Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  The next group of Norse voyagers did manage to establish a trade with local Indians (Norse cloth and cow’s milk in exchange for animal furs brought by Indians), until one Viking killed an Indian trying to steal weapons. In the ensuing battle many Indians were killed before fleeing, but that was enough to convince the Norse of the chronic problems that they would face. As the unknown author of Erik the Red’s Saga put it, “The [Viking] party then realized that, despite everything that the land had to offer there, they would be under constant threat of attack from its former inhabitants. They made ready to depart for their own country [i.e., Greenland].”

  After thus abandoning Vinland to the Indians, the Greenland Norse continued to make visits farther north on the Labrador coast, where there were many fewer Indians, in order to fetch timber and iron. Tangible evidence of such visits are a handful of Norse objects (bits of smelted copper, smelted iron, and spun goat’s wool) found at Native American archaeological sites scattered over the Canadian Arctic. The most notable such find is a silver penny minted in Norway between 1065 and 1080 during the reign of King Olav the Quiet, found at an Indian site on the coast of Maine hundreds of miles south of Labrador, and pierced for use as a pendant. The Maine site had been a big trading village at which archaeologists excavated stone and tools originating in Labrador as well as over much of Nova Scotia, New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Probably the penny had been dropped or traded by a Norse visitor to Labrador, and had then reached Maine by an Indian trade network.

  Other evidence of continuing Norse visits to Labrador is the mention, in Iceland’s chronicle for the year 1347, of a Greenland ship with a crew of 18 that had reached Iceland after losing its anchor and being blown off course on the return voyage from “Markland.” The chronicle mention is brief and matter-of-fact, as if there were nothing unusual requiring explanation—as if the chronicler were instead to have written equally matter-of-factly, “So, the news this year is that one of those ships that visit Markland each summer lost its anchor, and also Thorunn Ketilsdóttir spilled a big pitcher of milk at her Djupadalur farm, and one of Bjarni Bollason’s sheep died, and that’s all the news for this year, just the usual stuff.”

  In short, the Vinland colony failed because the Greenland colony itself was too small and poor in timber and iron to support it, too far from both Europe and from Vinland, owned too few oceangoing ships, and could not finance big fleets of exploration; and that one or two shiploads of Greenlanders were no match for hordes of Nova Scotia and Gulf of St. Lawrence Indians when they were provoked. In A.D. 1000 the Greenland colony probably numbered no more than 500 people, so that the 80 adults at the L’Anse camp would have represented a huge drain on Greenland’s available manpower. When European colonizers finally returned to North America after 1500, the history of European attempts to settle then shows how long were the odds that those attempts faced, even for colonies backed by Europe’s wealthiest and most populous nations, sending annual supply fleets of ships far larger than medieval Viking vessels, and equipped with guns and abundant iron tools. At the first English and French colonies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Canada, about half of the settlers died of starvation and disease within the first year. It’s no surprise, then, that 500 Greenlanders, from the most remote colonial outpost of Norway, one of Europe’s poorer nations, could not succeed at conquering and colonizing North America.

  For our purposes in this book, the most important thing about the failure of the Vinland colony within 10 years is that it was in part a greatly speeded-up preview of the failure that overtook the Greenland colony after 450 years. Norse Greenland survived much longer than Norse Vinland because it was closer to Norway and because hostile natives did not make their appearance for the first few centuries. But Greenland shared, albeit in less extreme form, Vinland’s twin problems of isolation and Norse inability to establish good relations with Native Americans. If it had not been for Native Americans, the Greenlanders might have survived their ecological problems, and the Vinland settlers might have persisted. In that case, Vinland might have undergone a population explosion, the Norse might have spread over North America after A.D. 1000, and I as a twentieth-century American might now be writing this book in an Old Norse-based language like modern Icelandic or Faeroese, rather than in English.

  CHAPTER 7

  Norse Greenland’s Flowering

  Europe’s outpost ■ Greenland’s climate today ■ Climate in the past ■ Native plants and animals ■ Norse settlement ■ Farming ■ Hunting and fishing ■ An integrated economy ■ Society ■ Trade with Europe ■ Self-image ■

  My initial impression of Greenland was that its name was a cruel misnomer, because I saw only a three-colored landscape: white, black, and blue, with white overwhelmingly predominant. Some historians think that the name really was coined with deceitful intent by Erik the Red, founder of Greenland’s Viking settlement, so as to induce other Vikings to join him. As my airplane from Copenhagen approached Greenland’s east coast, the first thing visible after the dark blue ocean was a vast area of brilliant white stretching out of sight, the world’s largest ice cap outside Antarctica. Greenland’s shores rise steeply to an ice-covered high plateau covering most of the island and drained by enormous glaciers flowing into the sea. For hundreds of miles our plane flew over this white expanse, where the sole other color visible was the black of bare stone mountains rising out of that ocean of ice, and scattered over it like black islands. Only as our plane descended from the plateau towards the west coast did I spot two other colors in a thin border outlining the ice sheet, combining brown areas of bare gravel with faint green areas of moss or lichens.

  But when I landed at southern Greenland’s main airport of Narsarsuaq and crossed the iceberg-strewn fjord to Brattahlid, the site that Erik the Red chose for his own farm, I discovered to my surprise that the name Greenland might have been bestowed honestly, not as false PR. Exhausted by my long plane flight from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and back to Greenland, involving shifts of 13 time zones, I set out to stroll among the Norse ruins but was soon ready for a nap, too sleepy even to return the few hundred yards to the youth hostel where I had left my rucksack. Fortunately, the ruins lay amidst lush meadows of soft grass over a foot high, growing up out of thick moss and dotted with abundant yellow buttercups, yellow dandelions, blue bluebells, white asters, and pink willow-herbs. There was no need for an air mattress or pillow here: I fell into a deep sleep in the softest and most beautiful natural bed imaginable.

  As my Norwegian archaeologist friend Christian Keller expressed it, “Life in Greenland is all about finding the good patches of useful resources.” While 99% of the island is indeed uninhabitable white or black, there are green areas deep inside two fjord systems on the southwest coast. There, long narrow fjords penetrate far inland, such that their heads are remote from the cold ocean currents, icebergs, salt spray, and wind that suppress growth of vegetation along Greenland’s outer coast. Here and there along the mostly steep-sided fjords are patches of flatter terrain with luxuriant pastures, including the one in which I took a nap, and good for maintaining livestock (Plate 17). For nearly 500 years between A.D. 984 and sometime in the 1400s, those two fjord systems supported European civilization’s most remote outpost, where Scandinavians 1,500 miles from Norway built a cathedral and churches, wrote in Latin and Old Norse, wielded iron tools, herded farm animals, followed the latest European fashions in clothing—and finally vanished.

  The mystery of their disappearance is symbolized by the stone church at Hvalsey, Norse Greenland’s most famous building, whose photograph will be found in any travel brochure promoting Greenland tourism. Lying in meadows at the head of the long, broad, mountain-rimmed fjord, the church commands a gorgeous view over a panorama of dozens of square miles. Its walls, west doorway, niches, and gables of stone are still intact: only the original roof of turf is missing. Around the church lie the remains of the residential halls, barns, storehouses, boathouse, and pastures that sustained the
people who erected those buildings. Among all medieval European societies, Norse Greenland is the one whose ruins are best preserved, precisely because its sites were abandoned while intact, whereas almost all major medieval sites of Britain and continental Europe continued to be occupied and became submerged by post-medieval construction. Visiting Hvalsey today, one almost expects to see Vikings walking out of those buildings, but in fact all is silent: practically no one now lives within twenty miles of there (Plate 15). Whoever built that church knew enough to re-create a European community, and to maintain it for centuries—but not enough to maintain it for longer.

  Compounding the mystery, the Vikings shared Greenland with another people, the Inuit (Eskimos), whereas the Iceland Norse had Iceland to themselves and faced no such additional problem to compound their own difficulties. The Vikings disappeared, but the Inuit survived, proving that human survival in Greenland was not impossible and the Vikings’ disappearance not inevitable. As one walks around modern Greenland farms, one sees again those same two populations that shared the island in the Middle Ages: Inuits and Scandinavians. In 1721, three hundred years after the medieval Vikings died out, other Scandinavians (Danes) came back to take control of Greenland, and it was not until 1979 that Native Greenlanders gained home rule. I found it disconcerting throughout my Greenland visit to look at the many blue-eyed blond-haired Scandinavians working there, and to reflect that it was people like them who built Hvalsey Church and the other ruins that I was studying, and who died out there. Why did those medieval Scandinavians ultimately fail to master Greenland’s problems while the Inuits succeeded?

  Like the fate of the Anasazi, the fate of the Greenland Norse has often been laid to various single-factor explanations, without agreement being reached as to which of those explanations is correct. A favorite theory has been climatic cooling, invoked in overschematic formulations approximating (in the words of archaeologist Thomas McGovern) “It got too cold, and they died.” Other single-factor theories have included extermination of the Norse by the Inuit, abandonment of the Norse by mainland Europeans, environmental damage, and a hopelessly conservative outlook. In fact, the Greenland Norse extinction is a richly instructive case precisely because it involves major contributions of all five of the explanatory factors that I discussed in the introduction to this book. It is a rich case not only in reality, but also in our available information about it, because the Norse left written accounts of Greenland (whereas the Easter Islanders and Anasazi were not literate), and because we understand medieval European society much better than we understand Polynesian or Anasazi society. Nevertheless, major questions remain about even this most richly documented pre-industrial collapse.

  What was the environment in which the Greenland Norse colonies arose, thrived, and fell? The Norse lived in two settlements on Greenland’s west coast somewhat below the Arctic Circle, around latitudes 61 and 64 degrees north. That’s south of most of Iceland, and comparable to the latitudes of Bergen and Trondheim on Norway’s west coast. But Greenland is colder than either Iceland or Norway, because the latter are bathed by the warm Gulf Stream flowing up from the south, whereas Greenland’s west coast is bathed by the cold West Greenland Current flowing down from the Arctic. As a result, even at the sites of the former Norse settlements, which enjoy the most benign climate in Greenland, the weather can be summed up in four words: cold, variable, windy, and foggy.

  Mean summer temperatures today at the settlements are around 42 degrees Fahrenheit (5-6 degrees Celsius) on the outer coast, 50° F (10°C) in the interiors of the fjords. While that doesn’t sound so cold, remember that that’s only for the warmest months of the year. In addition, strong dry winds frequently blow down from Greenland’s ice cap, bringing drift ice from the north, blocking the fjords with icebergs even during the summer, and causing dense fogs. I was told that the large short-term climate fluctuations that I encountered during my summer visit to Greenland, including heavy rain, strong winds, and fog, were common and often made it impossible to travel by boat. But boats are the main means of transport in Greenland, because the coast is so deeply indented with branching fjords. (Even today, there are no roads connecting Greenland’s main population centers, and the sole communities joined by road are either located on the same side of the same fjord or else on adjacent different fjords separated by just a low spine of hills.) Such a storm aborted my first attempt to reach Hvalsey Church: I arrived by boat at Qaqortoq in nice weather on July 25, to find ship traffic out of Qaqortoq on July 26 immobilized by wind, rain, fog, and icebergs. On July 27 the weather turned mild again and we reached Hvalsey, and on the following day we steamed back out of Qaqortoq Fjord to Brattahlid under blue skies.

  I experienced Greenland weather at its best, at the site of the southernmost Norse settlement in peak summer. As a Southern Californian accustomed to warm sunny days, I would describe the temperatures that I encountered then as “variably cool to cold.” I always needed to wear a wind-breaker over my T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, and sweatshirt, and often added as well the thick down parka that I had acquired on my first trip to the Arctic. The temperature seemed to change quickly and in wide swings, repeatedly within each hour. It sometimes felt as if my main occupation while out walking in Greenland consisted of taking my parka on and off to adjust to those frequent changes in temperature.

  Complicating this picture I have just drawn of modern Greenland’s average climate, the weather can change over short distances and from year to year. The changes over short distances partly account for Christian Keller’s comment to me about the importance of finding the good patches of resources in Greenland. The changes from year to year affect each year’s growth of pasture hay on which the Norse economy depended, and also affect the quantities of sea ice that in turn affect seal hunting plus the possibility of ship travel for trade, both of which were important to the Vikings. Both the weather changes over short distances and from year to year were critical, as Greenland was at best marginally suitable for Norse hay production, so being at a slightly worse site or in a slightly colder-than-usual year could translate into not having enough hay to feed one’s livestock through the winter.

  As for the changes with location, an important difference is that one of the two Viking settlements lay 300 miles north of the other, but they were confusingly called Western and Eastern Settlement instead of Northern and Southern Settlement. (Those names had unfortunate consequences centuries later, when the name “Eastern Settlement” misled Europeans looking for the long-lost Greenland Norse to hunt for them in the wrong place, on Greenland’s east coast, instead of on the west coast where the Norse had actually lived.) Summer temperatures are as warm at the more northerly Western Settlement as at the Eastern Settlement. However, the summer growing season is shorter at Western Settlement (just five months with average temperatures above freezing, instead of seven months as at Eastern Settlement), because there are fewer summer days of sunlight and warm temperatures as one gets farther north. Another change in weather with location is that it is colder, wetter, and foggier on the seacoast at the mouths of fjords, directly exposed to the cold West Greenland Current, than in the sheltered interiors of the fjords far from the sea.

  Still another change with location that I couldn’t help noticing during my travels in Greenland is that some fjords have glaciers dumping into them, while others don’t. Those fjords with glaciers constantly receive icebergs of local origin, while those without glaciers only receive whatever icebergs drift in from the ocean. For example, in July I found Igaliku Fjord (on which lay Viking Greenland’s cathedral) free of icebergs, because no glacier flows into it; Eirik’s Fjord (on which lay Brattahlid) had scattered icebergs, because one glacier enters that fjord; and the next fjord north of Brattahlid, Sermilik Fjord, has many big glaciers and was solidly clogged with ice. (Those differences, and the great variations of size and shape among the icebergs, were one of the reasons why I found Greenland such a constantly interesting landscape, despite its few col
ors.) While Christian Keller was studying an isolated archaeological site on Eirik’s Fjord, he used to walk over the hill to visit some Swedish archaeologists excavating a site on Sermilik Fjord. The Swedes’ campsite was considerably colder than Christian’s campsite, and correspondingly the Viking farm that the unfortunate Swedes had chosen to study had been poorer than the farm that Christian was studying (because the Swedes’ site was colder and yielded less hay).

  Weather changes from year to year are illustrated by recent experience of hay yields on sheep farms that resumed operation in Greenland beginning in the 1920s. Wetter years yield more growth of vegetation, which generally is good news to pastoralists because it means more hay to feed their sheep, and more grass to nourish the wild caribou (hence more caribou to hunt). However, if too much rain falls during the hay harvest season in August and September, hay yields decrease because the hay is hard to dry. A cold summer is bad because it decreases hay growth; a long winter is bad because it means that animals have to be kept indoors in barns for more months and require more hay; and a summer with much drift ice coming down from the north is bad because it results in dense summer fogs that are bad for hay growth. Year-to-year weather differences like those making life dicey for modern Greenland sheep farmers must have made it dicey for the medieval Norse as well.