A Voyage Long and Strange

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by Tony Horwitz


  With that, he resumed painting his boat, and pointed me to the small brown house of Lloyd Decker. It was Lloyd’s father, George, who had first directed Helge Ingstad to the Norse site. I found Lloyd in his yard, but he said he had no time to talk. The next day, I caught him climbing into his truck. “Too busy,” he said. “Need to buy nails for my boat.” I asked if I could ride along to see a bit of the scenery. He shrugged and pushed open the passenger door.

  Lloyd was a large, craggy-faced man of sixty-four, his hands dark brown below his shirt cuffs: the Newfoundland version of a trucker’s tan. We drove to the store and back in virtual silence. By the time we returned, I’d abandoned hope of hearing his family’s story. Then he shut off the ignition and said, “Come in for tea, will you?”

  Inside the Deckers’ immaculate house, Lloyd’s wife, Madge, served us tea with cheese and crackers. Their daughter, Loretta, who worked at the national park, sat making a birchbark whistle for a program on Norse crafts. Lloyd had also worked at the park, and, before that, he’d helped the Ingstads excavate the site.

  “I remember people here saying, ‘Don’t be fools going up there with them, they could be Russian spies.’ ” Lloyd laughed. “I said, ‘If that’s so, they’re not going to find out much.’ ”

  Loretta’s experience was different; she’d grown up with the Viking dig as part of the landscape. Now a large, dark-haired woman of thirty-three, she recalled childhood summers spent sifting sand for artifacts, or using socks to stage puppet shows based on the sagas. “I wondered lots of times why the Vikings killed those natives under the canoes,” she said. “Maybe it was a test, like dunking a witch. To see if they were really human. People are always scared of what they don’t know.”

  Her own world had been widened by summers playing with archaeologists’ children. “I remember one kid telling me, ‘My parents are divorced.’ I’d never heard the word and thought it was a place. ‘Where’s Divorced?’ When I learned what it meant, I was worried all the men here would leave if they knew they could.” She paused. “Funny, it didn’t occur to me the women would want to go. But they ran the households, so I thought they came with the house and couldn’t leave.”

  Madge brought out homemade bread with gooseberry jam, and Lloyd leaned back in his chair, recounting ghost stories his father used to tell by the fire at night. The nineteenth-century settlers at L’Anse had mostly come from Ireland and Germany, and the old people’s tales were filled with supernatural creatures. One story told of an old man who was murdered in his sod hut, but kept reappearing on the moor around L’Anse, wearing a brown suit. If anyone greeted him, he vanished or changed into a wolf. Villagers called him the Brown Man.

  “When I first read the sagas,” Loretta said, “all those shape-changers and man-beasts felt a little familiar to me.” She was nostalgic for childhood nights, listening to stories, but not for the fishing that filled people’s days. “I remember carrying buckets of fish guts and pouring it over the garden, flies all over me. The men had so much salt in their sleeves it’d give them boils that had to be lanced. It got so you hated to hear the word ‘fish.’ ”

  But as cod fishing faded, so had the community. Loretta was now the youngest adult in L’Anse; everyone else in their twenties and thirties had left to seek work on the mainland. “Vikings are about all that keeps this place going,” she said.

  For the first time in two hours, the talking ceased. I noticed a TV droning in the den: the room tone of modern domestic life. Thanking the Deckers, I headed out for a walk across the moor in the fading light. Lloyd saw me to the door. “Watch out for the Brown Man,” he said.

  BY THE END of my week in L’Anse aux Meadows, I’d met most of the hamlet’s inhabitants and felt able to conjure the Norsemen who had settled the remote peninsula a millennium ago. But the Skraelings of the sagas remained a spectral presence, like the Brown Man lurking at the fringes of L’Anse.

  Archaeologists at the Viking site had found arrowheads and other native artifacts. However, none of this material dated from the period of Norse settlement. In A.D. 1000, the environs of L’Anse seem to have been uninhabited, one reason Leif may have chosen to settle there. Also, the Europeans who returned to Newfoundland, centuries after the Vikings, described the natives they encountered as belonging to small, reclusive bands of hunter-gatherers.

  Who, then, were the myriad Skraelings, boldly attacking the Vikings with catapults and fleets of skin canoes?

  The sagas provide a few clues. For one, it appears that all the Norse contact with natives occurred during summer expeditions away from Leif’s settlement. Though directions in the sagas are sketchy, excavations at L’Anse turned up pieces of butternut, a wood unknown in Newfoundland. Also, the grapes that gave Vinland its name have never grown on the island. However, both butternut and grapes can be found in New Brunswick, several hundred miles to the southwest, on the Canadian mainland.

  After sifting this and other evidence, most scholars now believe that the settlement at L’Anse was a base camp or gateway to a much broader area. Vinland, in turn, may be best understood as the overall region the Norse explored. Only then do the stories about Skraelings make sense. Though scarce around L’Anse, maritime peoples lived in large numbers along the milder shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coasts the Vikings could easily have reached during summer sails.

  These coastal natives are silent in the sagas, except as “screeching wretches.” But their descendants have a voice now. On my last day at L’Anse, I learned that Parks Canada had recently instructed employees to stop using the word “Skraeling.” A native group had complained about the term’s derogatory connotations. “So now we say that the Vikings met ‘aboriginal people’ or ‘first nation people,’ ” Loretta Decker said.

  Intrigued, I asked her where the complaint had come from. She unfolded my map of Newfoundland, which I’d squared like origami to navigate the northern peninsula. Her finger finally stopped at Conne River, a remote dot on the island’s southern coast, roughly five hundred miles’ drive from L’Anse, most of it on two-lane roads. “I’d give yourself two days to get there,” she counseled, “on account of the moose.”

  CALLING AHEAD, I learned that the community at Conne River would be holding a powwow at the end of the week, a good time to learn about the tribe’s culture. This also left me several days to get there without driving at dawn and dusk, when moose like to feed on roadside plants or lick salt left from winter snow and ice control.

  But as soon as I departed the wind-scraped coast, I discovered a new peril. Stopping to piss in woods by the road, I’d barely unzipped my jeans before bugs assaulted every millimeter of exposed skin. Annie Proulx, the author of The Shipping News, once said in an interview that the ferocious blackflies of Newfoundland “can exsanguinate a human adult in 23 minutes.” I escaped with a few dozen bites and my hands, neck, face, and groin covered in flecks of blood.

  Swarming insects were one reason the island’s moist, sheltered interior had never been heavily populated. Another reason was food, or the lack of it. Though rich in fish, Newfoundland had little game apart from caribou and beaver (moose were a nineteenth-century import). This scarcity not only limited the size of the native population, but also made it vulnerable to sudden shifts, like the one that occurred when Europeans returned to the island five hundred years after the Norse.

  The first to come were fishermen—English, French, Basque, Portuguese—and then trappers who ventured inland in search of fur. They came in contact with tall natives who set feathers in their plaited hair and wore caribou hides with the fur against their skin. But the natives’ most distinctive feature was the red ocher covering their faces, bodies, clothes, and possessions. The English began referring to them as “Red Indians,” the first to be so called in America. Curiously, the sagas mention that natives who traded with the Norse showed a distinct preference for cloth of a certain color—red—which they tied around their heads.

  The natives called themselves Beothuk, mea
ning “Human Beings” or “the People.” Such names were characteristic of indigenous peoples across America, where nation-states and strong racial differences were absent. The fate of the Beothuk was also typical. At first, the newcomers were mostly seasonal fishermen who left behind nails, hooks, and other items that natives put to their own uses—for instance, draping their conical birchbark dwellings with discarded sails. But gradually, English traders and settlers spread across Newfoundland, competing for the fish, game, and fur on which the Beothuk relied. Small thefts by natives became an excuse for colonists to shoot them and burn their homes. By the early 1800s, the Beothuk had dwindled to a few scattered bands, roaming the mostly barren interior.

  In 1823, fur trappers captured three starving Beothuk and brought them to Newfoundland’s capital, St. John’s. The only one to survive was a six-foot-tall woman in her twenties, named Shanawdithit. She learned a little English and came under the care of a Scotsman, W. E. Cormack, who had founded an institute to protect and study Newfoundland’s “ill-treated first occupiers.” He collected more than a hundred Beothuk words and phrases, including those for “beaver,” “mosquito,” “puppy,” “hiccough,” “kiss,” and “cry.”

  Shanawdithit’s sketch of Beothuk “devil,” dancing woman, spears, and other items, circa 1829

  Shanawdithit also drew pictures, always depicting Beothuk figures in red. She never explained—or Cormack didn’t understand—why her people prized this color. Ocher, mixed with grease, had a practical value, as an insect repellent, and possibly as camouflage while hunting game in autumn. But the fact that Beothuk coated their possessions in red, and put packages of ocher in graves, suggests the color also had spiritual power, perhaps as a symbol of blood and life.

  Shanawdithit used black lead to draw non-Beothuk figures, including a stout bearded man identified as Aich-mud-yim, or the Devil. Shanawdithit said the Beothuk “feared some powerful monster, who was to appear from the sea and punish the wicked.” Beothuk also believed that they went to a “happy island” after death, but not if they consorted with white men.

  After six years in captivity, Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis, bequeathing Cormack pieces of quartz and a lock of her hair. “Here ends all positive knowledge of her tribe, which she never narrated without tears,” he wrote. No Beothuk were seen thereafter.

  The scant artifacts of Beothuk life that survive include items buried with a boy: miniature bark canoes, toy bows and arrows, red ocher, and other equipment for his journey to the happy island. “We have traces enough left only to cause our sorrow that so peculiar and so superior a people should have disappeared from the earth like a shadow,” Cormack wrote. “They are irrevocably lost to the world.”

  NEAR THE CENTER of Newfoundland, I turned off the Trans-Canada Highway and followed a badly paved road with a sign at the start warning, “Check Fuel: Next Service 127 km.” An hour and a half later, I came to another sign, adorned with a wigwam and welcoming me to Micmac territory: a fourteen-square-mile Indian reserve on the hilly, wooded shore of the Bay D’Espoir.

  Unlike the Beothuk, the Micmac are believed to have migrated to Newfoundland after the arrival of Europeans, from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where most of the tribe still lives. For centuries before that, ancestors of the Micmac inhabited the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This put them right in the path of Vikings who went on summer sails in search of grapes and timber. If any group today can claim descent from the Skraelings of the sagas, it is the Micmac.

  In contrast to the wary and reclusive Beothuk, the Micmac engaged in a lively trade with the French who began settling eastern Canada in the early 1600s, and became early converts to Christianity, led by a chief who entered the “Wigwam of Jesus” in 1610. “They have often told me that at first we seemed to them very ugly, with hair both upon our mouths and heads,” a priest wrote of the Micmac in 1611. “But gradually they have become accustomed to it, and now we are beginning to look less deformed.” Another priest observed that the Micmac “find the use of our handkerchiefs ridiculous; they mock at us and say that it is placing excrements in our pockets.”

  The French, for their part, were struck by Micmac respect for the animals they killed. It was customary to return the bones of beavers— “those animals almost men,” the Micmac called them—to the rivers the animals came from, “so that the lodges would always be there.” Micmac imagined heaven as a place where “animals allowed themselves to be hunted,” and where people always had “much meat and fat and marrow. Their chins are always dripping with fat.”

  While French-Micmac contact was generally peaceful, it brought a scourge that would ultimately afflict native peoples across America: epidemic European diseases, to which Indians lacked immunity. “They are astonished and often complain that since the French mingle with and carry on trade with them,” a priest wrote in 1612, “they are dying fast.” One particularly deadly campsite became known to the Micmac as “the place of measles.”

  Like many other tribes, the Micmac also became caught in the long struggle between Europeans for control of the continent. The French paid and armed Micmac to attack the English, who in turn urged settlers to “annoy, distress, take or destroy the savages,” offering ten guineas for every scalp. “Our nation is like a withering leaf in a summer’s sun,” declared a group of chiefs who petitioned the Newfoundland government for aid in 1849.

  I was surprised, then, to arrive at Conne River and find a relatively thriving community, with many new houses and powerboats and Jet Skis perched in driveways and yards. At the powwow site, in a park overlooking the bay, I joined a crowd of several hundred people milling around three wigwams and craft stands selling dream catchers, moccasins, Indian dolls, and beadwork made in China. Most of the people were olive-skinned, black-haired, and heavyset, no longer the lean, athletic figures described by early Europeans.

  “We’re big people now,” an old man named Michael Joe said, as we stood in line at a stall offering fried cod tongues, fried chicken, fried scallops, and French fries—a modern-day version of the Micmac’s fatty heaven. The only nonfried item was mooseburger. I asked Michael what this tasted like. “Moose-ey,” he said.

  Michael Joe introduced me to several other people, all with the last name Joe. This was a legacy of the seventeenth century, when the Micmac converted to Christianity and swapped monikers such as Born on the Way and Make Sure You Dream of Me First for French names. Then the Micmac took their fathers’ first names as surnames. Anglicized over time, the family names became John, Joe, Paul, and Louis.

  Michael Joe’s nephew, Missel Joe, was saqamaw, or chief, of the Conne River Band, which numbered about two thousand. A barrel-chested man wearing oval sunglasses and a beaded caribou jacket, Missel Joe had initiated the campaign against Parks Canada’s use of the term “Skraeling.” “ ‘Squaw’ is a derogatory word,” he explained. “ ‘Nigger’ is derogatory. ‘Skraeling’ is, too.” He raised the issue with officials and the term was dropped. “A rare victory over the white man,” he said, smiling thinly.

  Missel Joe also told me about a Micmac legend that recalled early contact with Europeans. “Our people thought white men looked like dried sea salt on rocks, a sort of off-white. And they had seaweed stuck to their faces—our people didn’t have beards.” He smiled again. “Too bad we don’t know the word our people used to describe Vikings. It was probably worse than ‘Skraeling.’ ”

  We were joined by Calvin White, a longtime Indian activist. He said government aid and tribal programs had improved conditions for the Micmac, but prejudice against them lingered. “White people love the Beothuk, they’re very romantic,” he said. “You know why? The Beothuk are a lost tribe, like your Vikings, and easy to deal with because they’re all gone. They can’t file lawsuits or raise awkward questions.”

  AT SUNSET, A band started playing, the cue for the powwow to begin. The first song was “Heave Away,” a Newfoundland shanty about a spurned suitor. This was followed by a girl banging a drum. “Thank
you, Great Spirit,” she intoned before launching into a traditional Micmac chant, honoring the eagle. Then she sang a pop song, “Can’t Fight the Moonlight.” As darkness fell, an emcee announced, “We’ll have karaoke now—traditional karaoke of course. And there’s a sweat lodge back near the sacred fire.”

  I wandered across the field to see the fire: a pile of logs tended by men slumped in lawn chairs. Curious what made it sacred, I asked one of the men, “Do you use a special wood?”

  “No,” he replied. “Just the wood we got.” He grunted, rising from his chair to heave another log on the fire.

  “Do you say a special prayer?”

  The man guffawed. “Pray it doesn’t rain.” The others laughed and went silent again.

  Nearby arose a much larger flame, tended by a lone figure named Don. He had a long face, high cheekbones, a large broad nose, and straight black hair draped forward across either side of his chest. Don looked like an Indian out of central casting, which he was, having played a warrior in films such as The Last of the Mohicans. After telling me this, Don fixed me with a stare so solemn and intense that I couldn’t maintain eye contact.

  “Hollywood loves us like that,” he said, breaking into a grin. “You’d think Indians never laughed.” He dragged another pole onto the fire, now a five-foot pyre with sparks shooting high into the sky. When I asked what the blaze was for, he pointed at an igloo-shaped structure nearby. It was made of bent boughs with blankets and a tarpaulin thrown on top. Rocks anchored the edges of the tarp so no air could get in, except through a heavy flap covering the entrance.

 

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