A Brief History of the Vikings (21 page)

The news, so reports the
Greenlander Saga
, was a surprise to Bjarni, but his merchant’s mind was already working.
¹⁴
Rather than unload his cargo in Iceland, he decided it would be more prudent to head after his father – presumably reasoning that colonists in Greenland would be pleased to find a ship of Norwegian luxuries turning up on their shores. Bjarni’s men were in agreement, although they did note that the route to Greenland was unknown to them, and that it might prove difficult.

Bjarni’s ship overshot Greenland by several days, possibly due to his ignorance of the route and currents, although his saga is swift to plead poor weather conditions. Beset by a severe fog that made it difficult to get their bearings by sun or stars, Bjarni sailed ever onwards, and when he did eventually sight land, it did not fit the description he had heard of Greenland’s eastern coast. Bjarni’s ship was the first European vessel to record a sighting of the place now known as North America, although Bjarni did not put ashore. Realizing that he was significantly to the south of his chosen destination, he sailed north along the strange shore for a further two days, but at no point did he see the glaciers that would identify the coastline as Greenland. His men did, however, note that the coastline was thickly forested – a fact that would encourage later explorers to seek it out from tree-starved Greenland. The exact location of Bjarni’s voyage is unknown – he never
dropped anchor, but merely tracked the Canadian coast north. Somewhere in the region of Baffin Island, he stared out at the icy shore and pronounced it worthless.
¹⁵
Turning back to the east, Bjarni sailed for several more days, until he reached a coastline that did indeed turn out to be Greenland. He found his father’s new homestead and supposedly turned to a farmer’s life, although by the next paragraph the
Greenlander Saga
reports that he began trading once more, with Norway.

It was 14 years after Bjarni’s historic voyage that the unknown coastline began to renew its pull on Vikings. The prime mover in the new venture was Erik the Red’s son, Leif the Lucky, the foolhardy pioneer of new sea routes. It was Leif who first sailed direct from Greenland to Norway, bypassing completely the staging posts of Iceland and the Faeroes, and instead pointing his ship directly at Scandinavia. Leif’s route headed due east from Greenland’s southern tip, and, if sailed properly, would pass neatly between the Faeroes and the Shetlands, steering with the former to port and the latter to starboard. Sailors might not arrive immediately at their destination port, but Norway was a large target and difficult to miss.

Leif bought the aging Bjarni Herjolfsson’s ship, and attempted to organize an expedition to the unknown coast at the turn of the eleventh century. He even tried to enlist the help of the venerable Erik the Red, but although the old Viking agreed to go, an injury from a fall as preparations were finalized caused him to excuse himself. It is therefore Leif the Lucky who is credited with leading the first party of Europeans to set foot in the New World. Deliberately retracing Bjarni’s trip homewards, Leif reached a flat, unpromising shore that was probably Baffin Island.
¹⁶
Regarding himself as the rightful namer by virtue of actually making a landfall, he called it
Helluland
(Slab-land). Sailing further to the south,
Leif’s crew sighted another land, covered in dense forests. This, too, matched Bjarni’s earlier descriptions, and was dubbed
Markland
(Forest-land) by Leif.

Another two days further south, they found an even more promising region, where they decided to spend the winter. The exact site of Leif’s base is unknown – although the most likely site is a Viking camp excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in north Newfoundland. Constructed somewhere between 1000 and 1020, the site appears to have been a base suitable for up to 90 men with the facilities for heavy-duty ship repair – a hollow for use as a dry dock, a smithy, and a kiln. At several points in the site, modern archaeologists have unearthed butternuts, which are not known to grow north of the St Lawrence river – whoever stayed at the L’Anse aux Meadows site had sailed further south, as confirmed by other information contained in
Greenlander Saga
. Leif reported the length of the day at winter solstice, which tallies with a latitude somewhere south of the Gulf of St Lawrence, but north of New Jersey.

The most famous feature of the land was discovered by Tyrkir the Southerner. Separated from the group while foraging, he returned babbling excitably in his native German, and had to be calmed down enough to speak intelligible Norse. Tyrkir had found some kind of berry (probably a cranberry) that he regarded as a grape, suitable for the making of wine. Leif took his word for it – they do not appear to have known much about wine themselves, and relied on Tyrkir’s hazy memories of vineyards from his childhood.
¹⁷
Leif dubbed their new land
Vinland
(Vine-land), wherever it may have been.

Triangulating the solstice length of day, with the butternuts and the ‘grapes’, it appears that Leif’s wanderings took him somewhere near Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, or perhaps even further towards New England, somewhere north of
Cape Cod. Even back in the warm summers of
AD
1000, true grapes did not grow in America north of Maine. After a winter in the new lands, and some brief further explorations, Leif set sail back for Greenland, his ship loaded with lumber from the Canadian forests.

The
Greenlander Saga
also reports an encounter that Leif made on the way home with a group of 15 fellow Vikings wrecked on a reef. He rescued them and brought them safely back to Greenland, before returning to the place of their wreck to retrieve their cargo. The saga implies that the ship was on its way from Norway, but it may have been
another
mission to America, specifically for the purpose of gathering timber. However,
Erik’s Saga
, a less reliable account that includes the same incident, makes no mention of the ship’s destination, instead noting that one of the rescued sailors was the first Christian missionary to reach Greenland. Considering that all the Icelandic sagas were committed to books long after the events they describe, it remains possible that the shipwrecked Vikings may have played a far greater role in the discovery of America than
Erik’s Saga
lets on. There is certainly a bizarre jumble of incidents concerning the survivors, which the suspicious-minded might interpret as signs of a whitewash. Among the rescued party was a woman called Gudrid, ‘a woman of striking appearance’ and the wife of the ship’s captain Thorir.
¹⁸
Without a place to stay in Greenland, Thorir’s crew lodged among the locals, and the couple were invited to stay at Erik the Red’s homestead in Brattahlid. For some reason, Thorir did not survive the ensuing winter – the saga implies that an outbreak of disease did for several of the new arrivals, as well as causing the death of Erik the Red himself. But Gudrid had no trouble finding a new man; she married Leif the Lucky’s brother Thorsteinn, and was to play an important role in later explorations of America.

Whatever the truth behind Leif’s luck and Thorir’s peculiar lack of it, Leif did not return to America. With the passing of Erik the Red, Leif was the inheritor of Brattahlid, and had other responsibilities to concern him, chiefly his
de facto
position as the senior colonist. His seafaring days were over, but he passed his well-travelled vessel on to his brother Thorvald. Thorvald wasted little time in preparing another trip to Vinland, fired possibly by the desire for new conquests, but more probably by increasing tensions in Greenland. Whether the story of the missionary rescued by Leif was true or not, Christianity had begun to take hold in the Greenland settlements, and was leading to tensions between the new religionists and the pagan old guard. Quite possibly, the Christian Thorvald was searching for a new place for fellow Christians to settle.

Thorvald was able to sail across the Davis Strait and down the coast to the place where Leif’s crew had previously wintered – wherever it was, it was in a sufficiently prominent position to be easy for other sailors to locate if they knew what they were looking for. After a winter spent at Leif’s old camp, Thorvald ordered further explorations in the spring. On one such trip, his men found evidence of human habitation, a wooden stack-cover.

After another winter at the camp, further explorations led them to a heavily wooded promontory between, as the sagas quaintly put it ‘two fjords’. Wherever it was, it was idyllic enough for Thorvald to decide he had found a place to settle. However, someone else had beaten him to it – three anonymous lumps on a beach in the distance were found to be upturned animal-skin boats, each hiding three Native Americans.

The Norsemen called them
Skraelings
, a word thought to evoke elements of ‘wretches’ or ‘savages’, and possibly related
to the pejorative prefix
Skrit
, used in earlier times to describe the inhabitants of Lapland.
¹⁹
The exact identity of the Skraelings is impossible to determine from the limited saga descriptions; they could have been Beothuk or Micmac Indians. Whoever they were, they appeared sufficiently threatening for Thorvald’s men to kill them. After a scuffle on the shoreline, the first recorded encounter between Europeans and Native Americans ended with eight Indians dead, and a lone survivor paddling in fast retreat towards a distant cluster of huts. He soon returned with heavy reinforcements, and in the ensuing battle between Viking ship and kayak flotilla, the Vikings were victorious. Thorvald, however, was shot through the armpit by a Skraeling arrow, and died in the aftermath, becoming, in a day of many firsts, the first European to perish on American soil, buried at at unknown location recorded as Crossness.

Thorvald’s crew made it back to Greenland, dismayed at the loss of their leader, but still optimistic about the potential offered by Vinland. They arrived back at Eriksfjord to discover that the sons of Erik the Red had suffered a second tragedy – in their absence, Thorvald’s brother Thorsteinn had also perished of an unknown disease, leaving his widow Gudrid an exceptionally rich woman, with inheritances from two departed husbands.

Although by now she must have seemed remarkably unfortunate, Gudrid remained an attractive marital prospect. She was still young, famously beautiful, rich, and related by marriage to the celebrated Leif the Lucky, unofficial headman of the Greenland colony. The sagas report a strange incident that could refer to a failed love affair or courtship with another man,
²⁰
but by the time the Vinland explorers returned, Gudrid had found a third husband. He was quite literally fresh off the boat from Norway, a wealthy ship’s captain called Thorfinn
Karlsefni. Leif brokered the marriage himself, functioning
in loco parentis
for his bereaved sister-in-law, and Gudrid’s groom soon found himself pestered into initiating another expedition to Vinland, this time with the intention of settling.

Karlsefni set out to colonize Vinland, but was expressly told by Leif that he could only ‘borrow’ the campsite where Leif and his brother had wintered. Leif clearly intended to maintain his claim on Vinland by reminding all successive travellers exactly who had reached it first. Karlsefni’s party was expected to find land of its own; certainly if it was a colonization mission, it was intended merely as the spearhead – only five women accompanied the settlers.

Karlsefni’s group had been at Leif’s camp for some months before they had their first encounter with Skraelings. A group of natives approached the settlement from the woods, bearing packs loaded with furs. This is in itself a strange occurrence – how did they know what the Vikings would want to trade? If this truly was the first peaceful encounter between the Skraelings and the Vikings, it is not likely to have been as sudden as the saga reports.
²¹
Despite a complete lack of shared language, trade was made possible by accident. In a gesture of hospitality, Karlsefni sent the women out with milk for the skittish new arrivals, but the Skraelings regarded the simple drink as such a delicacy that they were happy to trade their wares simply for more of it.

The incident gave Karlsefni pause. He ordered for a wooden palisade to be erected around the camp – hardly the act of someone not expecting trouble. Some of his companions grew restless, reportedly angry at the complete absence of the much publicized wine-grapes; one, Thorhall the Hunter, setting off back to Europe in disgust.
²²
But in time, Gudrid gave birth to a baby boy, Snorri, the first European to be born in America.

The next visit from the Skraelings came when Snorri was
still in his cradle. Trade went on in a similar manner to the previous occasion, but more Skraelings arrived, and may have even overwhelmed the little camp.
Greenlander Saga
reports an encounter between Gudrid and a mysterious woman, described by most commentators as an ‘apparition’, although if we look at the information revealed in the text itself, she is nothing of the sort:

. . . a shadow fell across the door and a woman entered wearing a black, close-fitting tunic; she was rather short and had a band around her chestnut-coloured hair . . . She walked up to Gudrid and said, ‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Gudrid. What is yours?’

‘My name is Gudrid,’ the woman replied.
²³

Surely this is no apparition, but merely an inquisitive Indian girl repeating the first Norse phrases she has heard. Meanwhile, a fight broke out among the men when one of the Skraelings attempted to make off with a Viking sword – Karlsefni had expressly forbidden the trading of weapons with the inhabitants of Vinland. The would-be thief was killed, and the others fled during the struggle. Since none of the other Vikings remembered seeing Gudrid’s ‘apparition’, it is possible that she was one of a second party of Skraelings that had been detailed to pilfer the camp while the traders caused a distraction.
²⁴