The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Following convention, as he approached the lands marked out for the Eastern Settlement, Eirík threw his high-seat pillars overboard, watching to see where they would be washed ashore; he thus relied on the gods to show him where to settle. The place he chose, Brattahlíð, has been identified and excavated, for it was occupied for hundreds of years; it lay some way back from the water, in a broad plain that led down to a fjord giving access to the sea. The settlements were not real towns, any more than the Icelandic settlements were; they consisted of a scattering of nearly 200 farms in the Eastern Settlement, while the Western Settlement possessed ninety. Some of these farms were occupied by later waves of settlers who had heard good reports of the opportunities this new land offered.10 The Eastern Settlement also contained a cathedral at Gardar, following the Christianization of the Norse settlers, and there were several churches in the other settlement too. The hardy inhabitants of the two settlements would sometimes head north in small six-oared boats, which many of the farmers owned. They might go as far as Disko Island (70°N), in search of walrus, polar bears and narwhal, whose spikes were often believed in Europe to be unicorn’s horns. The famous Lewis chessmen were made out of walrus ivory, though they are thought actually to have been made in Niðaros on the coast of Norway.

  In the mid-fourteenth century this commerce in walrus tusks began to fall away, and one can only wonder whether the exploitation of these resources had reached such a fever pitch that the walrus population had begun to vanish. Another explanation that has been mooted is the increasing ease of access within Europe to elephant ivory, by way of west Africa and the Red Sea, but, at least as far as west Africa is concerned, this was a development of the fifteenth and not the fourteenth century. Walrus hide was valued in northern Europe because it could be twisted into tough rope. Two tiny amulets preserved in the National Museum of Denmark are in the form of a polar bear and a walrus.11 A Greenland falcon made a perfect gift for the falcon-crazy Emperor Frederick II in thirteenth-century southern Italy; twelve Greenland falcons are said to have constituted the ransom paid for the crusading son of the duke of Burgundy when he was captured by the Turks in 1396.12 Greenland did, therefore, play a role in the international trade of the Middle Ages, and was by no means a disconnected territory inhabited by Norse exiles. A thirteenth-century Norwegian writer explained that there were three good reasons to sail to Greenland: curiosity; the search for fame; and the search for wealth – precisely because Greenland was so remote, and was visited less often than other lands, it offered ‘a good profit’. This was not just because it was a source of rare Arctic products; traders could also exploit the shortage of iron and timber, for ‘everything that is needed to improve the land must be purchased abroad’.13

  The great difference between Greenland and Iceland was the fact that part of the western coast of this vast land was already inhabited, not, as in Iceland, by a handful of chaste priests but by Eskimo peoples. The term ‘Eskimo’ has gone out of fashion, because it was a native American word meaning, rather contemptuously, ‘raw-meat eaters’; but it is used here as a blanket description of different people with different cultures: the so-called Dorset people, named after a small island off Baffin Island, and then the more familiar Inuit, who still inhabit Greenland and who have sometimes been called ‘Neo-Eskimos’ instead. The term ‘Inuit’ simply means ‘human beings’, for (not unreasonably) many peoples have no name for themselves other than ‘ourselves’.14 The Dorset Eskimos may have been clinging on to Greenland at the time of the Norse discovery, for the ‘Iceland Book’, the Íslendingabók, relates that Eirík and his companions ‘found many settlements, towards the east and towards the west, and remains of skin boats and stone implements’; and the author assumed that the people who had lived in these places were of the same origin as the troublesome inhabitants Eirík would later encounter in Vínland, some way down the eastern flank of America.15 Archaeological evidence is less secure, and the ‘Iceland Book’ may well have been embroidering the account of Eirík’s discoveries with information gathered much later; still, Dorset Eskimos may have been present in Greenland up to about 1000, though further north than the two areas settled by the Norse migrants. Legends circulating among the next wave of Eskimo settlers, the Inuit, recorded seal-hunting landsmen who had been pushed southwards as the Inuit entered Baffin Island, between Greenland and the Canadian mainland; these predecessors of the Inuit would have crossed over to Greenland in kayaks, but they were not really a maritime people, and they were defeated by conditions in Greenland: they lived in lightly constructed houses warmed by open hearths, and fuel was hard to find in a land so poor in timber as Greenland.16

  The Inuit, on the other hand, learned to work the waterways of the Arctic in increasingly well-constructed kayaks, and made their way from Siberia and Alaska along the far northern coasts and islands of Canada into north-western Greenland, which they entered by about 1000, that is, at the same time as the Norse settlements took hold. By about 1200 these Inugsuk Inuits (to give them their exact name) had made themselves known to the Norse Greenlanders. Contrary to the popular image of Eskimos living in igloos built out of ice-blocks, the Inuit lived in slightly sunken houses entered through narrow passageways, and made out of piled-up stones, stone flakes, turf and whalebone; like the Norse, they hunted walruses and seals, and they were very active whalers who were armed with heavy but handsomely crafted harpoons and who could even capture massive baleen whales. Objects of Norse origin found on Inuit sites in Greenland – a piece of tusk with symmetrical decoration, a fragment of a bronze spoon and of a bronze pot, and so on – indicate that trade (or possibly plunder) connected the Norse and Inuit communities. Contact became much more frequent as the Inuit moved slowly southwards, and as Norse explorers searched ever further north; on the other hand, very few Inuit articles have turned up on Norse sites in Greenland.17

  In the larger Eastern Settlement, there was more of an attempt to create a self-sufficient community. As in Iceland, this was not really possible, as there was no hope of sowing large areas with grain, and the mainstay of the Greenland settlers was their flocks. A thirteenth-century Norwegian text, the King’s Mirror, described how the settlers were rich in cheese and butter, and raised cattle for meat, as well as hunting reindeer, whales and seals, which they turned into meat or fat, as well as local fish (notably cod) and Arctic hares. The milky drink known as skýr was a favourite food. Timber was sparse and of poor quality; even the driftwood that came down from Siberia along the ocean currents was not suitable for building ships, though it burned well as fuel. They would have to go in search of wood – which, as will be seen, took them still further west. But they, like the Icelanders, produced heavy woollen cloth that found its way along the trade routes; a warp weight found in Greenland was decorated with a hammer, the symbol of the god Thor, suggesting that the pagan gods still had their attraction among the Norse settlers. So little grain was grown that (if the King’s Mirror is to be believed) most Greenlanders had no idea what bread was.18 The settlers were tough: when Eirík the Red called on his cousin Þorkell the Far-Travelled, Þorkell needed to offer him dinner but realized he had no boat available to travel to the island a mile away across the water where his sheep were pastured. So he swam to the island and killed a ram, which he then heaved on to his back, before swimming the whole way back and serving a meal of roast mutton.19

  The first settlers were pagan, and the circumstances of Greenland’s conversion to Christianity are not clear. According to the Saga of Eirík the Red, the founder remained a convinced heathen, and was disconcerted to find that his family was keen to adopt the new faith. His son Leif the Lucky had spent some time at the court of Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, and the king urged him to go back to Greenland and to spread Christianity there; Leif was no doubt thinking of his father when he objected that this would be a difficult task, but the king was persistent, and on his arrival (having first been blown to North America) he immediately converted his mother, whereupon she refuse
d to live with Eirík, and ‘this annoyed him greatly’. The annoyance was magnified when his family built a small church, only six metres long by three metres broad, that has been excavated at Brattahlíð.20 It is probably an exaggeration to suppose that King Olaf added Greenland to the list of countries he converted, and the story of his involvement was intended to boost still further the reputation he developed by the thirteenth century of being the father of Norse Christianity. No more than he succeeded in imposing the new religion on the more remote corners of Norway did he succeed in stamping out paganism in Iceland and Greenland; but gradually the population was won over, and the effects can still be seen in the remains of the cathedral at Gardar and in the intermittent line of succession of bishops of Greenland, sent out to the Eastern Settlement from the early twelfth century onwards. The church at Brattahlíð was built, for lack of good timber, out of chunks of turf set around a sparse wooden frame in the same way as the farmhouses of both Greenland and Iceland.21 For a long time, Greenland was not a dependency of Iceland; its system of government was closely modelled on that of Iceland, with a Þing that brought together the leading inhabitants and that passed laws under the direction of its Law-Speaker. This territory had the same ambiguous relationship with Norway as did Iceland, and by 1261 it, like Iceland, had accepted the authority of the king of Norway, not that he was able to do much to control its affairs.

  A charming tale from medieval Iceland recounts the career of an Icelander named Auðun, who travelled all the way from Norway to Greenland, where he bought a bear, ‘an absolute treasure’, with all the money he possessed. He decided to return to Norway and then to travel south, with the aim of presenting his bear to Svein, king of Denmark. But when he reached Norway the Norwegian king, Harald, a rival of the Danish one, heard that Auðun had arrived and summoned him to his court. The king courteously asked Auðun, ‘You have a bear, an absolute treasure?’ Auðun gave as non-committal an answer as he could, because he could guess what was coming next: ‘Are you willing to sell him to us for the same price you gave for him?’ Auðun politely but firmly refused. So the king asked what he did propose to do with the bear, and when he heard that Auðun wished to present it to the king of Denmark he expostulated: ‘Is it possible that you are such a silly man that you have not heard how a state of war exists between our two countries?’ Still, King Harald was polite enough to let him go on his way, so long as he promised to tell Harald on his return about the reward King Svein would give him. As he travelled south, Auðun realized that he had no money left and no way to feed either himself or his bear. He persuaded the steward of the Danish king to sell him some food, but the price was half-ownership of the patient bear. After all, the steward pointed out, if the deal was not struck the bear would die of starvation, and what profit would that bring to Auðun? ‘When he looked at it that way, it seemed to him that what the steward said went pretty close to the mark, so that was what they settled on.’

  Auðun entered the royal presence with the steward, and explained why he had come, and that there was now a new problem: he could not present the bear to the king, because he only owned half of it. The king scolded the steward for his lack of generosity to a traveller who had come to court with such a fine gift, when even Svein’s enemy King Harald had let him go on his way in peace. The steward was exiled forthwith, while Auðun was invited to stay at court as long as he wished. After a while, Auðun’s love of travelling reasserted itself, and he decided to go to Rome with a group of pilgrims; the king offered him every support. But by the time he returned to Denmark he was once again destitute, and he skulked around outside the feasting hall, not daring to show himself in his rags. Eventually the king realized that there was someone who was hanging back, and worked out who he was. Yet again Auðun was invited to stay for the rest of his days. Once again Auðun’s wish to be on the move triumphed: ‘God reward you, sire, for all the honour you would do me, but what I really have in mind is to return to Iceland.’ He was worried that his mother was living in poverty on the island while he might be carousing at court.

  One day, towards the end of spring, King Svein walked down to the jetties, where ships were being overhauled in readiness for voyages to many lands, to the Baltic and Germany, Sweden and Norway. He and Auðun came to a very fine ship which men were making ready, and, ‘What do you think of this for a ship, Auðun?’ asked the king. ‘Very fine, sire,’ was his answer. ‘I am going to give you this ship,’ said the king, ‘in return for the bear.’

  But the Danish king was worried that the ship might be wrecked on the dangerous shores of Iceland, so he gave him a purse full of silver and a gold arm-ring that he himself was wearing, charging him only to give it to someone to whom he found himself under a very special obligation.

  First Auðun sailed to the court of King Harald, and received a hearty welcome. He told the king how his rival had willingly accepted the bear and had given such handsome gifts in return. Auðun said: ‘You had the opportunity to deprive me of both of these things, my bear and my life too; yet you let me go in peace where others might not’, and saying this he presented the Danish king’s arm-ring to King Harald, and then set off for Iceland, where ‘he was thought to be a man of the happiest good fortune’.22 Alas, the tale does not relate what happened to the bear. However, the story of Auðun does not simply present evidence for the capture of Greenland polar bears, which were carried all the way to Scandinavia; it also conjures up a trading world that linked Greenland to Norway, sometimes by way of Iceland and sometimes directly. The story of the gift of a polar bear to a great prince is corroborated by evidence that both the eleventh-century German emperor Henry III and King Sigurð of Norway, known as ‘the Jerusalem Traveller’, who went on crusade to the Holy Land early in the twelfth century, received just such a gift. The idea behind the gift to this Norwegian king was that he would support the creation of a Greenland bishopric.23

  II

  Contact between Greenland and Europe began to diminish in the fourteenth century. Even so, contact was maintained to a greater degree than used to be supposed, proving that over a period of more than 400 years Greenland was linked to Europe by regular trade; by the late Middle Ages only one knǫrr a year was reaching Greenland, and maybe not even that, for no ships are known to have reached Greenland between 1346 and 1355, which was just as well, since Greenland was out of touch with Norway just at the time when Europe was being ravaged by the Black Death. By the fourteenth century, only ships granted a royal licence were permitted to trade towards Greenland. If anything, though, this proves that the king of Norway saw real value in the Greenland trade, and was keen to hog a large share of the proceeds. The arrival of ships from Greenland tended to be noted down in Norwegian annals, as was the case in 1383 when a ship loaded with Arctic goodies reached Bergen directly from Greenland (the ship itself was owned by an Icelander); it brought news that the bishop of Greenland had died a few years earlier, which suggests contact was intermittent. It turned out that the captain had never obtained a royal licence to trade in Greenland; but the crew insisted that the ship had been blown accidentally towards Greenland, and that no one had really intended to go there. The tax authorities preferred to believe what was probably a tall story – the cargo was too interesting for the Norwegians to complain. This sort of thing happened several times, and was conveniently overlooked; another Icelander turned up in Greenland in 1389 with four ships full of Norwegian cargo, and the Icelandic merchant breezily claimed that the Greenlanders, led by the king’s agent in Greenland, had absolutely insisted that he unload his cargo and take on board Arctic goods.24

  Still, the very insistence of the Greenlanders on their need for European goods shows that contact was less intense than it had been. The last bishop of Greenland officiated there from 1365 to 1378. There are several possible reasons for the decrease in contact: the end of the Middle Ages may have seen a cooling of temperatures, with the result that pack ice appeared ever further south, so that the voyage to Greenland bec
ame increasingly perilous; the Greenlanders themselves were more and more reluctant to pay the papal tax known as Peter’s Pence (paid in vaðmal cloth or walrus products); the king of Norway faced a cash crisis and became heavily dependent on the merchants of the German Hansa, who had not been involved in the past with the ambitious route across the north Atlantic; the Black Death reached Iceland in 1402 – much later than in Scandinavia – and sailings to Greenland were at least for a time suspended.25 The warm period stretching from about 800 to about 1200 was at an end. Drift ice certainly was an increasing problem: around 1342 the Norwegian priest Ívar Bárdarson, who had been sent to Greenland to look after the lands of the bishop of Garðar, described the sea route from Iceland to Greenland. He took as his point of reference the skerries Gunnbjorn had discovered when he accidentally came across Greenland centuries earlier. The priest knew of an old set of sailing instructions, for he went on to say: ‘This was the old course, but now ice has come down from the north-west out of the gulf of the sea so near to the aforesaid skerries, that no one without extreme peril can sail the old course, and be heard of again.’26