by Tim Severin
Every youngster, almost from the time he or she could walk, helped with day-to-day work and it made us feel valued. On land we graduated from running errands and cleaning out the byres to learning how to skin and butcher the beasts and salt down the meat. On water we began by baling out the bilges of the small rowing boats, then we were allowed to bait fishing lines and help haul nets, until finally we were handling the sails and pulling on an oar as the boats were rowed back to the landing place. We had very little schooling, though Erik's widow, Thjodhild, did attempt to teach us our alphabet and some rudimentary writing. We were not enthusiastic pupils. Thjodhild's character was embittered by a long-running disagreement with her husband. What irked her was that Erik had refused to become a Christian and this had set an example to many of his followers. Thjodhild was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic converts to the creed of the White Christ, and she was one of those querulous Christians who was always seeking to impose her beliefs on the rest of the community. But Erik was a dyed-in-the-wool pagan, and the more she nagged at him, the more stubborn he became. He had not left Iceland, he said, to bring with him in his baggage the newfangled religion. He had offered a sacrifice to Thor before he sailed to Greenland and, in return, Thor had looked after the colony very well. Erik told his wife in no uncertain terms that he was not about to abandon the Old Gods and the Old Ways. Eventually matters became so bad between the two of them that Thjodhild announced she would have as little as possible to do with him. They still had to live under the same roof, but she had a Christian chapel built for herself, very prominently, on a hillock near the farm just where Erik was sure to see it every time he left his front door. However, Erik refused to let his wife have much timber for the structure so the chapel remained a tiny building, no more than a couple of arm spans wide in any direction. It was the first Christian church in Greenland, and so small that no more than eight people could fit inside at once. We children called it the White Rabbit Hutch for the White Christ.
Halfway through the fifth summer of my life I learned that my foster mother was to marry again. After the hay gathering, the wedding was to be celebrated between the young widow Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir and another of Erik's sons, Thorstein. I was neither jealous nor resentful. Instead I was delighted. Thorstein was my father's youngest brother and it meant that my adored Gudrid was now to be a genuine relation. I felt that the marriage would bind her even more closely to me, and was only worried that after the wedding I would have to go to live in the main Eriksson household, which would put me in range of my detestable aunt Freydis. She had grown into a strapping young woman, broad shouldered and fleshy, with a freckled skin and a snub nose, so that she attracted men in a rather over-ripe way. She was also full of spite. She was always hatching plots with her girlfriends to get others into trouble and she was usually successful. On the few occasions I spent any time in my father's house I tried to stay clear of Freydis. Sixteen years older than me, she regarded me as a pest, and would think nothing of shoving me roughly into the darkness of the root cellar and locking me in there for hours, going off and not telling anyone. Luckily old Thorbjorn, Gudrid's father, who was still alive though weakly, was so pleased with the match that he agreed to let the newly-weds share his house, which was a short walk from the Eriksson home.
The wedding was a huge success. To satisfy grumpy old Thjodhild there was a brief Christian ceremony at the White Rabbit Hutch, but the main event was the exchange of ceremonial gifts, heavy beer drinking, raucous music and stamping dances which are the mark of the old-style weddings.
My next distinct memory of Greenland is a bright spring morning with the ice floes still drifting silently in our fjord. The glaring white fragments, so luminous on grey-blue water, made my eyes hurt as I stared at a little ship edging slowly towards us. She was a knorr, battered and seaworn, her planks grey with age. Some men were rowing, others handling the ropes as they tried to swing the rectangular sail to catch the cold breath of the faint wind that came from the north, skirting the great glacier behind us that is the heart of Greenland. I still recall how, from time to time, the oarsmen stood up to push with their blades against the floes, using the oars as poles to punt their way through the obstacles, and how slowly the boat seemed to approach. A crowd began to gather on the beach. Each person on the shore was counting the number of the crew and searching their faces to see who was aboard and if they had changed from the images we had been holding in our memories since the day they had gone to explore the mysterious land west across the sea, which Bjarni had first seen, and my father Leif had been the last person to visit. Then the keel grated on the shingle, and one by one her crew leapfrogged the upper strake and splashed ashore, ankle deep in the water. The crowd greeted them in near silence. We had already noticed that a man was missing, and the helmsman was not the skipper they had expected.
'Where's Thorvaldr" someone in the crowd called out.
'Dead,' grunted one of the seamen. 'Killed by Skraelings.'
'What's a Skraeling?' I whispered to one of my friends, Eyvind. The two of us had wriggled our way through to the front of the crowd and were standing right at the water's edge, the wavelets soaking our shoes. Eyvind was two years older than me and I expected him to know everything.
'I don't know for sure,' he whispered back. 'I think it means someone who is weak and foreign and we don't like.'
Thorvald Eriksson, the second uncle of my tale, I remember only vaguely as a jovial, heavy-set man with large hands and a wheezing laugh, who often smelled of drink. Thorvald and his crew had departed westward eighteen months earlier to pick up where my father Leif had left off. My father had described an iron-bound low vista of slab-like grey rocks, long white-sand beaches extending back into boggy marshes and swamps, enormous still forests of dark pine trees whose scent the sailors could smell from a day's sail out to sea. Now Thorvald wanted to know whether anyone lived there, and if they did whether they had anything of value for trade or taking. If the place was truly deserted, then he would reoccupy the camp Leif had established on the Vinland coast and use it as a base to explore the adjoining territory. He would search for pasture, timber, fishing grounds, animals with fur.
Thorvald had taken with him a strong crew of twenty-five men and had the loan of my father's knorr, the same vessel which had plucked me off the rocks. He was a good navigator and several of his men had sailed with my father and were competent pilots, so his track brought him directly to the spot where Leif had overwintered four years before. There the Brattahlid men reoccupied the turf-and-timber huts that my father had built, and setded in for the winter. The following spring Thorvald sent the ship's small boat farther west along the coast on a voyage of enquiry. They found their journey very wearisome. The coast was a vast web of islands and inlets and shallows where they often lost their way. Yet the farther they went, the more the land improved. The wild grass grew taller, and there were strange trees which bled sweet juice when cut, or produced edible nuts whose buttery taste no one had encountered before. Despite the fertility of the land, they found no people and no trace of human habitation except at the farthest end of their exploration. There, at the back of a beach, they came across a ragged structure made of long, thin wooden poles which seemed to have been fashioned by man. The poles were fastened together with cords made from twisted tree roots and appeared to be a temporary shelter. Our men assumed that whoever had made the structure was living off the land, like our hunters in Greenland when they went north in summer to trap caribou. They found no tools, no relics, nothing else, but it made them nervous. They wondered if their presence had been noted by unseen watchers and feared an ambush.
Meanwhile Thorvald had spent the summer improving Leifs-bodir, 'Leif s cabins' as everyone called them. His men felled timber to carry back to Greenland, and caught and dried fish as food for future expeditions. The quantity of fish was prodigious. The shore in front of the cabins had a very gentle slope, and low tide exposed an expanse of sand shallows runnelled with sma
ll gulleys. The men found that if they built fish traps of stakes across the gulleys, the fish — cod mostly - were trapped by the retreating tide and lay flapping helplessly. The fishermen had only to stroll across the sand and pick up the fish by hand.
After a second winter spent snug in the cabins, Thorvald decided to explore in the opposite direction - to the east and north, where the land was more like the Greenland coast, with rocky headlands, long inlets and the occasional landing beach. But the tides ran more powerfully there and this caught Thorvald out. One day the knorr swirled into a tide race and slammed against rocks beneath a headland. The impact was enough to break off the forward ten feet of her false keel and loosen several of the lower strakes. Luckily there was a beach nearby where the crew could land their craft safely, and with so much timber around it was a simple matter to replace the damaged keel with a fine clean length of pine. Thorvald found a use for the broken-keel section. He had the piece carried to the top of the headland and set vertically in a cairn of stones, where it was visible from far out to sea. If strangers came to contest the Greenlanders' discovery, it would be proof that the Erikssons had been there before them.
This was the story of Thorvald's expedition as it emerged from the reports of the returned crew that evening. Everyone in Brattah-lid crammed into the hall of the Eriksson longhouse to hear the details. We were listening with rapt attention. My father was sitting in the place of seniority, midway down the hall on the right-hand side. My uncle Thorstein sat beside him. 'And what about Thorvald? Tell us exactly what happened to him,' my father asked. He put his question directly to Tyrkir, the same man who had been rowing the small boat that rescued Gudrid and myself from the skerries, and who had gone with Thorvald as his guide.
AT THIS POINT I should say something about Tyrkir. As a young man he had been captured on the coast of Germany and put up for sale at the slave market in Kaupang in Norway. There he had been bought by my grandfather, Erik the Red, on one of his eastward trips, and proved to be an exceptionally good purchase. Tyrkir was hard working and tireless and grew to be intensely loyal to my grandfather. He became fluent in our Norse language, the donsk tunga, finding that it is not so far removed from his mother tongue of German. But he never shed his thick accent, speaking from the back of his throat, and whenever he got excited or angry he tended to revert to the language of his own people. Eventually Erik trusted Tyrkir so completely that, while my father Leif was growing up, Tyrkir had the task of watching over him and teaching him all sorts of useful skills, for Tyrkir was one of those people who has gifted hands. He knew how to tie complicated knots for different purposes, how to chop down a tree so that it fell in a certain direction, how to make a fishing spear from a straight branch, and how to scoop out a lump of soapstone so that it made a cooking pot. Above all he possessed a skill so vital and wondrous that it is closely associated with the Gods themselves — he could shape metal in all its forms, whether smelting coarse iron from a raw lump of ore or fusing the steel edge to an axe and then hammering a pattern of silver wire into the flat of the blade.
We boys found the German rather frightening. To us he seemed ancient, though he was probably in his late fifties. He was short and puny, almost troll like, with a shock of black hair and a ferocious scowl emphasised by a bulging, prominent forehead under which his eyes looked distinctly shifty. Yet physically he was very brave, and during Leif s earlier voyage to the unknown land it was Tyrkir who volunteered for the scouting missions. His German tribe had been a forest-dwelling people, and Tyrkir thought nothing of tramping through the woodlands, wading across swamps, living off berries and a handful of dried food. He drank from puddles if he could find no clean running water, slept on the ground and seemed impervious to cold or heat or damp. It was Tyrkir who had first come across the wild grapes that some believe gave Vinland its name. He came back into Leif s camp one day carrying a bunch of the fruit, and so excited that he was rolling his eyes and muttering in German until Leif thought he was drunk or hallucinating, but Tyrkir was merely revelling in his discovery. He had not seen fresh grapes since he had been a lad in Germany and indeed, if he had not recognised the wild fruit, it is doubtful whether my father and his companions would have known what they were. But the moment Tyrkir explained what a fresh grape is, my father realised the significance of the moment. Here was evidence that the new-found country had such a benign climate that grapes — an exotic plant for Norsemen — actually grew wild. So he gave the land the name Vinland, though of course there were cynics when he got home who said that he was as big a liar as his father. To call a wilderness by a name that evoked sunshine and strong drink was as misleading as to call a land of glaciers and rock Greenland. My father was canny enough to have an answer for that accusation too. He would reply that when calling the place Vinland he did not mean the land of grape vines but the land of pastures, for 'vin' in Norse means a meadow.
'TEN DAYS AFTER repairing the broken keel,' Tyrkir said in answer to my father's question about Thorvald, 'we came across the entry to a broad sound guarded by two headlands. It was an inviting-looking place, so we turned in to investigate. We found that the inlet divided around a tongue of land densely covered with mature trees. The place looked perfect for a settlement, and Thorvald made a casual joke to us that it was the ideal place, where he could imagine spending the rest of his life.' Tyrkir paused. 'He should never have said that. It was tempting the Gods.
'We put a scouting party ashore,' he went on, 'and when the scouts returned, they reported that on the far side of the little peninsula was a landing beach, and on it were three black humplike objects. At first they thought that these black blobs were walruses, or perhaps the carcasses of small whales which had drifted ashore. Then someone recognised them as boats made of skin. Many years earlier he had been on a raiding voyage to plunder the Irish, and on the west coast he had seen similar craft, light enough to be carried on land and turned upside down.'
Here I should explain that the idea that these boats belonged to the wild Irish was not so incredible as it might seem. When the Norse first came to Iceland they found a handful of ascetic Irish monks living in caves and small huts laboriously built of stones. These monks had managed to cross from Scotland and Ireland aboard their flimsy skin boats, so perhaps they had also spread even farther. Thorvald, however, doubted that. Tyrkir described how Thorvald sent him with a dozen armed men to creep up on the strange boats from the landward side, while Thorvald himself and most of the others rowed quietly round the coast to approach from the sea. They achieved a complete surprise. There were nine strangers dozing under their upturned boats. They must have been a hunting or fishing party because they were equipped with bows and arrows, hunting knives and light throwing lances. When they heard the creak of oars they sprang to their feet and grabbed their weapons. Some of them made threatening gestures, drawing back their bows and aiming at the incoming Norse. Others tried to launch their light boats into the water and escape. But it was too late. Tyrkir's shore party burst out of the treeline, and in a short scuffle all the strangers were overpowered, except for one. He managed to flee in the smallest of the skin boats. 'I've never seen a boat travel so fast,' said Tyrkir. 'It seemed to skini across the water and there was no possibility that our ship's boat would have caught up. So we let him go.'
The eight Skraelings our men had captured were certainly not Irish. According to Tyrkir, they looked more like ski-running people from the north of Norway. Short, they had broad faces with a dark yellow skin and narrow eyes. Their hair was black and long and straggly, and they spoke a language full of high sharp sounds, which was like the chattering alarm call of a jay. They were dressed entirely in skins: skin trousers, skin jackets with tails, skin boots. Any part of their bodies not covered in these clothes was smeared with grease or soot. They were human in form, but as squat and dark as if they had emerged from underground. They squirmed and fought in the clutch of the Norsemen and tried to bite and scratch them.
Tyrkir's story no
w took a grim turn. One of the captive Skraelings wriggled out of the grip of the man holding him, produced a bone harpoon head which he had hidden inside the front of his loose jacket, and jabbed the point of the weapon deep into his captor's thigh. The Greenlander roared with pain and rage. He slammed the man's head against a rock, knocking him unconscious, and then in a fury plunged his short sword into the victim's body. His action triggered a massacre. Thorvald's men fell on the
Skraelings, hacking and stabbing as if they were dispatching vermin, and did not stop until the last one of them was dead. Then Thorvald's men disabled the two remaining skin boats by gashing the hulls to shreds with their axes, and climbed through the woodland up to the top of the peninsula while the ship's boat rowed back to the knorr.
'On the highest point of the land we sat down to rest,' Tyrkir recalled. 'Thorvald intended to allow us only a few moments' breathing space, and we threw ourselves on the ground, and for some strange reason all of us fell asleep as if we were bewitched. About two hours later I was roused by a great voice howling, "Get back to the ship! If you are to save your lives, get back to your ship."'