The Western Settlement succumbed to a combination of worsening weather and to competition between the Inuit and the Norse for access to hunting grounds; the Inuit had been moving south as the seals they hunted tried to escape the bitterly cold weather of the very far north. When the Norwegian priest Ívar Bárdarson visited the Western Settlement in 1342, he found that it contained only ‘horses, goats, cattle and sheep, all wild, and no people, either Christian or heathen’, though he had heard rumours that the Skrælings, that is, the Inuit, had been harassing the inhabitants of the settlement.27 Its rationale had always been the supply of walrus ivory and other Arctic products to Europe. It has long been assumed that the smaller settlement had therefore ceased to exist by 1342. Rather different, though, is the evidence from archaeology. The ‘Farm beneath the Sand’, excavated after its discovery by Inuit in 1990, survived all the way from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. No evidence was found of furniture, suggesting that the last human inhabitants had taken most of their possessions away when they left. However, animals continued to roam the farmhouse, for an unburied goat was found beside an inside wall, having starved or frozen to death when its owners left it behind.28
Although a papal letter from 1492 proclaims that ships had ceased to travel to Greenland since the early fifteenth century, archaeological evidence suggests otherwise: fragments of fifteenth-century Rhenish pottery have been found in the walls of a Greenland church. The Eastern Settlement, or at least some of the homesteads, kept up contact with the outside world well into the fifteenth century, as the remarkable costumes excavated in graves from a farm at Herjólfsnes prove: late fifteenth-century Burgundian fashion is reflected in a headdress, and more generally the cut of the clothes accords with fifteenth-century European styles. The harbour at Herjólfsnes was the first port of call that ships were likely to encounter as they approached the Eastern Settlement, for it lay, unusually, directly on the sea coast, and further south than the other homesteads.29 A small silver shield from the early fourteenth century carries the coat of arms of Clan Campbell, suggesting some sort of connection between Greenland and the British Isles. The obvious conclusion is that, even when Norwegian shipping failed to set out for Greenland, and even when contact with Iceland was lost for years at a time, there were other visitors to Greenland, most probably English and Basque sailors who by the end of the Middle Ages were exploring the superbly stocked fishing grounds of the northern Atlantic. By 1420 English ships dominated the approaches to Iceland.30
Still, this was not enough to save the Norse settlements from extinction. A mass grave at Herjólfsnes may be evidence that when, as was almost bound to happen, the Black Death spread from Norway and Iceland to Greenland it wiped out a large number of people. Amid all the explanations that have been offered – the Black Death or other disease, famine and malnutrition, climate change, Inuit attacks, a European preference for elephant ivory, sheer lack of interest in sending supplies from Europe – nothing quite explains the evidence, which has all the character of an Agatha Christie mystery.31 In 1769 a Lutheran minister from the north of Norway named Niels Egede recorded a legend he had heard in Greenland. This told of Inuit who came to trade with the Norse settlers, and of how one day three small boats arrived carrying men who attacked the Norsemen, though they managed to fend them off; meanwhile the Inuit fled in terror. Then a year later a fleet came over the sea; the raiders massacred the Norse inhabitants and carried off their cattle. After another raid the following year the Inuit returned to the coast and saw that the settlement had been ravaged; the Inuit found some Norse women and children and took them away; the women married into the Inuit community, and harmony prevailed. After a long while an ‘English privateer’ arrived in the same region, but the Inuit were happy to find that all he wanted to do was to trade with them. Since the settlement that is described here lay right on the coast, it is once again assumed that it must have been Herjólfsnes. This is very late testimony from an oral source that could have been embroidered over the centuries, and further embellished by Niels Egede, who must have been influenced by conditions in his own day, when English pirates were known to be roaming the Atlantic.32 Even so, the idea that a third party, neither Inuit nor Norse, had a role in the downfall of the Greenland settlement is an interesting solution to the mystery.
The mystery is compounded by archaeological finds at a farmhouse at the end of one of the fjords that led down to the main part of the Eastern Settlement. This was a sizeable building, with fifteen rooms; in a passageway a skull and human bones were found, leading to the unprovable claim that maybe this was the last Norse Greenlander, who had no one to bury him – the skull has been identified as that of a Norseman. The evidence is made still more mysterious when one takes on board the report of Jon Grønlænder, from Iceland; he had taken passage on a German ship bound for his home in about 1540, but the ship was blown off course towards Greenland. There, deep within a fjord, he saw houses ranged along the beach, as well as huts for drying fish; then he found the body of a man dressed in woollen cloth, a fine hood and sealskin, who seemed to have collapsed and died right there.33 So here is another candidate for the title of last Norse Greenlander, though he could have been a lost visitor from somewhere in Europe, or even an Inuit who had managed to acquire Western clothes. For the Inuit certainly raided Norse farmhouses, which was easily done since the settlers continued to live in scattered homesteads rather than in a town. In 1379, for instance, the Skrælings killed eighteen Norse Greenlanders and enslaved two boys.34
A simple but important question is why the Inuit survived and flourished, while the Norse population disappeared. The Inuit proved much more adaptable than the Norse; they had the whole coastline of western Greenland, and the Arctic islands beyond, as their domain, whereas the traditional economy of the Eastern Settlement was based more on pastoralism within the small area of what was truly green Greenland than on hunting and fishing.35 It was long assumed that the Norse colonies in Greenland died out because the unbalanced diet left the population physically weak, a sign of which was the poor state of several skeletons recovered at Herjólfsnes. This degeneration was supposedly visible in the small size of the skulls of the Greenlanders (457 skeletons having been analysed). Much of this research was based on questionable assumptions, not just about the date of the bodies but about how representative they were of the wider population, and about the imagined difference between six-foot-tall Viking warriors and the shorter folk actually dug up from the ground. After all, one would expect to find similar evidence of physical ill-health in any medieval European cemetery, without assuming there was a process of constant degeneration. On the other hand, the high proportion of young women found in the graves suggests that death in childbirth was higher than in western Europe, or maybe that women stayed put while men went further afield – more of this in a moment. Evidence for malnutrition in the bones is very slender. The most convincing demographic explanation for the extinction of the Greenland colonies is a slow but steady trickle of emigration, as the inhabitants, particularly young males, went to search for a more profitable livelihood in Iceland or Norway.36 In that case, the ships carrying Arctic products back to Europe were also, very probably, carrying Greenlanders who had no intention of returning to the land where their ancestors had lived since the year 1000. Moreover, these Arctic products were more difficult to obtain as access to the hunting grounds was cut off by the Inuit, who were happy to trade bearskins and walrus tusks but expected more in exchange than curdled milk and woollen cloth. Meanwhile, manpower became a major problem: the fields around Brattahlíð, Eirík the Red’s original settlement, were allowed to revert to meadow, suggesting that there were fewer people around to work the soil, and perhaps fewer mouths to feed. Some Greenlanders may have merged into the Inuit population, for it has been seen that the Inuit themselves preserved tales of intermarriage. Some, it has been suggested, went in search of pastures new in America, an opinion that can be traced right back to a seventeenth-century Ice
landic bishop, who insisted they all turned pagan as well.37
The routes from Iceland to Greenland and then from Norway to Greenland had been in regular use during the summer months throughout the eleventh to fourteenth centuries; there was an occasional hiatus, but the fact that Pope Alexander VI wrote about his spiritual concern for the Greenlanders in the year that Columbus reached the Caribbean indicates that memory of this vast island did not evaporate: ‘the church at Gardar is situated at the world’s end’, he stated.38 By 1492 the Greenland settlements were deserted. But, if they ended around then, they had been in existence for half a millennium, about as long as the period between the Portuguese rediscovery of Greenland at the start of the sixteenth century and the writing of this book.
III
The volume of European trade with Greenland and the size of the Norse colonies that were established there may have been small, but knowledge of the north Atlantic was widely diffused, in works of geography produced in northern Europe, and the discovery of Greenland and of lands beyond was narrated in two sagas, the Greenlanders’ Saga and the Saga of Eirík the Red, both of which were copied and edited over the centuries, with the unfortunate effect that it is difficult to recover the original story amid later embellishments.39 These sagas are richer in information about the Norse discovery of what came to be known as America than they are in information about Greenland. Even so, they only reveal the first phase of contact; Norse mariners certainly continued to visit Labrador long after Leif Eiríksson sailed down the coast of North America around the year 1000, in search of timber and other raw materials. But, whereas the settlement in Iceland proved permanent, and that in Greenland lasted for centuries, it proved impossible to create anything more than temporary settlements in North America. The Norse voyages to America testify to the skill of these navigators, but they proved to be a dead end.
Before looking at the much more famous voyages to the east coast of America, to the lands the Norse called Helluland, Markland and Vínland, a word needs to be said about voyages northwards from Greenland that brought the Norse to the edges of the Canadian Arctic. Here, a mass of islands vast and small, from Baffin Island and Ellesmere Island to tiny Dorset Island, offered opportunities to Greenlanders of the Western Settlement in search of narwhal and walrus ivory, polar bears and seal or whale blubber (used in lighting as well as in food). On at least one occasion in the thirteenth century or later Norse Greenlanders penetrated as far as 72°55′N, leaving a runic inscription: ‘Erling Sigvaðsson and Bjarni Þordarson and Enriði Ásson on the Saturday before the minor Rogation Day [25 April], built these cairns.’ In 1266 an expedition to the north saw Inuit houses but was frightened off by the large number of polar bears, which prevented the Norsemen from landing; and a couple of small Inuit carvings from sites in western Greenland are thought to portray a European with whom the Inuit came into contact.40 An arrowhead found on a farm in the Western Settlement was manufactured out of meteoric iron obtained in north-western Greenland, which suggests that the Norse traders sometimes obtained iron from the Inuit, not just from Norwegian merchants.41 A case has been made for Norse visits to an improbably welcoming environment, Ellesmere Island, at 83°N, one of the northernmost large islands in the world, which turns out to be largely free from snow (though not from ice), and in past times hosted a large population of musk oxen, as well as plenty of plants and lichens on which they can graze; in some areas, summer temperatures hover between 10 and 15°C. Fragments of Norse chain mail and an iron rivet have been found there, underneath the remains of an Inuit house; but, despite the enthusiastic assertions of some writers, these and other bits and pieces do not prove the Norse went there – rather, they suggest that Norsemen traded with Inuit who travelled up to Ellesmere Island.42 There were no doubt extreme cases where adventurousness carried Greenlanders beyond their normal hunting grounds, but trips to Disko Island were much more regular: here a great amount of driftwood would arrive, carried down from Siberia.43
A tiny fragment of larch assumed to be from a ship tells a story that is in its own way as rich as the two sagas. Found in Greenland, it comes from a tree that did not grow in Greenland, Iceland or Norway, but existed in profusion in north-eastern Canada.44 It is not driftwood: that was not of sufficient quality for building anything large and strong, and it degrades in the water. Then there are the tiny traces found at the ‘Farm beneath the Sands’ on the Western Settlement in Greenland: fragments of bear fur, not from local polar bears but black or brown bears, of the sort that inhabit northern Canada, as well as bits of bison hair. An arrowhead found near graves in the same area originated somewhere around Hudson Bay. Moreover, two sets of Icelandic annals tell of a ship that arrived unexpectedly from a place beyond Greenland called Markland; this was in 1347, and it had been blown off course: ‘There came also a ship from Greenland, smaller in size than the small Icelandic boats; she came into the outer Straumfjord, and had no anchor. There were seventeen men on board. They had made a voyage to Markland, but were afterwards storm-driven here.’45 The assumption is that the ship had sailed to Markland in search of timber. The place name would have been familiar to an Icelandic, and indeed a Scandinavian, audience.
The geographical treatise from Iceland which suggests that Africa somehow embraced lands to the west of Greenland seems to go back to the twelfth century, even though the surviving text dates from around 1300. This states:
To the north of Norway lies Finnmark [Lapland]; from there the land sweeps north-east and east to Bjarmaland [Permia], which renders tribute to the king of Prussia. From Permia there is uninhabited land stretching all the way to the north until Greenland begins. To the south of Greenland lies Helluland and then Markland; and from there it is not far to Vínland, which some people think extends from Africa.46
This describes a closed Atlantic (rather in the way that Ptolemy had assumed there existed a closed Indian Ocean), with Greenland linked to Europe by way of an Arctic landmass. The statement may be even older than the Greenlanders’ Saga, of about 1200, and the Saga of Eirík the Red, written down in the mid-thirteenth century. Of these, the Greenlanders’ Saga claims to record the memories of one of the key participants in the discovery of the three territories of Helluland, Markland and Vínland, Þorfinn Karlsefni, while the Saga of Eirík the Red is richer in obvious fantasy, such as an attack launched on Norse visitors to these new lands by a Uniped, a single-footed humanoid who was supposed to inhabit Africa – hence, in part, the assumption that Vínland was linked to Africa. And this betrays the influence not just of medieval bestiaries and other imaginative literature, but of classical writers since, as has been seen, the Icelanders were devouring Latin texts from Europe with an enthusiasm barely matched anywhere else (a possible source is Isidore of Seville, writing around AD 600).47
Medieval fantasies about lands to the west are well matched by modern fantasies about who ‘discovered’ America. That the Norse reached North America is not in doubt. But, in one version, Norsemen reached as far as Minnesota, where a bogus rune-stone clearly manufactured in the nineteenth century proves their presence in 1362. In another version, a forged fifteenth-century map bought in an uncritical moment by Yale University supposedly demonstrates that exact knowledge of parts of North America was circulating in Europe in the fifteenth century, information that might have reached the ears of Columbus, who probably visited Iceland as a young man. A little more attention might attach to a late eleventh-century Norse penny found on a native American site in Maine in 1957; it has excited great interest, but it had been perforated for use as jewellery and had almost certainly worked its way south along the existing trade routes, passing from hand to hand.48 It is better to turn to the sagas and to try to make sense of what they say and of how it fits with archaeological evidence from North America.
IV
In the Greenlanders’ Saga we learn that new land to the west of Greenland was first spied out by Bjarni Herjólfson, who was trying to reach Greenland from Iceland in around 985 but
was blown off course. He realized that the hills and woodland that came into view could not be craggy, icy Greenland and refused even to land to take on water and wood. He also saw what he called a ‘worthless’ land, with mountains and a glacier, before putting in at Herjólfsnes, which was named after the farm of his father, Herjólf. ‘People thought he had showed great lack of curiosity, since he could tell them nothing about these countries’; on the other hand, ‘there was now great talk of discovering new countries’.49 The most enthusiastic Greenlander was Leif Eiríksson, the son of the colony’s founder, Eirík the Red, who was by now too old and tired to take part in new adventures. Leif has been described as ‘a tremendous sailor, and the first skipper reported to have made direct voyages between Greenland, Scotland, Norway, and back again’.50 The sagas disagree whether there were six or three expeditions to the new lands, and the Saga of Eirík the Red does not even mention the incurious Bjarni.
Leif and his men came first to the land Bjarni had considered worthless, and they agreed with that view; it was given the name Helluland, meaning ‘the land of slabs of rock’. Further south, though, they discovered white sandy beaches that fringed a flat, forested interior; this land they called Markland, ‘the land of forests’. After another two days at sea they reached an island and a headland; ‘in this country, night and day were of more even length than in either Greenland or Iceland’, and the river they saw teemed with salmon. There was an abundance of rich grass, and when one day a German slave named Tyrkir staggered back to their camp drunk from eating too many wild grapes they decided to call this land Vínland, ‘the land of wine’. They built some large houses, and wintered in Vínland.51
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