The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown

by The Far Traveler- Voyages of a Viking Woman (epub)

  Yet even sensible merchants did not go to Greenland solely for gain. As The King’s Mirror notes, they went to win fame, by sailing where others had sunk, and out of curiosity: “For it is also in man’s nature to wish to see and experience the things that he has heard about, and thus to learn whether the facts are as told or not.” And Karlsefni, as events would show, was both ambitious and curious.

  Among the entertainments at Eirik’s feast, and throughout that gay winter, the saga lists chess (or a game like it, hneftafl or “tables”) and storytelling. Leif Eiriksson was easily cajoled into telling the story of his discovery of the rich new land to the west: Vinland. No one knows which version he related. He was blown off course, he may have said, on his way west from Norway four years ago. He spied a strange country and, landing, found it to be a paradise. Three things in particular struck him—three things which today no one can positively identify: fields of “selfsown wheat,” well-grown “wine wood,” and trees “big enough for house timbers” of a valuable wood called mösurr.

  On the other hand, Leif may have told Karlsefni how he had cleverly retraced, backward, the route of another seaman, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had been blown off course coming to Greenland and had refused to set foot on the three strange lands he had spotted farther west than any land ought to be. The northernmost land Leif named Helluland (“Flat Stone Land”). A little south was Markland (“Forest Land”). Then came Vinland (“Wine Land”), which had sweet dew on the grass, huge salmon, “wine wood” and “wine berries,” and wide forests. In this story, Leif and his crew stayed the winter, first putting up “booths,” or temporary shelters roofed by sailcloth, and then building large houses. They filled the ship with timber, and the towboat with wine berries.

  Lured by Leif’s stories of this land of riches, and inspired by Gudrid’s eagerness for adventure—she had already gone looking for Vinland once before, she would have told him—Karlsefni made ready to sail when the ice went out in June. According to one saga, he took sixty-five people in one ship; in the other saga, his expedition had three ships (one of them Gudrid’s) and 160 people. Says The Saga of the Greenlanders, they took along “all kinds of livestock,” presumably from Gudrid’s farms, “because they meant to settle there if they could.”

  Before he set sail, Karlsefni asked Leif to let him have the large houses he had built there to overwinter in.

  “I won’t give them to you,” Leif said. “I’ll lend them to you.”

  The sagas do not mention walrus, but likely they were on Leif’s list of Vinland’s riches. From Nordsetur, thought to be Greenland’s Disko Island, you can sometimes see Baffin Island on the Canadian side, and the Vikings may have rowed well out into the Davis Strait to hunt the herds on the ice. This is the course Karlsefni and Gudrid took—north to Sandnes, north again to Nordsetur, west across the Davis Strait, and then south following the currents along the coastline of Canada. Gudrid may have warned Karlsefni not to head west too soon; that’s how she and her previous husband ended up tossed about by the sea all summer. As a practiced ocean navigator, Karlsefni would have learned everything he could about the prevailing winds and currents.

  They would have seen icebergs, and walrus, the whole way as they sailed south past Flat Stone Land or, as one scholar interprets it, “So-So Land,” now thought to be Baffin Island; and Forest Land or “Useful Land,” now identified with Labrador; until they arrived in Wine Land or “Luxury Land.”

  Where exactly is Wine Land? Georgia. Or between Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Or New York harbor. Boston, on the Charles River near Harvard University. Rhode Island or Martha’s Vineyard. Cape Cod or the coast of Maine. New Hampshire, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, the St. Lawrence Valley, or back in Greenland. All of these places have been suggested in serious manner between 1757 and today. As the irrepressible BBC television host Magnus Magnusson said at a conference in Newfoundland in 2000, “Enthusiasts have twiddled the texts, selected from the texts, conflated the texts, and compromised the texts in endless attempts to create a coherent story that will ‘prove’ their particular hypothesis. But frankly, the sailing directions which dozens of eager researchers have tried to follow are not much more explicit than the old Icelandic adage for getting to North America: Sail south until the butter melts, and then turn right.” Though folklorist Gisli Sigurdsson believes the Vinland sagas hold a coherent “mental map” of Viking explorations along the coast of North America, he concedes that “perhaps the most striking feature of the attempts to locate Vinland is that each and every person to have made one has disagreed with everyone else.”

  Some of the enthusiasts have evidence to back up their theories. In 1890, Eben Norton Horsford, a former professor of science at Harvard University, discovered what he believed to be a Viking city in Massachusetts, on the banks of the Charles River where it meets Stony Brook. According to Andrew Wawn, an expert on the Victorians’ passion for Vikings, Horsford “came to archaeology late in life. His earlier publications had included works on phrenology, bread making, water pipes, coral reefs, glacial ammonia, tea ashes, and the problem of offensive odours from pig slaughtering.... His booklet The Army Ration. How to diminish its weight and bulk, secure economy in its administration, avoid waste, and increase the comfort, efficiency, and mobility of troops (1864) appeared just in time to become a best seller during the Civil War period.”

  On the banks of the Charles River, Horsford found the docks and wharves, pavements and terraced “places of assembly” of a city he called Norumbega and that he said was founded by Leif Eiriksson. He also found a turf house, “the outlines of which correspond with the outlines of an Icelandic house in the saga time,” according to Horsford’s contemporary, Rasmus B. Anderson. In the center of the house, Horsford’s workmen found charcoal and fire-cracked stones. Digging along its rectangular perimeter, they found “a marked depression, as if there had been a door.” In 1895 Horsford’s daughter Cornelia funded the first excavation of Eiriksstadir in the Dales of Iceland in order to confirm her father’s discovery. The outline of Eirik the Red's house there (later proved to look quite different) seemed to verify Horsford’s find in Massachusetts.

  Helge Ingstad, who claimed to find Leif Eiriksson’s Vinland 1,500 miles farther north, at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, in 1960, had a curriculum vitae almost as eccentric as Horsford’s, if a bit more finely focused. He left a law career in his native Norway in 1926 to live as a fur trapper in the Canadian Arctic for four years. He came home only to be posted to south Greenland as governor of Eirik the Red’s old settlement, which Norway was trying to extract from Denmark. Next he governed the Svalbard Islands, in the Norwegian Arctic, before ditching the political life to live among the Apache Indians in Arizona. He married archaeologist Anne Stine Moe in 1941, and during World War II served in the Norwegian resistance. In the 1950s, he and Anne Stine went to Greenland to study the Viking ruins, which resulted in his book, Land Under the Pole Star. He set off up the coast of North America in the spring of 1960, determined to locate Vinland. He started in Rhode Island and traveled north by boat, plane, and foot, asking people he encountered “about traces of old house sites.”

  At the far northwestern tip of Newfoundland, Ingstad fell into conversation with a man named George Decker who had “something bold and authoritative about him.” Decker took Ingstad around to see the hillocks where he liked to cut hay, since the grass grew tallest there. The locals called them the Indian mounds.

  As soon as he saw the mounds, Ingstad had no doubt they were houses, “and very old ones.” Looking around, “I had a distinct feeling of recognition,” he writes in his book, Westward to Vinland. “There was so much here at L’Anse aux Meadows that reminded me of what I had seen of the surroundings of the Norse farms in Greenland: the green fields, the rippling stream, the open country, the view of the sea, and perhaps something else that was not so easy to fathom. Here the people from the Arctic island would have felt at home.”

  Anne Stin
e settled in to excavate, and four years later Ingstad announced, through an article in National Geographic magazine: “Vinland Ruins Prove Vikings Found the New World.”

  Serious Viking scholars had been tricked too often by such “cult archaeology” as Horsford’s—whose Harvard ruins, undatable, delivering no artifacts, could be Indian or early settlers’—to accept Ingstad’s claim. Even when a spindle whorl, a small soapstone ring used for spinning wool, was unearthed, they tried to explain it away. No eastern Indians kept sheep or knew how to spin wool. No seventeenth-century French settler would use a spindle instead of a spinning wheel. But historian Frederick J. Pohl, writing in 1966, had an answer. L’Anse aux Meadows must have been an emergency camp, settled by one of the eleven ships lost in the storm in 985 on their way to Greenland with Eirik the Red. As Pohl wrote in an appendix to The Viking Explorers, the place simply couldn’t be Leif Eiriksson’s Vinland. “The L’Anse aux Meadows settlement does not by any stretch of the imagination fit the description in the sagas. It satisfies fewer than six of the eighteen geographical requirements. It is not up a river at the shore of a lake. There are no vines in Newfoundland. And so on.”

  Pohl’s geographical requirements, drawn from his idiosyncratic reading of the sagas, are so vague as to match hundreds of spots on the Atlantic seaboard. Concatenating fourteen of them, we can say that Vinland is southwest of Greenland, with a prominent island thick with birds’ nests, a wide shallow bay, a sandy cape, an amazingly long beach somewhere to the north, a river with tidal flats, and a couple of lakes. The sagas sometimes tell how long it took to sail from one spot to another, but scholars argue viciously over how to translate “a day’s sail” into a distance. Is a “day” twenty-four hours? Twelve hours? The time when the sun is up? A Viking ship can sail at eleven knots per hour; we know from the replicas. It can also lie becalmed and be storm-driven backward. Some scholars take the wind into account. Others note that a cautious captain in an unknown sea with no hope of rescue might care to take his time, while an explorer, by definition, should poke into every interesting cove and bay.

  A note on the length of a winter day in The Saga of the Greenlanders has been similarly dissected. It has “proved” that Vinland lay at a latitude of 31 degrees North (as does Jekyll Island, Georgia)—and at 50 degrees North (nearer to L’Anse aux Meadows). The saga says simply: “The length of day and night was more equal than in Greenland or Iceland,” adding that the sun could be seen “during the short days” at eyktarstaður and at dagmálastaður. No one knows if those two terms apply to the places on the horizon where the sun rises and sets, or to times of day.

  With the sailing directions and the day length both inscrutable, we are left with the Vikings’ list of Vinland's riches. The land is called “Wine Land” so often, not only in the sagas but in other sources, that there must have been some berry from which wine could be made; the question of whether wine requires grapes has bedeviled generations of scholars. Although the words I’ve translated literally as “wine wood” and “wine berries” refer to grapevines and grapes in modern Icelandic, we can’t be sure they did so in Gudrid’s day. A related question is whether the Vin of Vinland has a long or short “i”: vín (long “i”) means wine; vin (short “i”) means meadow. Although most scholars are convinced by linguistic arguments that Vinland is Wine Land not Meadow Land, and that the “Meadow” in the name L’Anse aux Meadows is a corruption of a French word for jellyfish or a ship’s name, the other side of the debate still arises. The sagas do mention pastures “so rich that it seemed to them the sheep would need no hay all winter. There was no frost in the winter, and the grass hardly withered.” There was also some kind of wild grain that resembled wheat. Eider ducks nested on the offshore islands, whales washed up on the beaches, and fish, including large salmon, could be easily caught. There were bears and foxes and plentiful game. Finally there were those mösurr trees “big enough for house timbers.” (Twenty feet would have been tall enough.)

  On Green Island off L’Anse aux Meadows, according to George Decker, “were so many eider ducks that you couldn’t put your foot down without stepping on an egg.” (Helge Ingstad, who quotes him, doesn’t say whether he had primed Decker by reading to him The Saga of Eirik the Red, where there’s an island with “so many eider ducks you could hardly walk for all the eggs.”) Decker’s daughter-in-law Madge, who cooked for the bed-and-breakfast where I stayed in August 2006, told me the duck population is lower now, but I saw eiders as I walked along the shore. I also saw berries galore: raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, crowberries, red and black currants (whose name in modern Swedish means “wine berries”), lingonberries, cloudberries, and cranberries. I saw stands of bleached grass with a wheatlike head. And I walked through acres of boggy pasture and spongy turf edged by impenetrable, head-high spruce woods, the twisted trunks and spiny branches a poor source of charcoal (the wood is not dense enough to burn hot) and absolutely useless as house timbers.

  It was a windy, wide-open place, filled with the roar of the sea and the plangent cries of whimbrels. With the sun hot on my neck, I had, like Ingstad, the overwhelming sense that Karlsefni and his crew would have felt at home here. The bare rocks and mosses and low-growing juniper, the bog and black beach looked surprisingly Icelandic. A hill called Round Head was a double for Helgafell, at the mouth of Iceland’s Swan Fjord; it would have been a comforting, homey sight for Snorri Thorbrandsson. One of the islands in view recalled the blocky, steep-sided Drangey, the most prominent landmark of Karlsefni’s Skagafjord.

  It was warmer than Iceland the week I visited, as it had been the first year the Ingstads excavated the site, when the summer temperature averaged 55 degrees Fahrenheit. But the weather is not always so pleasant in northern Newfoundland. August is the only month in which freezing temperatures haven’t been recorded—the jokesters say there are only two seasons in Newfoundland: August and winter. Although it lies on the same latitude as London, L’Anse aux Meadows abuts the cold Labrador Current, which brings icebergs down from Baffin Bay. The sea freezes solid in December. It breaks up into a jumble of pans and plates and boat-sinking bergs, blocking ships from the Gulf of St. Lawrence well into June, and scattered icebergs may linger into August. Snow can be expected from November to May. Is this Vinland, where “there was no frost in the winter, and the grass hardly withered”?

  Birgitta Wallace, an archaeologist trained in Sweden, began working alongside Anne Stine Ingstad in the late 1960s and was put in charge of the dig—by then overseen by Canada’s national parks service—in 1975. Though retired, she is still the chief archaeologist associated with the site. In 1998, she writes, there was no snow there at all, and only a dusting in April 1999. The average temperature that winter was one or two degrees higher than normal, just as it was in the eleventh century, according to scientists who have modeled the past climate based on data from the Greenland ice cores.

  “I do believe Leif Eiriksson slept here,” Wallace told me when I met her at L’Anse aux Meadows in 2006. But she is not about to argue that there were once grapes growing in northern Newfoundland. “I don’t understand why people want to make Vinland one spot. People have never suggested that Helluland or Markland is one spot. Of course Vinland is not a little spot, and L’Anse aux Meadows can never be Vinland. It’s in Vinland. Vinland is a much larger concept. I find it odd when people chastise me, ‘You didn’t find any grapes, so it can’t be Vinland.’ People don’t think Brattahlid is all of Greenland.

  “All I do is start with the archaeology. You can’t deny that L’Anse aux Meadows is here.”

  The Ingstads had found three Viking longhouses, spaced evenly a hundred feet apart, on a grassy terrace above the shallow bay. Each house, built of turf in traditional Icelandic style, consists of a main skáli with a central longfire and wide sleeping benches along the walls, a large workshop, and one or more smaller rooms. Each house could sleep twenty-five to thirty people, or roughly one ship’s crew. Two of the houses have small outbuild
ings, one of which is clearly a pit house. Across the brook is a tiny hut where iron was extracted from bog ore.

  The walls Anne Stine Ingstad mapped are now outlined by low grassy ridges interrupted by door openings, so that tourists can walk through the original houses without destroying the last traces of them. Showing me the site, Birgitta darted from one wall to another, pointing with a pink-sneakered foot at the mistakes: “This room had a very clear door out to the west, toward the bog. That pit is not supposed to be here.” The house outlines had been made in 1975; since then Birgitta has spent many years reanalyzing Anne Stine’s work. “I’ve looked at all the photos, plans, and drawings—and I took notes at the time. I have gone back to the find bags and the earliest reports. They tend to be the most correct.”

  Next to the archaeological site, Parks Canada built a reconstruction of one of the longhouses—presumably the leader’s, since it had the best location, closest to the brook. A spacious and sensible structure, it has four rooms in a line. At one end of the great hall is a snug sleeping room for the women; in the other direction, a doorway leads to a sizable workshop and an ample storage room.

  But the turf ridges over the original dig show no central doorway—to go from the hall to the workshop, you have to go outside. Was that another mistake? No, Birgitta said. “The door isn’t real. They needed it for traffic flow for the tourists.