II
Vikings and Skraelings in Vinland
BY the closing years of the fifteenth century, not only were the mercantile classes of western Europe thoroughly awake to the possibilities of world trade, but a good number of other people were beginning to think for themselves about the world around them.
If one could cross by land to China, which itself faced on the sea, there must be ways to reach that fabulous country by skirting the land masses of the world. In that manner the Portuguese had discovered an all-water route to India and Malaya. Or, was there the possibility of an even more direct passage to both China and the Indies by sailing straight west across the ocean?
The ancients had said the world was a globe. Hundreds of years before Christ, Greek philosophers were sure the world was round. One of them, Eratosthenes, calculated the earth’s circumference to be 40,000 kilometers (amazingly enough today, within 9 kilometers of the meridional figure!) And Strabo, a geographer who lived in the first century, recorded that if it were not for lack of sailing equipment to negotiate the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean one could travel from Spain to India by keeping to the same parallel.
Of course this did not agree with the teachings of the scriptures which spoke of the “four corners of the earth.” All during the dark ages ignorant clerics of the Church preferred to think of the world as a flat platter and pretended to forbid a contrary conception because it did not conform with the Bible. The low level of western culture had blindly accepted the thesis that the inner edges of this platter-like world were inhabited by monstrous creatures, and beyond the edges—a bottomless gulf!
On such grounds most people of the western world still resisted any notion that the world was round. But there was a question in the minds of many.
The Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Arabs had navigated the waters of the Atlantic—so had the Irish and the Vikings who long since discovered and colonized “islands” across the western sea—all without falling off the edges of the world. The Arabs, even now, were making the globes they had made for centuries for their sailors and traders. Many learned men in the west, geographers and scientists, were confident that the world was round; only recently at scholarly Nuremberg a fine globe had been completed showing Asia right across from Spain.
If there were “islands” they could be skirted, large though some of them might be according to the legends and the sagas of ancient mariners. Christopher Columbus, the Genoese sailor, must have heard about these western islands at Iceland when he visited that old Irish-Norse settlement in 1477. Certainly he must have heard much about Greenland.
Greenland, a continent-like island in the west, had been colonized by several thousand Norsemen in the tenth century under the leadership of a red-headed, murderous Icelander named Eric Thorvaldson. From there two of his sons, Leif and Thorvald, an illegitimate daughter named Freydis, and a former daughter-in-law, Gudrid, with her new husband Thorfinn Karlsefni, set out on even more daring trading and colonizing expeditions to other great islands—“the western lands of the world.”
First, Leif, whose conversion to Christianity against his pagan father’s will may have had something to do with his wish to get away, made landings in America in 1003. To Leif it was “White Man’s Land” or “Great Ireland,” for he knew that Christian Irish had preceded him there. There is in fact some evidence today that Celtic missionaries in staunch, hide-covered coracles, and others too, had been crossing the sea and making settlements in America for five hundred years before Leif Ericson sailed west from Greenland. But Leif’s visit is recorded with much more credibleness.
In the tradition of his Viking ancestors Leif and his crew of thirty-five men visited Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and appear to have made their camp for the winter on Cape Cod where they built a good house. There they leisurely cut timber and gathered vines for cargo back to treeless Greenland. Some of the crew shaped a new mast from a tall tree for their dragon ship. Others collected peltries. All marvelled at the mildness of the new country’s climate.
Leif called the land surrounding his camp site “Vinland,” probably because of the abundance of the greenbrier vines which grew there. These made strong, flexible rope material when stripped of their thorns and stranded together. On the other hand the name “Vinland” may have been derived from the grape-vines and wineberries discovered there by Leif’s family retainer, a “southerner” called Tyrker. If this slave came originally from the Mediterranean area as his name might indicate he may well have been the first to recognize grapes and demonstrate their usefulness.
One thing is certain however; the addition of wine to Leif’s already valuable cargo, when he embarked for Greenland the following year, made his expedition most exciting—one to be emulated!
Ambitious Thorvald Ericson, for one, did not feel that the western lands had been sufficiently explored by his brother. He set out in 1004 and spent two years in Vinland investigating the coasts and rivers. In his Viking ship, the same one that Leif had used, the sagas seem to say that he ranged north of Cape Cod along the Maine coast and south through Long Island Sound.
The natives Thorvald met on his voyage were surprised whenever possible and liquidated without quarter. Skraelings, he called them, meaning shriekers or war-whoopers. No doubt the rough treatment afforded the wild Skraelings was an approved medieval means of taking possession of their fur skins with the least bother. In any case it ended in Thorvald’s own death. One day hundreds of Skraelings in their canoes suddenly attacked the Viking ship. Although the Norsemen drove them off with much slaughter Thorvald was mortally wounded in his armpit by an arrow. He was buried ashore that same day. His men returned to Greenland the following year, in 1007.
It has been claimed that the encounter in which Thorvald was slain took place at Mount Desert Island on the Maine coast. Somes Sound does seem to fit the site of the battle as related in the saga. Certainly, great numbers of natives could have been in the habit of congregating there with their canoes during fur trapping season, for Mount Desert Island was a favorite haunt of beavers and other fur bearers in past centuries.
In 1010 wealthy Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, who had urged the project upon him, took something over 160 colonists from Greenland to establish a permanent Norse trading settlement in the western land. They went in dragon ships and round-bottomed cargo vessels loaded with “all kinds of livestock,” including a bull. The men had headgear adorned with horns, antlers or ravens’ wings. They wore short breeches and were clad with leather armor. Pelts were wrapped about their legs. The women wore girdled tunics. Heavy fur coats and lambskin hoods lined with cat fur protected the voyagers, men and women alike, when the seas were icy and the winds biting. Most of them survived to reach Vinland, where Gudrid bore her husband a son, Snorri, the first autumn they spent at Leif’s old house.
Snorri, who was to become the ancestor of a number of distinguished men including three Icelandic bishops, appears to have been the first European of record born in America.
At Vinland the Skraelings came with “packs wherein were grey furs, sables, and all kind of peltries.” The bull having greatly frightened them, it was some time before they loosened their bundles and offered their pelts in trade. They wanted to exchange them for Norse weapons. Karlsefni rejected this proposition. But the saga relates that he gave them some milk, whereupon the red men wanted nothing else and barter forthwith got under way.
In such manner was the first fur trade of record joined in America, although one cannot resist wondering if the milk was spirituous. Experienced Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had gained his fortune in other parts of the world as a seafaring trader, may well have been the first white man to practice this ancient trick of the trade on the naïve native Americans.
Very soon after this first successful barter the aborigines came back in much greater number than before with bundles of pelts and stood outside the palisades which the Norsemen had been foresighted enough to erect around their house in the meantime. Karlsefni, sensing the making of another good bargain, instructed the women to offer more milk. The Skraelings took it thirstily, pitching their bundles of furs over the palisades. But then one of them tried to steal a Norse weapon and a battle ensued during which many of the Skraelings were slain.
Evidently Karlsefni thought it was too dangerous at Vinland. It would appear that he moved his colony the second year to a site probably on the Hudson River. In the meantime according to some students he had explored the country from its northernmost parts, where he mentioned seeing “many artic foxes,” to the Chesapeake Bay, no doubt entering many rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, possibly the James, and identifying correctly the extent of the Appalachian mountain range. There is reason to believe that he built shelters and maintained a separate camp somewhere in the Chesapeake tidewater.
It may have been there, as the Norsemen told it, that swarthy, ill-looking men with broad cheeks and ugly hair on their heads, came in canoes and stared at them in amazement. Later, these same men came back with “fur-skins and all-grey skins” wanting swords and spears in trade. Evidently there was no milk in this camp, wherever it was, but fortunately the natives finally agreed to take red cloth in exchange for their pelts.
“In return for unblemished skins, the savages would accept a span length of red cloth and bind it around their heads. Thus the trading continued. When Karlsefni’s people began to run short of cloth, they ripped it into pieces so narrow that none was broader than a finger, but the savages even then gave as much for it as before, or more.”
And, so the trading continued, according to a version of the saga in Hauk’s Book, until it ended in a battle as usual. Once more many of the natives were killed. So were two of the Norsemen.
After three years Karlsefni abandoned the idea of a permanent settlement. The Skraelings were too hostile. The Norse, with their superior boats and shields, could cope with them on water. But on land the red men were too numerous and had the advantage of surprise. They couldn’t be held at bay—the Norsemen didn’t have the terrifying firearms available to later colonists coming to America.
All of which may reasonably account for the dearth of Viking artifacts on the eastern seaboard of America. The Norsemen kept close to the shore-line, whether on the seacoast or on a tidewater river, building their huts near the safety of their shielded dragon ships. Today, the sites of those early camps may well be under water as the level of the sea has risen at least five or six feet in the intervening time due to glacial meltings.
A translation of the Flatey Book saga relates that when Karlsefni’s people returned to Greenland they “carried away with them much booty in vines and grapes and peltries,” and that after this “there was much new talk in Greenland about voyaging to Vinland, for this enterprise was now considered both profitable and honorable.”
Not to be outdone in the matter of profit Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eric the Red and with a heart as murderous as that of her father, led an expedition to Vinland a few years later. Honor appears to have had no part in her plans.
Freydis had a husband, but she made the plans. Before leaving Greenland, she arranged with Leif for the loan of his house in Vinland and induced two unsuspecting brothers of another family who had a particularly fine ship to become her partners in the venture. These two men were pledged to take only thirty warriors and their women. Freydis had agreed to take a like number, but somehow she contrived to conceal five extra men in her smaller ship.
After they arrived in Vinland, Freydis managed to keep the two groups apart by fomenting antagonism. The brothers were forced to build a separate house for their men and women. This house, together with too much wine and heavy sleep, proved to be the means of their undoing—all according to the Viking lady’s plan it appears. And what a red-handed proceeding it was!
Freydis, with her husband’s grudging cooperation, succeeded in murdering the two brothers in their house one night after shackling their company. She had all of their men put to death and personally wielded the axe that killed their five women when no one else would do it. Then, taking her deceased partners’ fine trading ship, she returned to Greenland with a rich cargo of furs, wine and lumber.
One shudders to think how she went about extracting the furs from the Skraelings!
For two or three hundred years the Greenland republic maintained an active trade between America and Norway, and with other countries, in walrus hides, seal and fur skins, dried fish and whale fat. Norwegian port records, as well as the sagas, testify to trade with “Markland,” the name which had been given to Nova Scotia by Leif Ericson. There are old church records which show that quantities of the pelts of animals not indigenous to Greenland were exported from that country to Norway, pelts that could have come only from the mainland of America. The bills of lading listing church taxes which had been collected in natura include elk, black bear, beaver, otter, ermine, sable, lynx, glutton and wolf.
But, in 1261, the Greenland parliament renounced its independence and swore allegiance to Norway. Independent traffic with other countries was promptly curtailed. Subsequently the dominance of the Hanseatic League through its monopolistic factory at Bergen, which took no interest in Greenland, brought about a withering of all commerce between Greenland and the continent.
Deterioration of the Greenlanders themselves came about through malnutrition and intermarriage with the Eskimos who descended on their settlements. Some who voyaged to America probably remained there and were eventually absorbed by the natives. There is evidence that as late as 1362 an expedition of Swedes and Norwegians, exploring westward in the Hudson Bay, left their ship at the mouth of the Nelson River and in their afterboats penetrated through Lake Winnipeg up the Red River into Minnesota. An inscription on a rhune-stone, ostensibly left by them as a marker, says they were being cut off by the savages at the time. But, whether authentic or not, the storied voyage appears to be of little commercial significance; the era of Viking trade in America was ended.
Among most scholars during the dark ages little notice had been taken of the Norse discoveries, if indeed very much was known about them. True, the chronicler Adam of Bremen had recorded the discovery of a large island in the western sea, called “Vinland,” but then everyone knew there were “islands” in the sea. Knowledge of any far-western lands, even of Greenland itself, faded with the withering of trade.
Then Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, plowed the ocean straight west in 1492 and returned to assert that as he had predicted the east coast of Asia was six thousand miles nearer to Europe than most of the world’s best geographers had estimated it to be.
A new, short route west to Asia! The news was electrifying to a now thoroughly trade-conscious world. Spain, England, Portugal, France—all took to the western sea.