Shortly after he arrived, in a rare moment of neighborliness, he loaned some of his house beams to a man named Thorgest, who wanted them briefly for his farmstead. But soon came the inevitable day when Eirik decided where to settle. He began to put up his own house and demanded the return of his beams. Thorgest refused, thereby setting off yet another terrible feud. This one embroiled the entire countryside and brought violent death to two of Thorgest’s sons. The vicious quarrel finally was resolved at the local assembly. Though his cause, for once, was just, Eirik and his supporters were voted down by Thorgest’s allies, and Eirik the Red was sentenced to three years’ banishment from Iceland.
According to custom, he was given a few days to pack up his belongings, and he used his time well. Thanks mostly to the affluence of his wife’s family, he bought and provisioned a knarr, then set about collecting desperate men to accompany him on a desperate adventure. They were not hard to find. A few years before, Iceland has suffered a famine in which, according to a chronicler, “men ate ravens and foxes, and many loathsome things were eaten that should not be eaten, and some men had the old and helpless killed and thrown over the cliffs.” The famine passed, but it left destitute many families, mostly the owners of marginal lands, whose strong sons and husbands were not eager to seek new fortune in a new land.
Eirik knew - more or less - where he wanted to go. More than fifty years before, sometime between 900 and 930, one Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakason had been scooped up by a tremendous gale while he was sailing down from Norway to Iceland, had missed his destination, and had been storm-tossed far to the west. Eventually he sighted a cluster of tiny rock islands, and he spied in the dim distance beyond them the looming, shadowed form of an immense land mass. But the place was not in the least inviting to Gunnbjorn. After naming the islets Gunnbjarnarsker, after himself, he put them in his wake the moment the wind turned fair, returning to his home in the same Breidafjord pocket of Iceland where, long after Gunnbjorn’s death, Eirik the Red found his final Icelandic refuge.
Icelandic mariners had talked and speculated often about Gunnbjorn’s islands, and at least one attempt had been made to explore this new corner of the earth. A man named Snaebjorn, seeking to escape retribution for murder, had sailed in that direction with a number of companions in two boats. He found a little shelf of land at the edge of the monstrous icecap of Greenland, and there he built a dwelling. The arctic winter came howling down on the settlers, burying their house so deep in snow that they had to dig a tunnel upward to get out to the surface, so they could make their way down to their boats. They caught enough fish to keep them from starving. But, cooped up in the fetid darkness, they allowed old rivalries and grievances to awake. Before they could get away in the spring, three men, including Snaebjorn, had been killed.
Eirik, of course, had heard the tale of Gunnbjorn’s errant voyage, and of Snaebjorn’s. The huge, mysterious mass sighted by Gunnbjorn could only have been the answer to Eirik’s pagan prayers. In 982, at about thirty-two years of age, Eirik Thorvaldsson Raudi set forth.
The way was not particularly long, some 450 miles, and easy enough with favorable winds. Eirik sailed from under the Snaefellsnes, a glacial promontory that, like a giant index finger, points due west from Iceland’s western coast. Moving steadily before the prevailing easterly breezes of early summer, Eirik tracked carefully along the sixty-fifth parallel, sighting the sun by day and Polaris by night. What Eirik and his crew beheld after four days or so of sailing was horrifying. Before them, blinding in their brilliance beneath the sun, were cliffs that fell sheer from a monster icecap. As they approached, the Vikings could see the tips of enormous mountains peeking above the ice. The bravest men might have been excused for turning back. But Eirik the Red coasted south. He may have headed out to sea and rounded Cape Farewell at the southeastern extremity of the new land. More likely, knowing that if grazing land existed it would be found along the banks of the fjords, Eirik turned off, probing and feeling his way for mile after forbidding mile through a labyrinth of narrow, intersecting waterways until, at last, he made his exit on the western coast.
There he steered north, tracing along the twists and turns of the coastline, his sturdy knarr bobbing and weaving through the islands of an archipelago where the cliffs echoed the screams of millions of sea birds. Their cacophony was occasionally interrupted by a more ominous sound from starboard: the reports, like cannon fire, of gigantic icebergs broken from glaciers that overran the mainland’s edge into the sea.
Yet, for all the glaciers, the permanent icecap itself did not reach to the western shore, which was instead fissured by countless fjords thrusting deep - in some cases, more than 150 miles - into the interior. Their waters teemed with fish. Along their banks grew emerald grass; the ground was springy with moss and carpeted by a profusion of wild flowers - harebell, angelica, buttercups, and pink wild thyme. It was at such a place, at the head of a broad and beautiful fjord that he naturally named after himself, Eiriksfjord, that Eirik the Red built a home.
Alone on the vast expanse of what was - although he could not know it - the world’s largest island, Eirik and his followers soon found traces of previous human habitation. House ruins, fragments of boats, and stone implements - all bore witness to an earlier, non-European culture. Indeed, man had been there as early as 2000 B.C.: A Stone-Age, reindeer-hunting people had lived there. They were succeeded around the beginning of the Christian era by people of the so-called Dorset culture, nomads who had neither kayaks nor dogs and whose survival depended on following the seals that provided them both food and clothing.
Eirik and his fellow Norsemen, then, were at least the third race to inhabit the vast island - and, as it turned out, the third to vanish from its face. But while they were there, the Vikings gave it a magnificent try. Eirik spent the remaining years of his exile from Iceland exploring the territory and subdividing land among his followers. The forbidding place apparently enthralled him, and, when, at the end of his banishment, he returned to Iceland to collect his wife, Thjodhild and drum up more settlers, he gave his new country a name that carried monumental disregard for the truth. He called the island Greenland - on the theory, as he acknowledged, that “men would be drawn to go there if the land had an attractive name.”
Early in the summer of 986, Eirik the Red, thrice an outlaw and now the proud father of a Viking colony, sailed from Iceland at the head of a fleet of twenty-five ships filled with men, women, children, and all their goods and chattels. The expedition was caught along the way by a storm - as so often happens, the saga fails to recount the harrowing details - that wrecked some of the vessels and forced others to turn back. But at last, fourteen arrived safely, and nearly 400 people went ashore to begin the colonization of Greenland.
Immediately, these hardy pioneers went to work. Unlike Iceland, Greenland had good stone for building, and the houses were thick walled with sod roofs. The homesteads were scattered along a 120-mile stretch of fjord-riven shoreline on the west coast. In time, the settlers came to call this region the Eastern Settlement to distinguish it from the later - by ten years - Western Settlement, some 300 miles to the north on a westward sweep of land. The Greenland colonists soon adopted a constitution, established a national assembly, and decreed a code of law, all based on Icelandic examples.
Although Eirik the Red may not have held official title, he was certainly the community’s ruling patriarch. “His state was one of high distinction,” acknowledges a saga, “and all recognized his authority.” The Eastern Settlement eventually came to accommodate 190 farms; of them all, Eirik’s Brattahlid, which was able to support fifty cows against an average of ten to twenty on other farms, was by far the finest. The Western Settlement eventually grew to encompass more than ninety farms, providing food and fiber for a total population that in the year 1100 A.D. reached about 3,000 people.
These were not warriors like Eirik but mostly solid yeoman farmers, crowded out of Iceland by implacable population pressures. They did so we
ll that word - perhaps colored by Eirik’s far-reaching boats - spread back to Norway. “It is reported,” wrote a chronicler there, “that the pasturage is good and that there are large and fine farms in Greenland. The farmers raise sheep and cattle in large numbers and make butter and cheese in great quantities. The people subsist chiefly on these foods and on beef; they also eat the flesh of various kinds of game, such as caribou, whale, seal, and bear.”
But the farms alone could offer little more than a bare subsistence - and the Greenlanders had need of much else. They were in need of iron for all purposes and especially for weapons. Although grain grew on a few sunny slopes, it was in piteously short supply. Beer and wine were required to satisfy the prodigious Viking thirst, as were European-style clothes and adornments to answer the craving for luxury items.
Most of all, the Greenlanders were extremely short of timber - essential if only for building and maintaining the ships that were their life line to the world. The local dwarf birch was useless for heavy duty, and the reliance on driftwood, most of which followed the ocean currents on a long, looping route from Siberia, was chancy.
As it had been in Iceland, trade became a way of life. The farms could provide the fleece for Greenland woolen cloth, which counted as a valuable commodity in the trading towns of Scandinavia and elsewhere. In his only recorded lapse into moral turpitude, Eirik’s son Leif, while journeying to Norway, once dallied awhile in the Hebrides, where he got a local highborn maiden pregnant. When she mentioned marriage, Leif paid her off with Greenland woolens and departed forthwith.
But the greatest natural trading treasures were to be found away from the farms in the wastelands of the far, far north, especially around Disco Bay on the seventieth parallel. Rough and hardy Norse hunters built rude stone shelters there, and they set about reaping a precious harvest of wildlife.
With canoes and harpoons, they hunted the mammoth Greenland whale, which grew up to seventy feet long and could yield vast quantities of flesh and oil. There were even greater herds of ivory-tusked walrus and fat seal than in Iceland, and polar bears, only accidental in Iceland, were native to Greenland. The flocks of eider ducks were immense beyond belief and provided vast amounts of down for the quilts of Europe. And in the northern hunting grounds could be found the pure-white falcons so prized by medieval nobility.
The markets for such goods were in Europe, especially the Scandinavian trading towns, and commercial sailing routes were soon established. One was deemed worthy of detailed description in a saga: “From Hernar in Norway one must sail a direct course west to Hvarf in Greenland, in which case one sails north of Shetland so that one sights land in clear weather only, then south of the Faroes so that the sea looks halfway up the mountainsides, then south of Iceland so that one gets sight of birds and whales from there.”
No matter how many times the trip was taken, it remained dangerous, and the sagas make frequent if passing mention of ships lost at sea. In addition to all the usual hazards, there lurked a phenomenon that one chronicler called “sea hedges,” writing that it seemed “as if all the waves and tempests of the ocean have been collected into three heaps, out of which three billows have formed. These hedge in the entire sea, so that no opening can be seen anywhere; they are higher than lofty mountains and resemble steep, overhanging cliffs. In only a few cases have the men been known to escape who were upon the seas when such a thing occurred.” Nothing recognized by science exactly fits this description. But the sea floor in the area is subject to earthquakes, which would produce tidal waves and unsettled sea conditions.
The mariners also risked daily death in their icy home waters. One of the most harrowing of the Greenland stories tells of Thorgils Orrabeinsfostri, who with his family (including an infant son) and some companions were shipwrecked in a storm that swept him onto the island’s bleak east coast. Thorgils fashioned a crude boat from the wreckage of their craft. The castaways rowed hundreds of miles through icy channels and, when it became choked beyond passage, dragged their lifeboat across vast expanses of ice and snow. One by one the travelers dropped of cold and hunger, a grave-mantle of snow quickly covering their stiffening bodies. Thorgils’ wife was among those who perished.
Finally, as his own end and that of his son drew near, Thorgils killed a polar bear with his sword, then clung grimly to its ears to prevent the great beast from slipping off the ice and sinking into the sea. With the meat of the polar bear in their bellies, Thorgils and his son survived.
Many other Greenland sailors in similar circumstances did not. One called Lika-Lodinn actually earned a living by collecting the dead bodies of shipwrecked seamen, boiling the flesh from the bones to make for lighter transportation, and carrying the skeletons back to the settlements for decent burial. For his efforts, he understandably became known as Corpse-Lodinn.
Still, despite all the hazards and hardships, the Greenland settlements not only continued to live and to grow, but even entered into a period of shaky prosperity. On his fjord-side farm at Brattahlid, Eirik the Red had cause for satisfaction. Yet, the late 990s, as he neared his fiftieth year, were for him a time of discontent. The place was becoming crowded; at least it appeared so to a man with a taste for open space. Moreover, civilization in the form of medieval Christianity was coming to Greenland - and Thjodhild, Eirik’s wife, was one of the first and most passionate converts. To halt her nagging, Eirik finally permitted Thjodhild to build a chapel - on another fjord. As for being baptized himself, Eirik the Red drew a resolute line, much preferring to identify his own spirit with that of Thor and Odin. For his failure to take up the cross, Thjodhild barred him from her bed.
Small wonder, then, that Eirik Thorvaldsson Raudi longed for his lost youth and yearned for still more new lands to the west. In fact, such lands existed - and Eirik knew it.
Almost from the very time of Eirik’s expedition to Greenland, an odd tale of exploration had been circulating among the Vikings. In late 985, a young Icelander named Bjarni Herjolfsson had made a trading voyage to Norway, wintered there and in the summer of 986 headed back to Iceland with a cargo of goods consigned to his father, Herjolf. By a matter of days, Bjarni arrived too late. Herjolf, evidently and impetuous sort, had sold his Iceland farm and accompanied Eirik the Red’s little armada to Greenland. Dismayed but not daunted, Bjarni followed after his father, sailing due west for three days. Then a dense fog rolled in, followed by a north wind, and Bjarni’s ship was tossed by storms for uncountable days in the gathering arctic winter.
When the storm finally abated, Bjarni sighted low, flat land covered by thick woods. This did not fit any description of Greenland given by Eirik to the Icelanders, so Bjarni sailed on, heading north. He came upon more land, similar to the first, and this time his crew, wishing to do a bit of exploring, clamored to go ashore. No, replied the single-minded Bjarni. He was searching for Greenland, which had glaciers, and here there were no glaciers. On Bjarni sailed, carried by a southwest wind for three days until he came abreast of bare, black cliffs rising like vertical slabs from the sea. There were plenty of glaciers here, stupendous ones, looming up in the distance and disgorging into the sea through breaks in the cliffs.
Bjarni did not even lower his sails. “This land looks good for nothing,” he pronounced, and now he steered to the east, where, after four more days, he finally came upon a land that perfectly matched the description of Greenland that he had been carrying around in his head.
He rounded a cape. There was his father’s ship, and there was his father. Bjarni Herjolfsson delivered his cargo and, his filial duty done, settled down to a quietly productive life on Greenland. He never knew that he had discovered America.
Now, at the turn of the millennium, Eirik the Red had been hearing the story of Bjarni’s voyage for nearly fifteen years. To a man of his disposition, fretted by domestic annoyances, the call of the mysterious land to the west must have sounded as strongly as ever. He was, however, an old man by Viking standards, and he might not be able to survive the t
rip. But his son Leif could and did.
Leif was a golden Viking. One saga describes him as “a big, strapping fellow, handsome to look at, thoughtful and temperate in all things.” He also was a splendid seaman, his reputation already firmly established as the first Viking shipmaster to make direct voyages with trade goods between Greenland, Scotland, and Norway and back again. These were bold ventures, accomplished by sailing along the sixtieth parallel for 1,800 miles without sight of land. But his courage was tempered by prudence, and he was not a sort to sail blindly into the unknown. Instead, before questing Bjarni’s new lands, he sought Bjarni’s advice, soliciting information about routes and landmarks, winds and currents, rocks and shoals. Only then, in the summer of 1001, after purchasing Bjarni’s ship and collecting a crew of thirty-five, was Leif ready. Eirik had meant to go along and even to assume national command. But on the way to the shore where the ship awaited, his horse stumbled and threw Eirik, and the old fellow broke his leg. “I am not meant to discover more countries than this one we are now in,” he said to his son. “This is as far we go together.”
Because he had been wind-blown and lost during the first part of his 986 voyage, Bjarni Herjolfsson had been able to provide Leif with specific sailing instructions only about the last leg. Leif followed Bjarni’s route in reverse, first sailing due west until he came upon the dismal, glacier-topped rock pile that Bjarni had deemed useless to anyone. Leif anchored briefly, going ashore for an inspection and concluded that Bjarni had been correct. After naming the place Helluland - Flatland - he got under way as swiftly as possible and sailed south, leaving behind him what was surely Baffin Island, most easterly of the islands of the Canadian arctic archipelago, and separated from Labrador by 250 miles of the Hudson Strait.
The Vikings Page 12
