The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (20 page)

The broken end of a bone needle used for a kind of singleneedle knitting was dug from a fire pit, and a needle hone, a slip of quartzite about three inches long used to sharpen a metal sewing needle, was retrieved from the floor. A white glass bead (subsequently lost by the conservation lab in Ottawa) was picked out of the dirt by a doorstep. Beside a broken wall, in a pile of rubble George Decker had dumped when he was digging a hole for a fencepost (or looking for buried treasure, says another version of the story), was the soapstone spindle whorl, proof that a Viking woman was here, in North America, a thousand years ago.

“It had been a horrible, miserable day,” said Birgitta, “cold and wet, one of those days when you work from teacup to teacup.” A student found the spindle whorl by the northernmost house, just outside the attached shed where a Viking ship had been repaired. Perhaps the woman had come by to watch the men work, spinning as she walked, and something had made her drop or put down her spindle and forget all about it, leaving us her calling card. “I had brought a bottle of champagne in my backpack,” Birgitta told me, “and you can bet it was cracked open that night!”

In a documentary movie shown in the park’s visitors’ center, Anne Stine Ingstad says, “Sometimes I identified myself with Gudrid of the sagas. When we found the spindle whorl, I thought it must have been hers.... And when I was longing for home, I thought of how she must have been lonely.”

I asked Birgitta what she thought.

“I have no problem with Gudrid being here,” she replied. “She was!”

One scholar has called the L’Anse aux Meadows artifacts “a rather disappointing collection.” But Birgitta Wallace’s analysis of some very uncharismatic artifacts—rusty nails, chips of wood, the slag from smelting bog ore—found around the houses and in the bog between them and the sea has answered the question, not only of
Where is Vinland?
but of what part L’Anse aux Meadows played in the Vinland story—Gudrid’s story.

The Viking ship repaired in the shed where a woman lost her spindle whorl was not a
knarr,
but a small boat, a
knarr’s
towboat. On the floor of the shed were the marks of a wooden form that had held the boat steady. Scattered inside and out were iron nails. Chemical analysis showed they had not been made from the local bog ore. X-rays proved their heads had been struck off with a chisel so they could be drawn from the wood they had once clinched.

The only whole nail, on the other hand, had been made from the local ore, which collects in ruddy nodules along the banks of the stream and clings to the undersides of turf blocks cut
from
the bog. The bog ore had been roasted in one of the outbuildings at the south end of the settlement. The iron had been smelted from the ore in a hut across Black Duck Brook beside a tiny tumble of rapids. The smelter was not very good at his job—the waste slag still held 80 percent of the iron in the ore. Nor did he practice: The furnace was fired only once, producing six to seven pounds of iron, enough for a hundred nails the size of those used in the Gokstad ship. The nails were fashioned in the workshop of the southernmost house.

So few nails would have secured only a very small patch—the total number of nails in the Gokstad ship is 3,500—and indeed, the broken floorboard of a small boat, with a plug of Scots pine, a European species, was among the hundreds of bits of worked wood that had been preserved in the bog’s acid water. Some of the wood was worked with metal tools; experts saw marks of a knife and a broadaxe. The metal-worked debris seemed to fan out from the one west-facing door in the middle longhouse, the door that opened from its workshop. There were wood shavings and the cut-off ends of posts, tree-nails made of fir, and many slender skewers. (Skewers are commonly found at Viking market sites: They might be toggles for fastening bales of cargo.)

Other wood pieces had been shaped with stone tools. The layers of peat in the bog showed clearly that the people who cut with metal (the Vikings) and those who cut with stone (the native Inuit and Indians) had lived at L’Anse aux Meadows at different times. Stoneworkers were there from 4000
B.C.
until 850
A.D.
, metalworkers for a few years around the year 1000, then stoneworkers after 1200 until colonial times. For at least 150 years before the Norse arrived, and again after they left, the peat that accumulated in the bog bore no trash.

The Vikings chose this spot precisely because it was long deserted. This settlement on the cold coast of Newfoundland—where, an Icelandic meteorologist has pointed out, the annual mean temperature was lower than at any Icelandic farm—was not a farm. It was an outpost, a base camp, a way to use and to control the resources of the whole Gulf of St. Lawrence from the Straits of Belle Isle west to Quebec and south to the forested banks of the Miramichi River in New Brunswick. About 2,000 miles from Greenland, the outpost could be reached in nine days (although the unlucky sailors in the unpowered replica Snorri took eighty-seven days to sail here from Brattahlid in “the windless summer” of 1998); the distance compared well to the standard twelve-day trip from Greenland to Norway. With the nearest Indian camp at Bird Cove, 75 miles to the south, the Vikings could safely winter here with full storerooms. They were safe from their own kind, too: Any sail entering the Gulf could be seen from here. And it was easy to find. With a few words, Leif could have told Karlsefni and Gudrid how to locate his camp. “There was only one thing for them to keep in mind on the southward journey: namely, not to lose sight of land to the west,” writes Helge Ingstad, who more than once had approached by boat. “Great Sacred Island would then be an unmistakable landmark, and L’Anse aux Meadows lay just behind that island. It was as simple as that.”

The camp at L’Anse aux Meadows was meant to last for many years and to serve many expeditions. The house walls are substantial and built with thoughts of winter—the walls to the west, where the wind blew off the sea ice, are slightly thicker than those to the east. Each house can lodge a full ship’s crew—with private space for women in two of them—and each house has storage rooms to rival the warehouses at Brattahlid. The Vikings felled at least eighty-six tall trees to fashion the timber frames, and stripped 40,000 cubic feet of turf off the bog (essentially all that was available). House building would have taken ninety men a month and a half—not counting the time needed to cut, dry, and move the turf blocks.

Birgitta Wallace believes these were the houses Leif Eiriksson had agreed to lend—but not give—to Gudrid and Karlsefni. She writes in
Vinland Revisited:
“It is far too substantial and complex a site not to be mentioned in the sagas.” It is like other gateways in the Viking world, where a king or chieftain will lay claim to a rich region and seek to funnel all its resources to one spot, where he or a trusted deputy can tax them more easily.

This gateway did have a strong leader, someone who divided the work of boat repair among the three houses: The men in the southern house smelted the ore and fashioned the nails. They worked the wood in the middle house. In the boatshed attached to the northern house, they pried off the broken piece and nailed on the patch.

But was that leader Leif, or Karlsefni? Leif did not have ninety men to build such sturdy houses; Karlsefni did. Then there’s the jasper evidence. Among the artifacts were ten strike-a-lights—shards of jasper, a reddish flinty stone that, struck with steel, creates sparks to start a fire. Knowing that jasper varies in its chemical makeup, geochemists compared the trace elements in the ten strike-a-lights to jasper from Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, as well as to samples from Norway, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Great Lakes region. Four of the strike-a-lights came from Greenland. Five came from Iceland. One was Newfoundland stone.

The strike-a-lights had been recovered from the floors of the houses. The southern house held only Icelandic jasper; the middle house had Icelandic and Newfoundland jaspers; the northern house, Icelandic and Greenlandic. In
The Saga of Eirik the Red,
Karlsefni’s expedition had three ships: two crewed by Icelanders, and one, Gudrid’s ship, that was “mostly” Greenlanders. Just as the lost spindle whorl said
Gudrid was here,
those ten bits of jasper assert Karlsefni’s claim.

Which does not push Leif Eiriksson out of the picture. His crew might have wintered here, building themselves a sturdy longhouse and some outbuildings. When Karlsefni and Gudrid arrived four years later, with three ships’ crews to house, perhaps they enlarged the settlement. Birgitta Wallace agrees we will never know. “In archaeology, it doesn’t really matter if the houses were built ten years apart—that’s simultaneous to us.”

Karlsefni called his base camp Straumfjord, “fjord with a strong current,” an apt name for the Straits of Belle Isle. Entering the Gulf of St. Lawrence through the Straits, you might think you were in a fjord, for the Labrador coast pinches closer to Newfoundland just south of L’Anse aux Meadows; you would certainly have noticed the turbulent, unpredictable currents that have wrecked many ships.

From Straumfjord the next summer Karlsefni and Gudrid sailed south “for a long time,” the saga says. They reached a river blocked by a tidal lagoon so full of shoals and sandbars that they couldn’t continue until the tide rose. On the shores of the lagoon they found fields of self-sown wheat and hills covered with “wine wood.” Every creek was full of fish, and the forest held all kinds of animals. Karlsefni called the area Hop, pronounced “hope” and meaning “tidal lagoon”; there is a region named Hop just west of Skagafjord in Iceland, well known for its wealthy farms and its wide tidal flats.

An oddity in the bog at L’Anse aux Meadows has given Birgitta Wallace a clue as to where in Vinland Karlsefni’s Hop might lie. It has also confirmed—as far as archaeology can be expected to—that the Vikings found grapes and not some other wine-making berry in Wine Land.

She told me, “We sent all the wood, all the seeds, off to a botanist in Ottawa. I said, ‘Look for what doesn’t belong here, what’s not here now.’ He said, ‘It’s all what you’d imagine. Except what are those butternuts doing there?’”

To sample the bog, the park workers had dug a 200-footlong trench five feet deep, along with twenty smaller blocks, or monoliths. In three different spots, each in the Viking layer, the workers turned up butternuts, or white walnuts.

Walnuts, white or black, do not grow in Newfoundland. The farthest north the butternut has ever grown is New Brunswick—some 800 to 1,000 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows—and the currents along the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence run generally north to south. The only way three butternuts could have reached the bog when they did is by Viking ship.

As if to offer proof that the nuts had been picked by Viking hands, the bog also gave up a butternut burl, a wartlike growth from a butternut tree. Burls are prized by wood-carvers for their intricately swirled grain patterns, and a Viking whittler had indeed begun work on this burl, for it shows the cut marks of a metal tool. “Burlwood” is also one possible translation for the mysterious
mösurr
wood that Leif Eiriksson commented on; the English cognate
mazer
means a highly figured wood—usually maple, but occasionally walnut.

The butternuts prove that the Vikings who wintered at L’Anse aux Meadows had already traveled much farther south—to the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, up the St. Lawrence River toward Quebec, or into New England. All three areas lie within the ancient range of the butternut tree. And where butternuts grow, grapes are also found. Butternuts fall from the tree in early September, just when the grapes are ripe and ready to pick; when they collected these butternuts, the Vikings could not have avoided noticing the grapes.

Studying the range of butternuts and grapes, and consulting with botanists, Birgitta Wallace inadvertently solved another puzzle that has vexed saga scholars for many years: the translation of “wine wood.” When Leif Eiriksson first discovered Vinland in
The Saga of the Greenlanders
, he set half his crew to “cutting wine wood” to make a cargo for his ship. Reading “wine wood” as “grapevine,” Einar O. Sveinsson, who edited the manuscript of the saga for its publication in 1935, footnotes the phrase to say: “Wine wood is not a tree, and in any case is worthless without the berries.” Counters Birgitta, “Where grapes grow wild, the vines look nothing like those in a vineyard. Instead they wrap themselves around any tree or bush that happens to be nearby, often all the way to the top of the trees. These are the
vívið,
the grapewood-trees of the sagas, the lumber harvested and brought back to Greenland by every Vinland expedition.”

That grapevine-laden trees were abundant is confirmed by later travelers. Jacques Cartier explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence five hundred years after Gudrid and Karlsefni. His 1534 description of the Miramichi River mouth is a close echo of the saga’s: Cartier points out its shallow tidal bay “skirted with sandbanks,” its “beautiful fields and meadows,” and its hilly northern shore, “covered with many kinds of lofty trees.” In nearby Chaleur Bay, he saw “wild oats like rye, which one would say had been sown there and tilled.” Along the St. Lawrence River, he saw the “finest trees in the world: to wit, oaks, elms, &c, and what are better, a great many vines, which had so great abundance of grapes that the crew came aboard all loaded down with them.” He named an island by Quebec lie de Bacchus, for the Greek god of wine. The first French settlers just south of the Miramichi followed suit, naming a little inlet there Baie de Vin, “Wine Bay.”

The Miramichi area can make two additional claims to being Karlsefni’s Hop—and part of Leif Eiriksson’s Vinland. First is the salmon Leif noticed. The Miramichi River has the richest salmon run in eastern North America. The noise of fish jumping kept a visitor in 1672 awake all night. Another, in the eighteenth century, caught 700 fish in twenty-four hours. In the 1960s, the river’s annual salmon catch was 30,000 fish. Catherine Carlson, an archaeologist who has studied the historical range of the fish, has shown that salmon did not spawn in Maine or farther south before the seventeenth century, which would make the Miramichi not only the best salmon grounds for the Vikings to find, but also the southernmost.