish also. Both the Pilgrim Fathers and the Native Americans they encountered knew that there had been significant prior contact between Europe, particularly England, and New England. The Pilgrim Fathers are particularly remembered because they are the group that formally sought permission to set up a colony – from the Virginia Company – and therefore made a voyage that had a paper trail. Many Europeans had been to North America before them, and many had settled there.

In the Pilgrim Fathers we have a settlement building on the legacy of earlier European encounters with America, and supported by the remarkable resource of two Native American tribesmen who both spoke English and knew how to farm. The Pilgrim Fathers are part of a long tradition of European exploration of the continent, a tradition which ultimately goes back to the Vikings.

DOES it matter that the Vikings were in America? Does it really make any difference whether the European discoverer of America was a Hispanic Christopher Columbus or a Norse Leif Eiriksson? Whether Europeans have known about America for 1,000 years or for just half that time surely makes no difference to Europe or America in the twenty-first century.

But rather, yes, it does matter. The Vikings have left an enduring legacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Without the Vikings' discovery and settlement of North America the world would be a different place. It is important, too, to understand the centuries-long European amnesia on the topic, and the failure even today for the story to be given the attention it deserves. These are things which are relevant today.

There are several ways in which the Vikings in America have stamped their mark on the world.

A particularly enduring legacy would seem to be in the genetic make-up of indigenous peoples of North America. The idea is simple – if the Vikings were in America for a significant length of time there would have been intermarriage between Vikings and Native Americans, and we should be able to find Viking genes in Native American indigenous populations. There should be Viking blood in the New World.

The prospect is both exciting and tantalising. There is enormous media and public interest in DNA projects, yet results are often elusive. When looking at the ‘Blond Eskimo' of the Victoria Island the evidence is actually from early twentieth-century anthropological observations rather than from a recent DNA study. The early twentieth-century ethnographers found a characteristic deserving comment; the early twenty-first century work has failed to support the ethnographers, but hasn't disproved them either.

Today much work on human ethnicity is linked in one way or another with the Human Genome Project, a mass of fundamental research whose impact is just beginning to be felt. It may be hoped that in time, studies developing from this project will demonstrate the place of the Vikings in America. Its achievement has been to sequence the three-billion human DNA sub-units. This is a tremendously exciting project, but one which has being conducted for reasons other than to assist in the study of history, archaeology and human migration, with the result that there are real issues in trying to apply its insights in these disciplines. Nevertheless, its impact is to transform these disciplines, and in the future an assessment of the extent of the Viking impact on America will come from studies related to the Human Genome Project.

When looking at the genetic profile of Native American indigenous populations it is possible to identify genetic signatures characteristic of each group, and it is also possible to see represented in an indigenous population genes from other ethnic groups. What it is not possible to do from a study based on people alive today is to determine whether a European or Norse genetic signature comes from the post-Columban settlements, or from an earlier Viking settlement. In order to examine the issue of Viking genes in pre-Columban populations we would need to examine pre-Columban human tissue – and in this there are problems. First of all, there is little human tissue suitable for analysis which has survived from over 500 years ago. Then there are religious and ethical reservations in carrying out such tests on human remains, an issue often particularly sensitive within the context of Native American beliefs.

However, one area of research has opened up, and has yielded unexpected results. This is the case of the Narragansett Indians.
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Genetics can help this study in understanding ethnic variation in human resistance to disease. Tuberculosis – TB – is a case in point. TB is very common indeed in human populations today, with around one person in three worldwide carrying the infection, though most display no symptoms, and are not at risk themselves of developing the disease. Because TB is present in human populations everywhere it is crucial that all individuals gain resistance to it, and this usually happens through mild exposure while in good health. Resistance can be broken down through malnutrition, frequent contact with the bacteria through overcrowding, and through close contact with sufferers. Tuberculosis is therefore associated with poverty, and with the overcrowding of urban slums. In the late nineteenth century the
cities of Europe and North America, with their overcrowding and poverty, were perfect breeding grounds for TB, and in these locations it flourished. From around 1830 there is a marked upturn in the frequency of TB, and while this peaked around 1900 and showed some signs of decline in the early twentieth century, it was not until the introduction of antibiotic treatments in the 1950s that TB showed a substantial decline. Today in the developed world, a combination of effective antibiotic treatment and the impact of immunisation programmes have greatly reduced the frequency of TB. In the developing world, by contrast, it remains a major cause of death.

The reduction of the number of instances of TB in the developed world in the half century 1900–50 cannot be explained through medical interventions alone. Improvements in living conditions in cities had an impact too, along with welfare schemes which ameliorated the worst overcrowding, and some public perception of the means of transmission. The crucial factor was the growing genetic resistance to tuberculosis. Even if today the cities of Europe were as poor and overcrowded as a century ago, and without the medical advances, there would still be a reduction in the incidence of TB because of genetic changes within the population reducing susceptibility.