by Tim Severin
The little Skraeling flotilla — there were nine of their skin boats — slowly paddled closer. The boatmen seemed to be as surprised and cautious as we were. They slackened their pace and drifted their boats gently through the shallows, keeping about fifty paces offshore as they watched us, staring curiously. Neither side said a word. There was a tense silence. Then one of the Skraelings stood up in his boat - it was a narrow, trough-shaped vessel, not very well made — and began to wave his arm in circles above his head. In his hand was some sort of blade, which made a low humming sound, halfway between a gentle roar and a mutter.
'What do you think that means?' Thorfinn asked his second-in-command, a man called Thorbrand Snorrisson.
It could be a sign of peace,' he replied, 'They don't seem very hostile.'
'Then we had better respond in the same way,' answered Thorfinn. 'Take a white shield and go into the water up to your knees. Hold up the shield so they can see it clearly.'
A white shield is our standard signal of peace, recognised and used even among the wild Irish and distant German tribes. A red shield displayed means war. Anyhow, the Skraelings seemed to understand the gesture; they gently turned their boats towards us and paddled inshore. We all stood motionless as they touched land, and the men climbed out of their boats and advanced hesitantly up the beach.
We could see that they were exactly like the people that my uncle Thorvald's crew had attacked and killed. The men — there were no women in the party — were dark-skinned and a little smaller than us in stature. They had the same almond-shaped eyes and lank, very black hair worn long and loose, right down to their shoulders. Their cheekbones were high and prominent, and this gave their faces a menacing look. I noticed that their eyes were uniformly dark brown, almost black. They must have been a hunting party because there was very little in the boats except for some hunting spears and nondescript bundles wrapped in rawhide. Thorfinn suspected that they were as startled as we were by the encounter. At any rate, there was a very long silence, while both parties looked one another over, and then the leader of the Skraelings called out something in an unintelligible language and the entire group deliberately got back into their boats, shoved off and paddled away, from time to time looking back over their shoulders.
As the Skraeling boats disappeared on their original route up the coast, we returned to our chores. You can imagine the chatter and speculation about when the Skraelings would reappear and what they intended. No one doubted that this was only the preliminary encounter.
The Skraelings took us even more unawares on their next visit by appearing from the landward side of the settlement. It must have been about six months later, and how they got so close to the settlement without being detected was alarming. At one moment we were going about our usual routine, and the next instant a couple of dozen Skraelings were walking down from the edge of the woods towards us. They seemed to have sprung from the ground. It was lucky that they came peacefully for we were taken totally off guard. Indeed, we were all dithering, not knowing whether to run for our weapons, cluster together or go forward to meet the Skraelings with another peaceful gesture, when, as luck would have it, our bull began to bellow. He was with the cows in the nearby meadow, and possibly the scent of the Skraelings — for they did smell rather powerfully - disturbed him. He let out a series of thunderous bellows and this terrified our visitors. Glancing back over their shoulders, they scampered for the safety of our houses as though pursued by a monster. Several of our more timid men had already taken up position inside the houses, the better to defend themselves, and had already shut the doors. The next thing they knew, the terrified Skraelings were beating on the door planks, crying out in their strange language, pleading to be let in. The Norsemen, thinking that an attack was in progress, pushed desperately against the doors from the inside, trying to keep them shut. For us who were outside the situation, once so fraught, was now totally comic. It was clear that the Skraelings meant no harm, and the fainthearts inside the houses were in a panic at the unseen onslaught. Those of us who could see what was happening burst into roars of laughter. Our guffaws reassured the Skraelings, who calmed down and began to look sheepish, and after a few moments the frightened house defenders began to peek out to see what had happened, only to make us scoff even more loudly. This ludicrous situation proved to be the ideal introduction — there's nothing like two sides making public fools of themselves and accepting the fact for a sense of mutual understanding to develop. With sign language and smiles the Skraelings began to open the packs they had been carrying. They contained furs, splendid furs, the pelts of fox and marten and wolf and otter. There were even a couple of glossy black-bear pelts. The quality was like nothing we had seen before, and we knew they would fetch a premium price in any market in Norway or Denmark. There was not one of us who did not begin to wonder what we might trade with the Skraelings in exchange.
The obvious item was metal — for we had noted that the Skraelings possessed only stone-tipped weapons. But Thorfinn was quick off the mark. He ordered sharply that no one was to trade weapons or metal tools to the Skraelings. Better weaponry was the only advantage we possessed against their superior numbers. Everyone was standing around racking their brains about what to do next and the Skraelings were gazing around curiously, when one of the women in a gesture of hospitality fetched a pail of milk and a wooden dipper. She offered a dipper of the milk to the leader of the Skraelings. He stared at the liquid in puzzlement, sniffed it suspiciously and then cautiously tried a sip, while the woman indicated that he should drink it. The Skraeling was delighted with the taste of milk. He must have also believed that it was a rich and rare substance, for he delved in his pack and offered the woman a marten skin. She had the wit to accept it. Another Skraeling stepped forward and gestured he wanted to try drinking milk, and before long the entire group were clustering around, reaching for the ladle and handing over valuable furs and pelts in exchange.
Even as an eight-year-old lad, I had seen the drunks at Brattahlid so desperate as to give their last coins for a draught of wine or strong mead, but this was the only time in my long and varied life that I have ever seen anyone pay so handsomely for mere cow juice. What is more, the Skraelings were totally happy with the bargain. After they had parted with their entire stock of furs, even leaving behind their empty packs, they were content to walk back into the forest, carrying their barter profit in their bellies, while we gleefully stowed away a small fortune in Vinland furs.
But however peacefully the Skraeling visit had turned out, their arrival had a more sinister implication. The following day Thorfinn told us to stop all our other work and start building a palisade around the settlement. We did not need urging. All of us had an uncomfortable feeling that our peaceful and profitable relationship with the Skraelings might not last. Everyone remembered how the Skraelings had killed Thorvald Eriksson with their darts on his earlier expedition to this land, and that a massacre by our men of eight Skraelings from their hunting party had preceded his lone death. If the Skraelings behaved like us, then they might still be looking for more blood vengeance to balance the account. Like one of those sea anemones who retract their tentacles when they sense danger, we shrank back inside a safer perimeter. The outlying houses were abandoned and the entire community shifted to live within the shelter of the palisade, just in case the Skraelings returned with less peaceable intentions. The only structure to remain outside the stockade was Tyrkir's little smithy down by the river, where he needed access to the bog iron and running water.
THE SKRAELINGS DID not return until the beginning of the following winter, when baby Snorri was nearly a year old. By then we felt we were getting the measure of this new land. We had cleared back the surrounding brushwood for additional pasture, fenced two small paddocks for our cattle, which now included three healthy calves, improved and strengthened the walls and roofs of our original hastily built dwellings, and our people were beginning to talk about the prospect of sending our knorr bac
k to Greenland with a cargo of timber and furs, and attracting more settlers to join us. We had lived through the full cycle of the seasons, and though the winter had been cold and dreary, it had been no worse than what we had known in Greenland. Our settlement had begun to put down roots, but — as we soon learned — those roots were shallow.
This time the Skraelings came in much greater strength, and by land as well as by water. One group of about a score of hunters emerged from the forest, while their comrades paddled directly into the bay in glistening, grease-treated skin boats. Their visit seemed to have been planned well ahead of time because both groups were seen to be carrying no weapons, only their packs of furs. This time one of our fishermen had spotted the Skraelings at a distance and come ashore to warn us. Thorfinn, worried by their greater numbers, had already ordered the entire community to enter the stockade and shut the gate. So when the Skraelings approached they found no one to greet them. The fields and the beach were deserted. They came up to the palisade and hesitated. Thorfinn called out, asking what they wanted, but of course they did not understand a word of our language and we had no way of understanding their reply. Then one of the Skraelings, a tall, good-looking man who must have been their chieftain, lobbed his pack over the top of the palisade. It landed on the earth with a soft thump and we found it contained five grey wolf pelts. Clearly this was the result of their summer trapping and the Skraelings had come again to trade. 'Let's see if we can sell them only milk again,' Thorfinn warned us. 'Remember: on no account let them get their hands on our weapons.' The stockade gate was cautiously open and we began to trade.
It was not quite as easy as before. The strange dark-skinned men were still eager to barter furs for milk, but when the milk was all drunk they still had more pelts for sale, and pointed to the red wadmal, which one of the colonists was wearing as garters. In the beginning we offered a hand's span of red cloth cut from the bolt for every pelt. This they accepted and immediately tied the pieces of cloth around their heads, preening in the gaudy decoration. But then the supply of red cloth ran low and it was only possible to offer them a single ribbon of red cloth, barely a finger wide, for each pelt. To our astonishment, the Skraelings were just as happy as before to make the bargain, and kept on dealing until their stock of fur was used up.
When the trading for milk and red cloth had ended, the Skraelings lingered. They strolled among our men, gingerly picking up various implements and testing their weight and wondering at their purpose. Clearly these were people who had never handled a spade or sickle, though I suspect that, hidden in the edge of the forest, they had often watched us farming. They did not mean any harm, I'm sure, and were merely inquisitive. But quick as a flash one of them leaned forward and tugged a scramsaxe from the belt of a man called Hafgrim. Startled, Hafgrim gave a shout of surprise and tried to seize the culprit Skraeling in order to retrieve his long knife. But the Skraeling was too quick for him and twisted away. The entire group of Skraelings scattered like a shoal of frightened minnows and began to run back towards the woods, several of them still with our farm tools in their hands. One Skraeling was so terrified that he ran in the wrong direction, past the smithy, and Tyrkir, who had gone back to work, emerged from the doorway just at the right moment to stick out his foot and trip him up. As casually as if he were in a salmon stream, Tyrkir then reached inside the smithy, produced a heavy fish spear he had been mending and killed him. I shall never forget the sight of my first battle corpse, the half-naked Skraeling, suddenly a pathetic, scrawny, broken figure, sprawled half in and half out of the peat stream, his bright red headband smeared with mud.
Thorfinn immediately called an assembly to discuss what we should do next. Everybody crowded into the open space in front of the longhouse and in the nervous aftermath of that tragic brawl it was not long before people were shouting irritably at one another, arguing about the best tactics to defeat the Skraelings. No one doubted that the Skraelings would return and seek revenge.
I do not know whether the next, and final, visit of the Skraelings was an accident or intentional and if they came to exact retribution for the man killed outside Tyrkir's smithy. For more than a year we mounted guard over the colony. Day and night there was a watcher stationed on the headland to keep a lookout for Skraeling boats, and another lookout scanned the edge of the forest, where it lapped down towards our stockade. Then came the fateful day when the coast watcher came panting up from the beach to announce that a large Skraeling fleet was rounding the headland. He had counted at least thirty of the needle-shaped boats and half a dozen larger canoes, each paddled by a dozen men. No one seemed to have noticed that the new Skraeling threat came from the south, and that the men we had driven off had run away in the opposite direction, to the north.
Thorfinn had planned it all out. As the Skraeling fleet aproached the beach, a handful of our men, led by the same Thorbrand Snorrisson who had stood alongside Thorfinn at the first encounter with the Skraelings, took up position on the foreshore, displayed their red shields and called out a fighting challenge. For a short while the Skraeling fleet hung back, the paddlers either suspicious or puzzled by the belligerent behaviour of the white men. Then, as our champions continued to shout defiance and wave their weapons, the Skraelings decided to accept the challenge. The Skraeling men rose to their feet in the skin boats and began to wave the same thin-bladed implements over their heads that they had employed on their very first visit, the flail-like implements that might have been mistaken for the flat wooden lath known as a weaver's sword. Only this time the sound they produced was entirely different. Instead of a low muttering hum, the noise was a loud and angry buzz, almost the sound of an enraged swarm of bees. Then, as more and more of the whirling flails joined in, the sound swelled in volume until it became a cataract of noise, filling the air until it seemed that the blood was roaring in our ears. Finally, the noise altered again as the sound-makers began to coordinate the movements of their flails, and the sound began to come rushing towards us in wave after wave, rising and falling in volume as it beat upon our senses.
Presumably, this extraordinary resonance was intended to frighten or dismay our small group of men down on the beach and it worked. Numbed by the vibrating din, they stood rooted to the ground. This was their error. While the Skraeling boats were still some distance away from the shoreline, a shower of darts suddenly came skimming through the air from the flotilla and began to patter down around our men in a deadly hail. The Skraelings were using some sort of dart launcher, a flat board a cubit long that made an extension to their throwing arm and gave an astonishing range to their missiles. Three of our men were struck by the darts, two were killed outright, and scarcely a member of our advance party was not injured in some way. As the Skraelings came into close range, they began to fling another strange weapon at us - spears which pulled behind them some sort of round float attached by a short length of line. The weird and startling appearance of these floats hurtling through the air frightened our men as much as the war sound of the flails. As they went skimming through the air over their heads and bounced on the ground, our men feared that the Skraelings were unleashing some sort of magic weapon.
Now the Skraelings were climbing out of their boats and running up the beach, waving lances and stone-edged knives, trying to come to grips with our advance guard. The Norsemen turned and fled, as was Thorfinn's plan, for they were really decoys. When the Skraelings came level with the dead bodies of our two slain, their leader was seen to reach down and pick up the axe from the corpse of Thorbrand Snorrisson. The Skraeling leader must never have seen a metal axe before, because he hefted it and then hacked experimentally at a nearby rock. The axe head broke, and thinking it was useless because it did not cut the rock, the Skraeling leader threw it into the sea with a gesture of disgust. A few moments later he learned what a metal blade can do on human flesh because by then the decoy party of colonists, with the Skraelings in pursuit, had fallen back as far as the edge of the forest, where Thorfinn had h
idden the main body of the settlers in his ambush. The bulk of our men came charging out of the brushwood at full tilt, waving their weapons and roaring their war shouts. The Skraelings did not have a chance. They were lightly clad, held no shields, and even their lances could be sheered through with a swingle sweep of a metal sword. The rush of Norsemen bowled over the Skraelings, and before they could flee four Skraelings were killed, two of them victims to the heavy axes of the Norse farmers. The whole encounter was over in an instant. The Skraelings took to their heels in panic and either ran for the edge of the woods or back to their boats, which they pushed off and fled in as fast as they could paddle.
When I helped bury the corpse of Thorbrand Snorrisson I found that the small dart which had killed him looked more like a hunting weapon than a man-killing implement. As for the mysterious spears and their attached floats, they proved to be sealing harpoons with an inflated bladder attached to mark the spot where the seal has dived when it is wounded. I did not voice my opinion to the jubilant settlers — they would have thought me utterly impertinent — but I came to the conclusion that the Skraelings had not come prepared for war and we did not deserve our victory. The Skraelings were a large hunting party and would have passed by us peaceably if we had not challenged them with our red war shields and shouted defiance.