The Great Warming

by Brian Fagan

  AS IN EUROPE, the Medieval Warm Period brought milder winters and a longer growing season for cereals in much of Scandinavia. Population densities rose, creating land shortages and limiting opportunities for young men. They lived in a volatile society, riven with quarreling, factionalism, and violence. Each summer, young “rowmen” left in their long ships in search of plunder, trade, and adventure. As ice conditions in the north improved and the Arctic pack receded, Norse skippers, long expert coastal navigators, ventured farther offshore, into the North Atlantic.

  Contrary to popular belief, the Norse never sailed far offshore in their warships. Instead, they relied on the knarr, a stout, load-carrying merchant ship that was capable of sailing far across the ocean. Knarrs were light but strong, easily repaired at sea or on remote beaches. The crew subsisted off stockfish, the dried cod cured in the chill Arctic winds of spring in the Lofoten Islands off northern Norway. As the warming began, experienced skippers sailed west into waters unknown except to a handful of Irish monks who had traveled as far as Iceland in large hide boats a few generations earlier. Few of the adventurous crews wrote of their experiences, which passed into the legends commemorated by the Norse sagas. Many ships never returned, wrecked on fretted, stormbound shores or foundering without trace in savage offshore gales. But Norse colonists settled in the Orkneys and Shetlands off northern Scotland soon after 800 and on the Faeroes shortly thereafter. In 874, the Norseman Ingólf landed on Iceland. By 900, colonists had settled on the island, bringing their dairy economy with them. At the time, the winters were milder than they had been for centuries. Today, the southern boundaries of the northern pack ice lie about 60 miles (100 kilometers) off Iceland’s north coast; when the first Norse settlers arrived, the ice was at least twice that distance offshore. Even in these milder conditions, life in Iceland was harsh, especially after a cold winter. The colonists combined dairying with seal hunting and inshore cod fishing. Milder summers allowed them to grow hay as winter fodder and to plant barley until the twelfth century, when cooler conditions made cereal cultivation impossible again until the early 1900s.4

  Locations mentioned in this chapter.

  In about 985, Eirik the Red, exiled from Iceland after some killings resulting from family feuds, sailed west and settled in southern Greenland. There he found better grazing than at home. Soon two colonies flourished, one in the sheltered waters of Greenland’s southwestern coast, another farther north in the modern-day Godthåb district, at the head of Ameralik Fjord. The settlers found themselves on a coast that was ice free for most of summer at the time, warmed by the north-flowing Greenland current that hugs the shore. This favorable current carried the colonists’ fishing boats into the fjords and islands around Disko Bay, to a place that abounded with cod, seals, narwhals, and walrus. Here, in what they called Nordrsetur, they collected enough ivory to pay tithes to diocesan authorities in distant Norway for many years.5

  The West Greenland current flows into the heart of Nordrsetur and Baffin Bay, where it gives way to much colder, south-flowing currents. Even a modest sail offshore would have brought the Norse in sight of the snow-clad mountains of Baffin Island on the other side of the Davis Strait, which is little more than 200 miles (325 kilometers) wide at its narrowest point. The colder waters on the west side of the strait along Baffin Island, Labrador, and eastern Newfoundland experience a longer ice season and heavier ice cover that can last well into summer. But during the milder centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, when the ice cover dispersed relatively early in the season, coasting along eastern shores may have been considerably easier and less hazardous.

  We do not know when the first Norse ships landed on Baffin Island, but it may have been before the first documented sighting of Labrador by Bjarni Herjólfsson in about A.D. 985. Lost in fog and light north winds on a passage from Iceland to Greenland, he eventually sighted a low-lying, forested coast quite unlike the glaciated mountains of his intended destination. He sailed back without landing and was criticized for it. Then followed the famous voyage of Leif Eirikson, the son of Eirik the Red, who anchored off a rocky, icebound coast, then coasted southward before a northeasterly wind past “Markland,” the southern Labrador coast, until he reached the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, then southward to a region south of the great estuary that he named Vinland, on account of the wild grapes that grew there. He founded a small settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern peninsula of what is now Newfoundland. The settlement remained in use for a few years.6

  Later expeditions in search of Labrador’s timber came in contact with numerous indigenous Beothuk people, who fought them so fiercely that the Norse never settled permanently on the western shore. “When they clashed there was a fierce battle and a hail of missiles came flying over,” the Vinland Sagas tell us.7 For two centuries, Greenland ships sailed north and west, then used favorable currents to coast southward. Once they had built ships, or simply acquired timber, they would sail directly home on the wings of the prevailing southwesterly winds. Natives and newcomers seem to have avoided one another.

  Sailing the eastern shores of the Davis Strait and down Labrador was fraught with danger, even in the warmer centuries. The crews faced hostile native Americans, polar bears, icebergs, and sudden storms offshore in notoriously windy waters. Navigation in icy waters and close inshore was far more dangerous for the Norse in their wooden boats than for the Inuit, who relied on light kayaks and hide boats that were easily pulled out of the water while being relatively immune to puncturing and easy to repair. A sudden freeze could crush a knarr in minutes, even in summer. As much as they could, the Norse steered well clear of the margins of the pack and breaking summer ice. But, for all the dangers, abundant cod and milder conditions allowed the Greenlanders to voyage freely across the Davis Strait and into narrow channels of the Canadian Archipelago. There they encountered Inuit hunters, who welcomed them, for the Inuit craved what to them was an exotic substance: iron. Unlike the insular Beothuk of Labrador, the Inuit were part of a far larger Arctic world, linked by informal trade networks to other hunting groups with common ancestries that extended as far west as the Bering Strait.

  Can we, then, trace this trade westward and connect it to the warm centuries?

  A.D. 1000. THE Bering Strait is a sullen gray wilderness of ice-strewn waves. The wind is calm, the temperature near freezing, and the surface of the water unruffled. Low clouds hover. The hunter sits absolutely still in his skin kayak, his eyes quietly scanning the dark ocean. His hunting gear lies close to hand, his paddle barely touching the water. Life on the water is second nature to him, often more comfortable than being on land.

  A black head surfaces momentarily, close downwind. A seal looks around inquisitively. The hunter waits, the kayak motionless. His prey slips under the water, leaving only ripples behind. Now the familiar vigil begins, the boat dead in the water. As he waits, the hunter checks his harpoon and the coil of line attached to the razor-sharp head. The waiting stretches from morning to afternoon. He sees the seal once more some distance away; again it vanishes. He paddles softly toward the dispersing ripples, and then waits again. Suddenly, the prey surfaces within harpoon range. The Eskimo casts his harpoon. The iron tip sinks deep into the seal, which dives at once. The line with its floats courses out as the shaft detaches from the head. For a couple of hours, the hunter follows the bobbing float as his quarry weakens, then dies. When the carcass comes to the surface, he lashes it to his kayak and heads for home.

  The Bering Strait is a harsh, unforgiving place where winters can last nine months a year. Dense fogs mantle the gray ocean for days on end, cutting visibility to a few yards. Howling winds blow through the mists. Except during the brief summer, fractured pack ice crowds the narrows, occasionally surging ashore in violent storms. The Siberian coastline is the more rugged side, with steep cliffs and clear landmarks. Low-lying coastal plains, numerous lakes, and low, rolling hills mark the Alaskan side. The best sea mammal hunting lies on the western shores
, protected by strategic promontories. Twelve hundred years ago, as the Norse knarrs were crossing the North Atlantic for the first time, elaborate sea mammal and caribou hunting societies thrived on both the Asian and American coasts of this harsh and demanding world.8

  We know little about climatic fluctuations in the Bering Strait during the Medieval Warm Period. Southerly winds sometimes prevailed for periods of several decades, or even centuries, during periods of warmer climate. But colder winters brought strong northerlies and ferocious storms. So the pattern of settlement shifted, favoring north- or south-facing coasts according to changing climatic conditions. Warmer conditions between 1000 and 1200 did mean that the open-water season was longer, with more narrow channels—“leads”—through the pack in spring where hunters could stalk sea mammals. The climate was still savage, colder in some places, warmer in others, with greater storminess off one coast, calmer conditions off another. A longer ice-free season and more open water allowed people to move more freely, to hunt sea mammals over wider ranges, and to trade with greater ease. There were no universal benefits from warmer conditions as there were in medieval Europe. Each year was different, some with severe ice conditions, others with open water for months on end. To thrive in this challenging environment required a level of adaptability and opportunism almost unmatched in the ancient world.

  In many ways, a degree or two of climatic warming was irrelevant to people who dwelled in a world where cold was the norm, where ice and relentless winter were part of daily existence. Unlike the Norse, the native peoples of the Arctic had inherited adaptations to extreme cold from remote Stone Age ancestors, and they passed those skills from one generation to the next. They were adaptable enough to be immune to even quite large climatic fluctuations. Unlike the Inuit, the seagoing Norse knew nothing of Arctic living and were at the mercy of ice conditions in the North Atlantic. Their western voyages might never have reached Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago if it had not been for the centuries of warming.

  Bering hunting groups developed a remarkable expertise with skin kayaks and hide boats. Eskimo men, like the Aleuts to the south, started paddling such craft practically from infancy. They protected themselves from the cold by wearing their kayaks like skin garments, but the full effectiveness of such watercraft depended on the development of hunting weapons much more capable than simple thrusting harpoons. Sometime during the first millennium B.C., Bering Strait hunters developed revolutionary sea mammal hunting technology that relied on toggle-head harpoons. Just as iron plows had revolutionized agriculture in Europe, so the toggle-head harpoon changed life in the ancient Arctic. (The heads were originally made of ivory, of course, not iron.) The conventional, line-mounted barbed harpoon head detached from the shaft when it struck its prey. But the head often slipped out of the wound when the quarry dived and struggled. In contrast, a toggled head, which also detached from the shaft when it hit its quarry, had a swiveling tip that toggled under the skin and blubber of its prey so that it could not be detached by violent movement or contact with ice. The new harpoons were especially successful against whales and larger sea mammals when used from light skin kayaks and umiaks, large skin boats.9

  As the centuries passed, the ivory-tipped harpoons became ever more elaborate, often with fine decoration. The same material provided mouthpieces and plugs for the harpoon-line floats of inflated sealskin that helped the crews to recover larger sea mammals when they died. Ivory was good, tough material for harpoon heads, but no substitute for exotic and highly prized iron, which first reached the Bering Strait region from Asia about two thousand years ago (the precise date is uncertain).

  By A.D. 900, whale hunting had developed to a fine art, carried out by teams of expert boatmen and hunters in umiaks. They would pursue the migrating whales through narrow ice leads in spring and in open water in the fall. In warmer summers, such as became more common toward the end of the millennium, open-water conditions were such that captains could follow whale migrations over long distances through the strait and along the Arctic Ocean shore to the east. Contact between west and east appears to have become more regular during the warm centuries, just as the Norse arrived off Baffinland.

  A toggle-headed harpoon penetrates the prey, then detaches from its foreshaft (an intermediate link to the main harpoon shaft) and toggles sideward, causing internal bleeding and making it nearly impossible for the animal to shake the harpoon loose. The head is attached to a line and a float, so the hunter can track a wounded beast.

  EKVEN VILLAGE, EAST Cape, Siberia, A.D. 1100. A smoldering fire fills the house with smoke that hovers in the whalebone rafters above the two whaleboat captains. They talk softly, the one a local man, the other from across the strait, from a summer village now named Ipiutak near what is now Point Hope, a place with powerful supernatural associations.10 The visitor, having taken advantage of the fine late-summer weather to cross the water, arrived a few hours ago. He timed his visit well, for a strong southerly wind now whips the strait into a frenzy. Some days will pass before he can move on to his next destination to the south.

  The two men are relatives, both skilled whale hunters, the visitor also a revered shaman known far and wide for his spiritual powers. His men have unloaded a cargo of caribou skins, now piled by the hearth. The host reaches into a sealskin bag and brings out a fine iron spear point, which shines brightly in the firelight. The easterner examines it closely, runs his finger over the sharp point. He shakes his head and the bargaining begins. By the time it ends, a knife, some more fine points, and a lump of dark ore lie on the ground between the captains. Each side has driven a hard bargain, but both are satisfied, for caribou skins, and especially iron, are in short supply.

  What remains of Ekven lies on the Bering Sea coast of Chukotka, south of Cape Dezhnev (East Cape) in extreme eastern Siberia, the closest point to Alaska, which is readily visible from the shore on a clear day.11 A cemetery lies atop a hill a few hundred yards behind the settlement. The remains of more than three hundred people have come from the burial ground. The grave goods tell us that there were sharp social distinctions within Ekven. Three tombs contained two thirds of the harpoons from the cemeteries. One skeleton lay with a remarkable inventory of seal- and bird-hunting equipment, including ten harpoons, spear points, ice picks, and wooden hat accessories. There were multiple burials, too, perhaps of retainers or slaves, some of them perhaps sacrificial victims.

  The archaeologist Mikhail Bronshtein has studied the elaborately decorated bone and ivory tools from the cemetery and believes that the fantastic animal-like motifs and other elaborations are signs that distinguish different communities and kin groups from far and wide across the Bering Strait. Some of the graves were those of village residents. Perhaps others were of visitors such as traders, or of wives brought in from other communities. An elaborate web of political and social interconnected- ness seems to have linked Bering Sea communities over long distances, all of them living off the maritime resources of the Arctic seas. We can imagine the factionalism and sporadic violence that marked these societies, the quarrels and petty disputes that assumed menacing proportions during the long months of total winter darkness. They competed and fought over trade routes and hunting territories, over perceived insults that festered for generations.12

  When Bronshtein pored over the Ekven artifacts, he discovered that the lines and tracery on the bone and ivory artifacts were so fine and intricate that they could only have been made by cutting and engraving tools with iron working edges. He believes that most of the ivory, antler, and wooden artifacts of the Old Bering Sea culture were fashioned with iron tools, so this was a vital material for the artisans of two thousand years ago and later.

  At first, Bering Strait iron came from trade fairs in the interior, perhaps, as well as down trade routes along the coast. Strategically placed villages like Ekven were in a good position to control all kinds of trade, especially that in valued commodities like iron. We do not know how much iron passed from hand
to hand across the strait, but large quantities were probably involved. This could account for the rapidity with which Eskimo groups accepted iron technology and artifacts after later European contact. Iron was a known, highly useful, and valued commodity long before the Russian explorer Vitus Bering sailed into the strait that bears his name in 1728.13

  By the time conditions warmed slightly in the Arctic, the highly competitive societies of the Bering Strait had developed an insatiable hunger for iron. Almost all of it came from Asian sources. Then, gradually, a handful of iron objects may have come from the opposite direction, from sparsely inhabited lands thousands of miles away in the Canadian Archipelago and Greenland.

  EAST OF THE Yukon, a vast tract of low-lying, undulating territory stretches eastward to the distant Atlantic Ocean. A thick ice sheet blanketed this glacier-scoured, rocky land as recently as fifteen thousand years ago. Hudson Bay is the dominant landmark, little more than a shallow basin. The barren terrain of the ice-clogged Canadian Archipelago lies north of the mainland, separated by a short distance from Greenland with its vast ice cap. Throughout this savagely cold world, there are rarely more than three frost-free months a year. Even during warmer centuries, the permafrost would have persisted, covered by bogs and swamps during the summer months, so that travel by land would have been difficult at best. These hardships would have been compounded by swarming mosquitoes. Vegetational cover is sparse, but caribou and musk ox could be hunted, also small fur-bearing animals and seabirds. But the rich resources of the Arctic Ocean provided food aplenty for the tiny primordial Tuniit populations that moved east from Alaska along the shore and into the archipelago after about five thousand years ago.

  The Tuniit were tough, resourceful folk who survived in some of the harshest environments on earth with the simplest of technologies.14 The Canadian archaeologist Moreau Maxwell once described what life must have been like in their tiny musk-ox-hide tents, equipped with hearths, in the depths of winter in about 1700 B.C. The thick scent of seal oil lamps inside the tents would have pervaded everything. “The bitter winter months might have been spent in a semi-somnolent state, the people lying under thick, warm musk ox skins, their bodies close together, and with food and fuel within easy reach.”15 Everyone kept trips outside to a minimum and basically hibernated.