Vikings in America (8 page)

The attraction of Greenland as a refuge for an outlaw was not lost on its next settler. Eirikur Thorvaldsson, known to later generations as Eirik the Red, either on account of his red hair or his bloodthirsty ways, established the first permanent settlement. Eirik was a Norwegian, forced to flee Norway ‘on account of some killings' as the sagas tells us, who sought his fortune in Iceland. In Iceland he pursued a similarly bloody career,
murdering the killer of two of his slaves, with the result that he was outlawed from Iceland, too.

Eirik stands at the head of so many Icelandic genealogies that he is in effect the progenitor of the Icelandic nation. It is probable that all Icelanders today are his descendants. His house in west Iceland has been painstakingly excavated, and a faithful replica built close by. To many in Iceland and beyond, Eirik is simply the archetypal Viking, a figure of his age.
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However we wish to judge his murderous career, he was a remarkable character. Following the sentence of outlawry passed in 982, Eirik and a tiny band of followers took refuge over winter on an islet in Breithafjordur, a tiny scrap of land. They were literally in hiding, as men with a price on their heads who could be killed by any bounty hunter. Return to Norway was not possible for Eirik as he was an outlaw there, too, while even the stepping-stone islands of Faroe, Shetland and Orkney were effectively closed, as the local chiefs would not have been willing to risk the displeasure of both Norway and Iceland to shelter a man twice outlawed. Dublin would have been a possible destination, but also a high-risk strategy. When it suited the Vikings in Dublin so to do they acknowledged the overlordship of the king of Norway, and delivering Eirik to him – or making him a slave – would have been tempting to them. The winter of 982–83 therefore finds Eirik and his band in hiding and with nowhere to go. The islet they chose reflects their fear and desperation, for it has a deep bay with its entrance obscured from open water by another islet, providing a genuine place of concealment. Presumably the men subsisted on whatever winter stores they had been able to steal, and the marine life of Breithafjordur.

From Breithafjordur it is a short crossing to Greenland. Rather than emulate Snaebjorn in settling on the coast opposite Iceland, Eirik instead explored the coast to the south, rounded Cape Farewell, and realised that the lands on the west coast of Greenland were suitable for both sheep grazing and for agriculture. Eirik and his band staked out land-holdings for themselves, with Eirik himself settling at Brattahlith at the head of Eirik's Fjord.

In 986 Eirik returned to Iceland with a view to finding settlers to establish a Greenland colony. Though still a man with a price on his head, it seems that the passage of a few years and the good news he brought of available land made his visit possible. In seeking colonists, he found he was pushing at an open door. After a century of Viking settlement, Iceland was effectively full. The land-hunger that had pushed the Vikings west from Norway
had caught up with them in Iceland, and stories of vacant land to the west were attractive. It was Eirik who christened this new land Greenland. He is credited with saying that he thought people were more likely to come if it had an attractive name, in contrast with Iceland, which he said many early settlers had found an unattractive name. Many modern writers have seized on this to suggest that Eirik was fibbing, and that the name was no more than a scam. Clearly these writers have not been to Greenland. The summer pastures of Greenland have an unrivalled vitality in their brilliant green, unequalled anywhere else. Greenland is certainly an attractive name; it is also an accurate name.

In Iceland, Eirik found enough colonists to fill 25 ships – a number reported as little less than 1,000 people. In 986 they set out from Iceland as pioneers bound for a fertile land where they could carve out farms for themselves.

Of the 25 ships that set out, 11 sank en route without survivors. There can hardly be a better demonstration of the dangers of the Denmark Strait. Doubtless the ships were overloaded, both with people and the materials they needed to start their new homes. Perhaps there was particularly bad weather. Yet even considering these factors, Viking ships were sea-worthy, Viking mariners aware of what they could reasonably carry, and losses at this terrible level – perhaps 400 deaths – are nowhere else recorded. It is likely the Denmark Strait produced conditions which the Viking ships were scarcely able to withstand. The crossing from Iceland to Greenland was dangerous, and as there were no significant developments in ship design in the centuries that followed, it remained perilous throughout the Viking Age. It is the Denmark Strait that is the true barrier between Europe and America, and from the outset Greenland, which is geographically part of America, had to function largely independently of Iceland and Europe.

Maps of today correctly include Greenland as part of the American continent. The boundary between Europe and America is set by geologists as the mid-Atlantic ridge, with the result that Iceland, the only part of the ridge which rises above the sea, might be regarded as sitting on the boundary. Culturally Iceland is European, and no-one would seriously wish to argue the contrary, though Icelandic tour guides are prone to assert that one side of the Thigvellir rift valley is in Europe and the other in America. Greenland is open to discussion. Politically, the land is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and in terms of its recent history is bound to Europe. Yet its Inuit inhabitants are an American people, tied by blood and culture to the
Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. For the Vikings the decisive boundary was the difficult crossing of the Denmark Strait, the sea that their ships were scarcely adequate to sail. Greenland represents not an off-shoot from Iceland, but a new continent. For the Vikings this was the start of a whole new world.

From the development of sea-going ships to the settlement of Greenland had taken the Vikings around 200 years. The islands of the North Atlantic had provided stepping stones, and the Viking expansion along this route may be regarded as inevitable. From Norway it was certain that they should reach Orkney and Shetland, island groups but a couple of days' voyage with a favourable wind. Once there it was sure that they would reach the Faroe Islands, visible from a little distance off the shore of Shetland. Iceland and Greenland were just as certain. Driven by an expanding population and a need for arable land, the expansion had to happen. Just as the European settlers of North America pushed at their wild-west frontier until within a few generations they had crossed the continent, settling from ocean to ocean, so the Vikings pushed at their sea frontier.

Yet Greenland was not the end of the road, just the last and biggest stepping stone. After Greenland was the continent of America, its northern lands just another short sail west. Driven by population growth and land-hunger, discovery, exploration and settlement of America was simply inevitable.

THE base for all Viking exploration and settlement of America was Greenland, and this expansion can only be understood within the context of Greenland. In Greenland we find a prosperous nation, one of the world's first democracies, which flourished for approaching five centuries, before failing for reasons still not fully understood.

To the Vikings, Greenland was a land of plenty. While winters were severe, they were little worse than in many parts of Norway or Iceland, and the Vikings' style of farmstead met the challenge of keeping people warm through the Greenland winter. The country offered ample farmland, abundant food and a good quality of life. Greenland to the Vikings was as California to the pioneers who crossed the American continent. Skeletal remains of early Viking settlers in Greenland show them growing around two inches taller than their ethnically identical contemporaries in Norway, while there is much evidence of robust health and longevity.
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Whatever the myths about Greenland in Europe and America, to the Vikings it was a good place to live.

Today Greenland is perceived through an accretion of myth. Two hundred years ago the hymn-writer Reginald Heber told of ‘Greenland's icy mountain',
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a single phrase which has done much to colour the world's perception of Greenland, while children's books have presented Greenland as a world of perpetual snow. The reality of Greenland as a land where people may live warm and well-fed lives still surprises. In contrast to popular perception, most of Greenland is without polar bears. Parts of it are free from snow and ice for much of the year. The people who live there today are part of the Kingdom of Denmark, enjoying the comforts and prosperity of a first-world country. Greenland does not conform to popular perception, at least not
those parts that are populated, for there is a contrast to be made between the inhabited parts and the ice cap of the interior and the isolated north and east coasts. The Greenland of human habitation is a strip of land between the west coast and the central ice cap. Typically, this strip is 20 miles wide; in a few places the ice cap pushes as far as the sea, where it calves icebergs; in a few places there is as much as 80 miles from the sea to the ice cap. With a coast many thousands of miles long, this thin strip of land comprises a habitable area roughly equivalent in size to the whole of the British Isles. This is a substantial area of land. While snows cover Greenland for a long winter there is also a summer which provides a growing season. Even the winters are not as severe as many would think – much of the west coast of Greenland has winters milder than, say, Ottawa, milder even than Chicago, though Greenland lacks the warm summers of these more southern locations. Wheat will grow in Greenland, along with a range of root vegetables, while the meadows produce a season of berries. Agriculture in Greenland was marginal in Viking times; while possible today, it is rarely practised by Greenlanders, whose heritage is that of hunting rather than farming. The weathered landscape of Greenland means that in many places there is a good depth of soil, and that soil is often fertile, a marked improvement on Iceland with its thin soils. The Vikings practised animal husbandry as well as agriculture, and added the resources which could be found through fishing and hunting. Along the shores seal and walrus were then plentiful, alas sadly depleted today by excessive hunting, while the seas offered, then as now, some of the world's richest fishing and the cliffs teemed with seabirds.

The Greenland that the Vikings settled was not at the margins of habitation, but rather a land that gave them a lifestyle far healthier than their cousins in Europe. It was also an empty land. Though North American people had lived in Greenland many centuries before, when Leif Eiriksson and his pioneers arrived, no-one was there. Greenland offered that great rarity for migrants of any age – a truly uninhabited country.

Having crossed the barrier of the Denmark Strait and reached Greenland, the Vikings encountered one major problem. Greenland shared with Iceland the limitation of not having any trees for the timber essential for the main beams of houses and for boat building. Like Iceland, Greenland has only dwarf trees, rarely exceeding three feet in height. While in Iceland it has proved possible to grow some trees with careful nurture, twentieth-century experiments in Greenland have been disappointing, and it is not possible that the Vikings could have found any trees. Greenland is simply
too far north of the tree-line. A partial solution to the problem was available through driftwood, for the west coast of Greenland is washed by the West Greenland Current, a warm current coming from far to the south, from Newfoundland and even further, which brings driftwood in reasonable quantities. As in Iceland, the driftwood had value as firewood, but rarely had the suppleness or strength for building houses or ships. From the beginning of the Greenland colony, timber had to be imported.

The distance which had to be travelled for timber is substantial. All the stepping-stone islands – Iceland, the Faroe, Shetland and Orkney islands – are virtually without timber. The nearest good European source of timber was Norway. Almost from the start of the Greenland colony trade was direct between Greenland and Norway, and predicated on the need for timber. A voyage via Iceland was many additional hundreds of miles, and putting in at an Icelandic port would have incurred costs and inconvenience for a Greenlandic ship. The sailing directions have been recorded, and are almost comically simple: sail west from Nidaros in Norway so as to pass midway between Shetland and the Faroe Islands, so that the top portion of the cliffs of each island group may be seen over the horizon; set a course due west from there. The south coast of Iceland may be seen to starboard; continue until Greenland's Cape Farewell is sighted.
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This direct route took ships south of the worst drift ice obstacles of the Denmark Strait, offering a voyage that was actually safer than the short crossing from Iceland's Snaefelsness to east Greenland. While this route was clearly followed by hundreds, even thousands of ships, it was a major undertaking to cross the whole of the North Atlantic in one leap, and there can be no minimising the achievement of these mariners. A trade was established whereby the Greenlanders supplied at first wool, and later walrus and narwhal ivory and Arctic furs, and traded this for timber and some European luxuries. In the ivory and furs Greenlanders had a valuable, low-weight cargo for trade, something their cousins in Iceland largely lacked, and giving Greenland the potential for prosperity and even wealth.

The Vikings created around 200 settlements in Greenland, of which around 160 have been identified, and many have been excavated. These settlements were not villages, but individual farms. A typical farmstead would have accommodated 20 to 30 people. At its centre was the house, often called
a hall. The building material was usually stone, sometimes stone and turf, with a turf roof supported on timber pillars. All of these halls have a similar ground plan. The sole door was situated at one end of the structure, entering into a small room sometimes described as a store – and doubtless often used in this way – but in effect a porch. The cold winters of Greenland discouraged direct entry from the outside to the living room. From the store or porch a door led into the hall proper. This was an all-purpose living room, with wooden platforms on either side that were used for sleeping at night, and for seating and as work-space by day. A double row of wooden pillars supported the roof. In the middle of the floor, in an open hearth, a fire was kept burning continually, providing both light and heat. There was no chimney; the smoke found its way up to a hole in the roof, though even this could be closed in bad weather with a wooden trapdoor, leaving the smoke to circulate within the roof space.