by Farley Mowat
The uplands were equally fruitful. Caribou abounded, as did rabbits, ptarmigan, and other small fry. Black bears roamed the woods while occasional white bears hunted the shores. Lynx, otter, mink, marten, beaver, fox, and wolf were not only abundant but relatively unwary, having not yet learned who their greatest enemy really was.
And then there was the sea. . . .
The twin inlets of St. George’s Bay and Tusker Bay were home to a concourse of walrus, great whales, lesser whales, porpoises, and fishes. Valuta hunters working these waters were able to take full cargoes in only a few weeks. The necessity of having to make voyages that had once taken them a thousand miles and a year or more from home was now a thing of the past.
The benefits of the new Alba-in-the-West seemed manifold. Not the least of them was freedom from the fear of human depredations. Albans and Tunit had long ago learned to get along. Now Albans learned to do the same with Beothuks who, more withdrawn than Tunit, were somewhat more difficult to approach. Inevitably there were fallings-out between the three peoples and, occasionally, bloodshed; but, in the main, they lived together on the same island in peaceable fashion.
The Norse threat was now distant. And if, in future, the black ships did come seeking, they would not easily find their way to the new Alba-in-the-West. Supposing that they did, they would have to deal with three peoples in arms against them instead of only one.
For three centuries Albans had been driven westward across the grey waters of Ocean. Now, at last, it appeared that they had found their promised land.
MY FIRST VISIT TO ST. GEORGE’S BAY WAS IN 1965, travelling with Newfoundland author Harold Horwood. We lived rough, pitching a tent, boiling our tea over an open fire, and catching brook trout for breakfast. We spent much of our time with a category of people whose social status might be compared to that of gypsies. They were called Jakatars.
Generally rather small and wiry folk, dark-haired and dark-complexioned, they spoke a mixture of French and English laced with a little M’ikmaw.1 Some fished lobster, eels, cod, and herring. Others were “countrymen” spending the bulk of their time in the interior, trapping; guiding “sports” through the mountains and the barrens in pursuit of caribou; or leading fly-fishermen to the best salmon pools in the brooks, as rivers in the region are often called, regardless of size.
In addition, most kept one or two cows, a few sheep, a couple of tough little horses, and a brace of black water dogs. The places where they lived were crofts in all but name.
They were an enduring people. Peter Barfit, also known as Pierre Beaupatrie, was ninety-four when we met him. He talked at length of his childhood and dwelt on the extraordinary trips Jakatar hunters and “furriers” had been used to making into the country, sometimes being gone from home for several months.
“I suppose furs accounted for most of your income?” I enquired.
Peter gave me a wizened grin. “You supposes wrong then. We got something for the furs, certain, but the most of what we got come from selling beef and mutton to Americee and Frenchie schooner men as used to come fishin’ onto the coast by the hunnerts, spring and fall. They was some starvin’ for fresh meat.”
I knew that until a generation previously almost every Newfoundland family had kept a cow and some sheep, but I had never considered the Rock capable of producing beef and mutton on what amounted to a commercial scale. I concluded Peter was stretching things.
On a later visit I enquired more deeply into what he had told us, and learned he had understated the matter. After the completion of the trans-island railway in 1898, people from around St. George’s Bay produced the bulk of all fresh beef sold in the distant capital city of St. John’s and in most communities in between. I was told that as many as three hundred cattle had sometimes been assembled in St. George’s shipping pens. And I learned that until as late as 1940 the vast estuarine plain at the foot of St. George’s Bay, degraded into a gravel and concrete desert during the war by a USAF Strategic Air Base, had embraced several farms, on some of which as many as a hundred head of cattle had grazed.
In the gentler climate of the tenth century, pastoralists would have found this region even more rewarding. They would not even have had to clear forests in order to free the soil for their use. Broad expanses of natural grasslands exceeding twelve thousand acres in total still surround the many coastal lagoons, spread across river deltas, or undulate over sand spits and sandy islands.
As Claire and I discovered when we explored the district in the summer of 1996, it and the nearby Codroy valley remain the most productive agricultural areas in Newfoundland, and amongst the best on the entire Atlantic seaboard of Canada. We found laden apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees; gardens producing a remarkable diversity and abundance of vegetables; pig and poultry farming; and, along the so-called Highland (southern) shore of the bay, not only cattle ranches but fields of corn and grain as well.
But Flat Island, for so long the hub of human activity in southwestern Newfoundland, was such no longer. As late as 1900 Sandy Point, as the community upon the island was called, numbered more than three hundred inhabitants, making it by far the largest settlement on the west coast. By the time Claire and I came on the scene, Sandy Point had been abandoned for thirty years. It perished, so we were told by a grizzled man walking his dog on the mainland shore, because of the wheel.
“Once the railroad and then the high road come by, there was less and less call for vessels to bring the freight, or to carry off salt fish or people to St. John’s, to Canada, or to the Boston States. When I were a lad there’d sometimes be vessels enough anchored out there you could almost have skipped across Flat Bay from deck to deck.
“My people always belonged to Sandy Point. When we come out of it in ’62 we was near the last to leave. Then the houses was beat down or floated off to the mainland. At the end of it only the headstones in the graveyard was left standing.
“When did Sandy Point begin? Now that I can’t tell ye, sir. There’s some as says people was living there before the flood.
“What odds? It’s been a right long time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT
SEARCHING FOR ALBA
WHEN I WAS WRITING WESTVIKING, I WAS MORE concerned with where the Norse had gone than with their reasons for going. I accepted more or less at face value the orthodox explanation that they had been impelled by exploratory zeal combined with a desire to settle new and distant lands.
Working on the present book disabused me. It early became apparent that the primary and abiding motivation of Norse westfarers was the lust for loot. Land taking did follow in Britain, Iceland, and Greenland, but in all cases the path had been blazed by marauders bent on pillage.
Greenland Norse proved to be no exceptions. Those who are on record as sailing west across the Labrador Sea did so not as explorers or settlers, but as sea rovers seeking plunder.
This chapter and the next, both of which include synoptic accounts of known Viking voyages to mainland North America, are partly based on my reconstructions in Westviking, but this time around I have emphasized purpose and behaviour.
Bjarni, son of Herjolf, was a well-to-do merchant mariner from southwestern Iceland. Having spent the winter of 984 in Norway, he returned home in the summer of 985 to find his father gone to Greenland with Erik Rauda’s land-taking expedition.
Bjarni decided to follow, even though, as he frankly admitted to his crew, “people may think us foolhardy, since none of us have been in the Greenland Sea before.”
They departed from Iceland with their cargo of Norwegian trade goods still in the hold, and were struck by a fierce northerly which swept them far to the south and west of their intended course. After a long, hard time at sea, they sighted land. Closing with it, they came to a country of well-wooded hills behind a bold coast pierced by many fiord-like inlets.
They had reached the eastern coast of Newfoundland.1
From dead reckoning and his relative latitude, Bjarni knew he was far to the so
uth and west of his intended port. He would also have known that, a few years earlier, Erik had crossed a sea to the west of Greenland and had found an extensive coast. It would have been reasonable for Bjarni to conclude that Erik’s land was contiguous with the one he now saw before him. He decided to sail north along it until he had regained his lost latitude.
In a few days he was abeam the forested regions of Labrador. The crew wanted to go ashore here but Bjarni forbade it. He pressed on under the formidable shadow of the Torngats until he reached the northern tip of Labrador, which, it so happens, lies in the same latitude as Erik Rauda’s Greenland settlement. It now remained only for Bjarni to turn his knorr’s head east and run down his latitude. Four days later the lookout raised mountains and glaciers ahead, and soon thereafter Bjarni brought his vessel into Sandfiord, where his father, Herjolf, had taken land.
The sagas say nothing about Bjarni having landed in the west but, considering that his knorr had been storm-buffeted all the way from Iceland, he must surely have sought a haven near his landfall, where he could make things shipshape and replenish his firewood and fresh water. That he did do this seems implicit in his refusal to let his men go ashore in Labrador. There was then no need, he said, since “of neither [wood nor water] are we unprovided.”
Where might a Newfoundland landing have taken place? Conception Bay, the first protected body of water Bjarni’s people would have been likely to encounter on an approach to Newfoundland from the northeast, is the best candidate.
And what might they have found there? Wood and water, certainly; fish and meat probably; but they might also have found people, or at least traces of them.
I am persuaded by Bjarni’s behaviour during the remainder of this voyage, and by his subsequent history, that he found either Albans or strong indications that they were or had been in the vicinity.2
Because Bjarni was a far-ranging merchant who regularly visited European ports, he could hardly have failed to hear about Alba-in-the-West and to have acquired some knowledge of its whereabouts. He would, of course, have been fully aware that Albans hated Norsemen in general, and Icelanders in particular.
Bjarni was no Viking warrior. He was a merchant skipper backed by only a handful of men. Finding himself on an alien coast inhabited by potentially hostile people, he would have done the sensible thing and taken himself and his vessel out of there as fast as possible.
The sagas tell us that when Bjarni reached Erik’s new settlement he was accused of timidity, if not cowardice, for his failure to investigate the far western land more closely. Whether there was justification for these accusations, the fact remained that he had pioneered a Norse route into that part of the world where western Alba lay.
This contribution to Norse knowledge did not fire any immediate reaction. The loss of almost half of the first wave of settlers sailing to Erik’s new fiefdom seems to have chilled desire for further westward adventures, and the usual hard scrabble of getting established in a new land preoccupied Erik’s people for some time. In fact, it was not until about 995 that the Norse Greenlanders looked beyond Crona’s refurbished crofts to what lay over the western horizon.
The Alban shift from northerly to southerly hunting grounds in the new world brought about major changes in the valuta trade. Although tusker ivory remained a mainstay, seal tar was no longer worth commercial preparation and the European demand for sea mammal oil was largely being met by Basques who were killing Right whales on a massive scale in home waters.
Fortunately for Alba-in-the-West, the slack was more than taken up by a commerce destined to shape the future of the new world.
The North American fur trade was coming into being.
White fox and white bear skins had always been prime valuta. Now they were joined by a wide variety of New World peltries, including lynx, sea mink, otter, marten, black and grizzly bear, and beaver. The trade may even have included moose (called elk in Europe) and buffalo (bison), the hides of which were so sought-after for leather clothing, shields, and body armour that, before the end of the ninth century, both species had been virtually exterminated in Europe. Moose were, however, abundant in the Gulf of St. Lawrence basin, and wood buffalo still ranged the eastern forests almost, if not quite, to the shores of the Atlantic.3
As the demand for peltry grew, Tunit and Beothuks must inevitably have become involved in its collection. Such were the small beginnings of a commerce which would grow and spread until it encompassed an entire continent.
The flow of wealth from Alba-in-the-West must inevitably have stirred the rapacity of Norse Greenlanders, not least among them Erik Rauda. Something certainly impelled Erik to go westviking once again. Loot was the most likely motive, but he may also have hoped to “rescue” his kinsman Ari Marson, supposedly held captive in Alba.
In the winter of 996 Erik and his elder son, Leif, determined to go roving in the west. To this end they refitted Bjarni’s knorr. When summer brought good sailing weather, Erik rode down to join the vessel lying in the fiord below Brattahlid. But Thor failed him. Erik fell from his horse, injuring himself so severely he had to give up the venture. So Leif sailed without him, accompanied by Bjarni as pilot and sailing master.4
The real nature of this expedition is revealed by the saga statement that, on this occasion, Bjarni’s knorr carried thirty-five men! Clearly this was a Viking war band and, I believe, one with a specific target in mind.
The relative latitude of the new Alba-in-the-West would have been a more or less open secret amongst the North Atlantic merchant mariner community. As a farfaring merchant himself, Bjarni would have had access to such information. He would also have known the latitude of his own first landfall in the New World.
These two latitudes almost mirror one another. The mouths of Trinity and Conception bays, which bracket the stretch of eastern coast where Bjarni made his first landfall, open between 47° 50’ north and 48° 40’ north. The mouth of St. George’s Bay in southwestern Newfoundland opens between 48° 0’ north and 48° 30’ north. From a comparison of these, Bjarni could have concluded that if he sailed west between the Norse equivalents of 48° and 49° he would find Alba. If, on his first visit to Newfoundland, he had found indications of an Alban presence emanating from Cupids Cove, it would have reinforced this conclusion. He was not to know that the whole of Newfoundland lay between Conception Bay and Alba-in-the-West.
In the event, he made his second landfall at the northern extremity of the hundred-mile-long peninsula separating Conception and Trinity bays, probably on Baccalieu Island in latitude 48° 10’ north.5
Leif and Bjarni were then faced with the choice of descending into Conception Bay or into Trinity Bay. They chose the latter.
Here is what I believe happened thereafter.
By the time the knorr sniffed her way into the many harbours and inlets along Trinity’s eastern shore, summer was getting on. The Norse had been a long time at sea, so they made a halt at Tickle Cove Pond, from which secure and comfortable base reconnaissance parties using longboats investigated the west coast of Trinity Bay. They found nothing to feed their expectations.
Winter was now approaching so they hauled the knorr out on Tickle Cove Sands, built turf-and-log cabins for themselves, and settled in. The saga tells us they spent some of their time reconnoitring on foot, and some cutting timber and gathering grapevines. In the event of failing to make a real strike they would at least not have to come home empty-handed.
Nothing is said about encounters with other human beings but the sagas make it clear the Norse were on tenterhooks. We are not told who, or what, they feared. The region where they wintered has apparently never been favoured by native peoples. Wolves and bears would not have given Vikings pause. But the possibility of being surprised by Albans would have served to keep them on the qui vive.
At the coming of spring, they launched their knorr and set sail for home, with nothing to show for their venture but baulks of wood, grapevines, and perhaps some furs. Unless something u
ntoward had happened, their venture would hardly have been deemed a success.
Something untoward did happen during the voyage home. The knorr arrived at Brattahlid carrying a cargo so valuable it made Leif’s fortune.
Some sources say he found an Icelandic or Norwegian ship wrecked on an islet off the Greenland coast. He is supposed to have rescued crew and cargo. Thereafter the crew fortuitously died of some unspecified ailment.
According to the saga,
Leif was afterwards known as Leif the Fortunate because he was now so well off both in riches and renown.
The saga story was composed by a Greenlander, but the existing recension is the work of Christian Icelandic clerics of a considerably later era who were not much inclined to celebrate the piratical aspects of their pagan forebears’ exploits. I suspect that behind the story may have been an encounter between Leif’s knorr and either a European merchantman bound to or from Alba or an Alban valuta ship.
Farfarer’s people were amongst the first valuta folk to move from Crona to Okak. Many clans that followed went on to settle at Alba-in-the-West. Farfarer’s people chose not to shift again. Although they hunted the Inland Sea as diligently as other valuta men, and sometimes wintered over, they maintained their crofts in Okak.
Time was lost travelling between the two places, but there were compensations. West-bound European merchant ships generally made their landfalls on the Torngat coast, then visited Okak, after which they might or might not continue south. Okak valuta folk therefore had the first opportunity to trade, and could command premium prices for their goods.
Early in June of 997, Farfarer, with a crew of eight men, six women, and three youngsters, prepared to return to Okak from a cove in Tusker Bay where she had wintered. Walrus had been plentiful and the previous summer’s slaughter on the beaches had yielded several casks of ivory.
