by Farley Mowat
Although Northern Islanders had been familiar with Tilli since before the days of Pytheas, they may not have been the first to set foot upon it.
That iconoclastic British archaeologist Tom Lethbridge believed men may have walked Tilli’s beaches in much earlier times. Indeed, North Americans could have reached Iceland via Greenland without much difficulty during a climatic optimum that occurred between c. 1800 and c. 1500 B.C. This warm spell saw a massive reduction in ice cover over the Arctic Ocean, in consequence of which very little pack flowed south between Iceland and Greenland. And during this period, when the ice barrier between the two great islands had virtually ceased to exist, men were travelling along the east Greenland coast.
From as early as 2000 B.C. northeastern Greenland had been home to tundra dwellers who lived chiefly on musk ox and caribou. They were good hunters—too good for their own good—and towards the latter part of the warm period had virtually exterminated musk ox in the high north. As is described in chapter 16, they then moved south along both eastern and western coasts, looking for new sources of provender.
Those who committed themselves to the east coast would have found no musk ox and precious few land mammals of any species south of Scoresby Sound. But the bright glitter of Iceland’s glaciers, the vivid mirages characteristic of the high Arctic, the flight of waterfowl, and distant volcanic smoke by day or flames by night must have made them aware of the existence of a new land not far distant to the east. In truth, the highlands of Iceland and Greenland are visible to the naked eye of anyone who cares to scale the heights on either side of the intervening strait.
Crossing that strait would have offered no great challenge to people with boats good enough to navigate the rugged east Greenland coast. The shortest distance is only 175 miles, and the mountains backing the opposing shores are so high that a vessel making the passage in clear weather need never be long out of sight of land.
Either by accident or intent, these people may well have become the first of our species to visit Iceland. It probably would have disappointed them. Although blessed with an abundance of waterfowl and sea animals, it harboured no land mammals except Arctic foxes and white bears. Hunters from the west would have found no caribou (or reindeer, which are essentially the same thing), and no musk ox. People can eat foxes, and bears too if the bears don’t first become the eaters; but neither species can be considered a sustaining food for any significant number of human beings.
If Iceland’s first-footers did come from Greenland, they evidently did not remain long, and they left little evidence of their stay. No evidence, according to most Icelandic historians. But proof of an early and transient human presence in Iceland would necessarily be scanty. Volcanic eruptions have buried even many modern human habitation sites. Only extraordinarily good luck would have preserved the scanty detritus left by a small number of neolithic visitors.
Nevertheless, such a discovery may have been made. According to Kevin Smith of the Buffalo Museum of Science, a quartz core from which micro blades had been struck has recently been excavated in western Iceland. It is similar to cores left by people of the palaeo-Arctic tradition that, in the North American Arctic, date back at least three thousand years.
The earliest human beings of record to visit Iceland were the men who guided Pytheas there around 330 B.C., though they are not likely to have been the first of their kind to cross the wide waters separating Iceland from the Northern Islands.
What would Tilli have been like when the first Europeans came upon it?
If they arrived in spring they would have found every sea cliff whitened by nesting oceanic birds. Most of the larger islands and all of the inland reaches, excepting only sheer mountain slopes, barren lava fields, and equally barren glaciers, harboured legions of swans, geese, and ducks come to breed in one of the planet’s greatest waterfowl havens.
The enormous bird population would have attracted flying predators, chief amongst these being sea eagles, golden eagles, peregrine falcons, and gyrfalcons—all of which were highly valued by falconers, the latter two being literally worth their weight in gold to royal practitioners of the sport in Europe and the East.
This avian world also has sustained great numbers of Arctic foxes, both white and blue, whose pelts were highly valued in European markets as exotic rarities.
The white or water bear was equally at home, whether in the sea or when it came ashore to fish in salmon rivers or to den and raise its young. Initially it must have been at least as abundant in Iceland as in southeastern Labrador, where, as late as the mid-eighteenth century, thirty or forty white bears were sometimes to be found fishing the lower reaches of a single salmon stream.2 They were not called “polar” bears in those times. It was not until the nineteenth century that the remnants of the species, which by then survived mostly in high latitudes, acquired that name.
The sagas testify that water bears still occurred in Iceland in Norse times and that as late as the 1400s a white bear pelt was still worth a fortune in Continental markets, while a live cub was considered a gift fit for a king.
The land produced riches, but the sea surpassed it. Bowhead, black right, grey, humpback, fin, sei, and Bryde’s whales abounded.3 Although valuta seekers seem not to have hunted the great whales extensively, they probably collected baleen from strandings. And they actively hunted the narwhal, whose spiralled ivory tusk surpassed in value all other Arctic products, with the possible exception of gyrfalcons.
Ring, grey, and harbour seals thronged coastal waters, their rendered oil being an important source of the tar used in great quantities for sealing the seams of wooden ships and waterproofing skin-covered ones.
The variety of living creatures that could be converted into riches must have amazed the first European visitors to Tilli. But foremost were the walrus. We will never know how many tuskers encrusted Tilli’s beaches, but can estimate (by analogy with the size of the herds encountered by latter-day exploiters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and on Sable Island) that they must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands.4
So much ivory! So much leather! So much fat to be rendered into oil! Valuta-hunting ventures must have been undertaken almost as soon as Albans discovered Tilli.
Valuta voyages were never casual affairs haphazardly undertaken by a handful of adventurers in any old vessel. Each farfaring ship was painstakingly built and fitted for her task and crewed by the most skilful hunter-sailormen, accompanied by wives and sisters, sons and daughters, all of equal competence.
A vessel’s outfit included everything necessary to keep the ship in good repair, but very little food. Valuta seekers took most of their livelihood from land and sea. Self-sufficiency was the order of the day on voyages that could last a year or more.
Hunters arriving in early summer would land on Tilli’s southern coast, whose almost endless beaches, protected lagoons, and rich offshore shellfish pastures provided ideal seasonal grounds for enormous numbers of walrus. Each crew worked a stretch of beach belonging by tradition to its clan. Each vessel was unladen, hauled far enough up to be safely out of reach of storm tides, and overturned to serve as a shelter for her people.5
The walrus-killing season lasted until the fierce storms of autumn began to ravage the open coast and roaring breakers rendered the beaches unusable to walrus and hunters alike.
Both now made their separate ways to wintering grounds along the fiord-riven northern and especially western coasts. During the winter, walrus spent most of their time at sea, hauling out occasionally on reefs, rocky ledges, and wave-swept islets. Here they were seldom molested. Nobody relished hunting them from skin boats, preferring instead to make market kills at the mass haul-outs on summer beaches.
Faxaflói and Breidafjördur were particularly favoured Alban winter bases because they harboured an abundance of seals, which, in turn, attracted white bears. Bear hunting and fox trapping were major occupations during the dark, cold winter months.
Seals were also taken, especially
in January, when grey seals whelped on offshore reefs. With the coming of spring some people busied themselves collecting eiderdown. Others departed on small-boat expeditions to slaughter flightless great auks on their island rookeries for fat and feathers. The younger and most agile men set off inland in search of gyrfalcon and peregrine eyries on high-country cliffs. People remaining at the camp caught and dried salmon, which flooded the streams in such numbers they could be forked ashore.
Salmon fishing could become exceedingly exciting when human fishers found themselves challenged by competing water bears. At such times the islanders’ black dogs more than earned their keep by distracting the white giants.
As spring turned to summer, vessels were repaired and their skin coverings tarred preparatory to launching. Once again houses were transformed into ships. Some set sail for home in the Northern Isles. Others returned to Tilli’s south coast for one more slaughter on the beaches before their final departure late in the second summer.
From very early times, individual Albans of the lone-wolf variety elected to live on the island permanently, in much the same fashion that white trappers have chosen in modern times to live isolated in the Canadian Arctic.
The exploitation of Tilli’s riches had its ups and downs. Periods of deteriorating weather magnified the natural hazards of farfaring but the weather never became bad enough to prevent some determined valuta seekers from sailing to and from Tilli.
Valuta from Tilli (and beyond) sustained the Northern Islanders. But, as the eighth century A.D. approached, the land of fire and ice was destined to play an even more vital role in their survival.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SANCTUARY
FAVOURABLE WEATHER BEGINNING EARLY IN THE Christian era seems to have persuaded a few hardy crofters to join a scattering of loners sustaining themselves on Tilli as hunter-gatherers. A subsequent long cool spell around A.D. 300 might have discouraged settlement, although Roman coins of the period found in the Eastfiords, backed by the account of Theodosius’s expedition to Thule in 363, suggest that eastern Iceland, at least, was then inhabited.
There were good reasons why settlement should have begun along the eastern coast. This was where Tilli lay closest to Britain; the Eastfiords abounded in good harbours; the east-coast climate (warmed by tendrils of the Gulf Stream) was especially favourable; and the countryside afforded a mixture of wooded and arable lands.
During the fifth century, the North Atlantic climate entered a long period of improvement. Fewer storms raged; mean temperatures rose; and there was less rain and snow. Enticed by Tilli’s good pastoral prospects, and made increasingly uneasy by political and military uncertainties boiling up in the wake of Rome’s departure from Britain, more and more Northern Islanders seem to have made the journey west.
Circa 550 a British priest named Brendan, accompanied by fourteen fellow clerics, set sail from Ireland in a curragh—a wicker-framed vessel built on the same principle as Alban boats but covered with cow, instead of walrus, hides. After diverse adventures, the voyagers reached the Faeroes, where they wintered with a resident religious community. The following spring they sailed west to a nearby land that must have been Tilli.1
Here they visited another religious settlement that may have been on the off-lying island the Norse called Papey, presumably because they had found Christians in prior possession of it.
In the accounts of Brendan’s voyage it is called Isle of St. Albe. Brendan and his companions were welcomed by a white-haired abbot and entertained by clerics who said their foundation had been established eighty years earlier by a priest named Albe whom they now honoured as their patriarch.
Irish church history tells us that St. Albe and St. Patrick were contemporaries. Albe reputedly spent his final years in Ireland, but there is no evidence he was Celtic. It seems fair to assume he was an Alban.
Historians generally admit there may have been a few Europeans in Iceland at the coming of the Norse, but write them off as of little consequence, assuming they amounted to no more than a small scattering of Christian hermits seeking isolation from mankind and devoting themselves to abjuring the profane and mortifying the flesh.2
The people Brendan met do not fit this image. We are told they ate white bread, which was the height of luxury in those times, and drank from crystal goblets. Rather than ascetic anchorites, they are portrayed as a high-living lot whose prosperity must needs have been maintained by a well-to-do parish.
Residents of Tilli in those days ought to have been relatively prosperous. Good land in quantity was available for the taking. The soil was far more generous than that of the constricted holdings on the home islands. Virgin ground and favourable weather would have produced bumper crops. Valuta goods were to be had in abundance. Of a certainty, resident clergy should have been well provided for.
On fine evenings people gather in the dooryards of their crofts; men to slouch about and yarn while mending tools and implements; younger women to season the air with the aromas of mutton, fish, or seabirds boiling in pots suspended from tripods over open fires. Older women knit and sew by the long light of the sinking sun. Youngsters bother their elders, and play with ever-attendant dogs.
If the weather turns foul, people withdraw into the long, low, single room of each turf-built house. They eat by the flicker of saucer-lamps, then listen to stories, or sing old songs until it is time to clear away the benches and lie down to sleep (some to make love) on, and under, piles of fleeces.
During daytime the houses belong to the women who, when they are not cooking or dealing with children, make butter and cheese, card wool, and weave homespun. They have much to do, but time remains for pleasuring themselves with talk and the practice of decorative skills.
The men’s main summer task is to lay up a sufficient supply of hay. The half-wild sheep can look after themselves year round, as can the hairy little horses; but if cattle are to continue to give milk and to survive the winter, they must be stabled and provided with hay.
Harvesting wild grasses over rough and uneven ground with hand sickles is exceedingly laborious. If it becomes too tedious one can always go fishing. Nets are set in the runs between islands and at river mouths. On any day when it is not pouring rain or blowing a living gale, boys will be out jigging fish from little skin-covered boats not much larger than bathtubs. When the salmon run is on, all available hands spread out along the stream banks, spearing and gaffing the fat fish as they work upstream against the current.
Summer and winter, the men spend as much time as they can spare from the crofts, hunting and trapping foxes, seals, and other creatures whose produce will be added to the valuta brought home by the clan’s farfarers. Men and youths also kill great numbers of waterfowl and seabirds and fill many sealskin sacks with swan, duck, and goose eggs preserved in oil.
On Sundays and feast days, the crofters assemble at their local chapels or, if they are near enough, at one of the large clerical establishments, there to worship God and to share the news of their small world. For the most part the news is good, and life is well worth living.
By early in the sixth century, Tilli had notably changed its spots. What had once been a valuta hunting ground par excellence had become home to a growing population of small holders, herdsmen, and fishermen whose crofts clustered along the habitable portions of the eastern and southern coasts.
However, as the numbers of people increased, those of wild creatures diminished. The tusker tribes were much reduced and the survivors had altered their ancient ways. Now they eschewed the great sand beaches, hauling out instead in small and wary companies on offshore reefs where they could be neither surprised nor driven inland. This was especially hard lines for valuta men because a mounting vogue on the Continent for ivory religious carvings and decorations was making white gold more sought after than ever.
Valuta hunters were also having trouble finding bears and gyrfalcons. Bears were in short supply partly because of hunting but mainly because the polar pack, whi
ch was their summer seal-hunting ground, no longer came close to Tilli. Falcons were growing scarce because so many crofters were robbing fledglings from the nests.
As Tilli’s animal resources began to fail, valuta men did as their ancestors had done in the past. They fared farther westward, searching for new grounds.
Climatic conditions for farfaring had never been better. By the mid-sixth century, the river of Arctic pack flowing south between Tilli and Greenland had become no more than a minor seasonal obstruction which, in some years, vanished entirely.
In the past, venturesome probes (to say nothing of involuntary voyages due to stress of weather) had been made to the land the Albans knew as Crona. There was now little to prevent valuta hunters from sailing there almost at will.
Cape Brewster stands about halfway along the east Greenland coast. The thousand-mile stretch of southeast-trending shoreline separating it from Cape Farewell is mostly fronted by a wall of glacial ice thousands of feet thick which, in many places, crowds almost to the sea. This is such an inhospitable shore, with such limited animal resources that, with the exception of a small region around Angmagssalik, it has repulsed even the efforts of the Inuit to maintain a foothold upon it.
However, for six hundred miles to the northward of Cape Brewster Greenland’s east coast is of an entirely different nature. Here is a glacierfree land of mountains, moraines, and tundra-carpeted valleys as large as Iceland itself. The coast is deeply indented by convoluted fiords, one of which, Scoresby Sound, runs into the land for almost two hundred miles before encountering the inland ice.
These northeastern fiords and the country surrounding them have long been rich in animal life. Even as late as the early years of the twentieth century, more than 150 cabins belonging to Norwegian and Danish trappers dotted the shores of the fiord complexes. The wealth these men obtained from fox, bear, musk ox, ermine, and wolf pelts, together with seal skins and fat, walrus ivory, and narwhal horns, was so great that Norway attempted to annex the entire region, and was prevented from doing so only by the intervention of the League of Nations acting on Denmark’s behalf.
