The Farfarers
Page 39
CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN
ALBA-IN-THE-WEST
1 Micmac was the name used by Europeans for the natives of Nova Scotia and some adjacent regions of the Atlantic provinces. It is now being replaced by the native usage: M’ikmaw or M’iqmaw.
CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT
SEARCHING FOR ALBA
1 I arrived at this conclusion after an extensive reconstruction of the voyage, as detailed in Westviking, Chapter 9, America Discovered.
2 There is the possibility that Bjarni met natives, but the Avalon peninsula was one of the least attractive regions of the island from the native point of view until the post-Columbian period brought numbers of European fishermen to it. These attracted some (but never many) Beothuks seeking European goods. Current archaeological findings suggest that the Avalon may have been effectively devoid of indigenes in Bjarni’s time.
3 Cf. Sea of Slaughter, Chapter 9, The Passing of the Buff (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984).
4 Bjarni’s presence on the voyage is confirmed by the legend on the Vinland map. R.A. Skelton et al., The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1965).
5 I have dealt with these matters in Westviking, Chapter 11, The Vinland Voyages; and in Appendix L, Leif Erikson’s Vinland Discovery. Grape vines were in much demand as withies, used for sewing the lap planking of Viking vessels together.
CHAPTER TWENTY - NINE
KARLSEFNI AND COMPANY
1 My reconstruction of Karlsefni’s voyage is to be found in Westviking, Part III, and in appendices M, N, and O.
2 It is worth repeating that, among the Norse, trading and raiding were traditionally interchangeable and complementary activities. The Norse raided when it suited them, and traded when it didn’t. The masters/owners of three of the four ships on the Karlsefni expedition were nominally traders.
3 As previously noted, Norse ships engaged on long voyages frequently carried a couple of milch cows, and a bull to freshen the cows. But these would hardly have sufficed to establish a settlement herd.
4 The Western Settlement of that time was in Ivigtut Bight, just west of Cape Desolation. It became known as the Middle Settlement a good many years later when the Godthaab fiords usurped the name Western Settlement. Cf. Westviking, p. 152, footnote.
5 The name Helluland may have been descriptive of the enormous, near-vertical cliff faces that form portions of the walls of many north Labrador fiords and outer coasts.
6 In 1995 and again in 1997, I sailed the entire length of the Labrador and, although our vessel held as close to shore as safety permitted, we saw no indication that this vast land was, or ever had been, inhabited until we entered some of the deep fiords and inlets, and even then signs of human life were few and far between.
7 The saga specifies that this was a ship’s, not a boat’s keel, but gives no clue as to its origin. However, the keel of a wooden ship is an integral part of the vessel and does not usually separate from the hull of a wreck. On the other hand, the keel of a skin-covered vessel (by far the most enduring part of the structure) is readily detached and will survive long after the skin covering and light wooden framing have decayed or been washed away. The keel found on Porcupine Strand may well have come from an Alban ship.
8 Copyists who made the late recensions of the sagas (the ones we now possess) appear to have systematically substituted Vinland for Albania or Hvitramannaland, the original Norse names for the region.
9 See Westviking, Chapter 21, The Land of Hope.
10 The identity of the Skraelings encountered at Hop is uncertain. We can deduce from the given evidence that they were probably not Beothuk. In all likelihood they were Tunit, although archaeologists have so far not found evidence for a continuing Tunit presence in Newfoundland later than the ninth century.
A slight possibility exists that they might have been Albans but, if so, why were they not recognized as such by Karlsefni’s people? My conclusion is that they were either Tunit or of mixed Alban-Tunit ancestry. There can be no question but that they were used to trading with, or that they were friendly towards, Europeans but could put up a good fight in their own defence when needs must.
11 These natives could have been Tunit, but might equally well have been Innu.
12 No. 194, 8vo, the Arna-Magnean Library.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE BEST OF TIMES
1 King Olaf, who ruled Norway from 1015 to 1028.
2 It is apparent from the saga account that the place where Gudleif landed was not the only, or even the chief, settlement.
3 Two tower beacons were in existence when the first surveys of St. George’s Bay were compiled in the nineteenth century and stood until near the mid-twentieth when both were destroyed by contractors erecting a fire observation tower on Cairn Mountain, whose name has since been changed to Steel mountain. Cf. Chapter 33, Jakatar.
4 Walrus were also abundant in other parts of the Gulf. Enormous concentrations were to be found on the beaches of Prince Edward Island and Miscou Island. These, too, were exterminated, mainly for their oil, by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commercial exploiters. Cf. Sea of Slaughter, Chapter 16, Sea Tuskers.
5 In an attempt to avoid culpability for the decline and virtual disappearance of Canadian Atlantic ground fisheries, the governments of Canada and of Newfoundland blame depredation by the harp and hood seal populations and are waging relentless war on them. Since 1996 a government-supported pogrom has resulted in the slaughter of a million or more seals. Most of what little financial return has resulted from this butchery has been from the sale of seal penises to the Asian market, where they are used in aphrodisiacs.
In the spring of 1998, unusually mild weather conditions resulted in a drastic reduction in the amount of ice suitable for seal nurseries. Some biologists estimate that seal pup losses from this cause may have amounted to as much as forty per cent. Despite this horrendous natural disaster, the governments concerned allowed, and encouraged, a further holocaust that is believed to have resulted in the deaths of at least half a million adults and sub-adults.
The Canadian seal “hunt” currently entails the biggest ongoing destruction of large, wild mammals anywhere in the world. For a history of this cf. Sea of Slaughter, Chapter 18, Death on Ice (Old Style) and Chapter 19, Death on Ice (New Style).
CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE
DROGIO AND ESTOTILAND
1 This palaeo-Inuit culture is called Thule because some of the first artefacts attributed to it were found near a trading post in northwestern Greenland named “Thule” by its founders. The name has no connection with Tilee, or with Albans.
2 Westviking, Appendix P.
3 Around 1516 Erik Valkendorf, Archbishop of Nidaros, collected information about Greenland from merchants trading at Trondheim. He noted that Greenland’s exports included black bear, lynx, beaver, otter, sable, stoat (weasel), and wolverine, none of which were to be found in Greenland. The pelts could only have reached Greenland from North America.
4 Prior to his transatlantic venture, Zichmini had led at least one major expedition against Iceland. It was probably here that he heard the fisherman’s tale and took the man back with him to Scotland, intending to use him as a pilot in a venture to the new world.
CHAPTER THIRTY - TWO
GREENLANDERS
1 These were not tower beacons. Archaeologists who have examined the site report finding three accumulations of stones, none of which could have provided materials for a cairn more than three or four feet high. The runic inscription tells us that three men built the cairns in a single day, from which we can judge that they must have been small constructs.
2 Supposedly there were 190 farms in the Eastern Settlement and 90 in the Western, but surveys have located fewer than 170 in the former and 70 in the latter. Population estimates have run as high as 8,000. I believe such figures to be greatly inflated. High infant mortality combined with the low productivity of most of the farms would have severely limit
ed the number of people each settlement could have supported at any given time. There may never have been more than eight hundred people in the Western, and two thousand in the Eastern, Settlement.
3 What remains of a written record of the Norse in Greenland is almost exclusively concerned with events in the southern (Eastern) settlement. No accounts of what took place in the northern one have survived. Since the keeping of written records was a function of the clergy, the absence of such from the northern settlement would seem to indicate a parallel absence of priests.
4 Icelandic Norse do not appear to have colonized the Western Settlement for some time, even decades, after Erik Rauda led the first land taking in the south. It is not impossible, therefore, that some Albans who, for one reason or another did not leave Crona at the time of the exodus may still have been living in the western fiords when the first Icelanders reached that region. If the two peoples had then been relatively equal in numbers they may have made an accommodation, rather than waging war. An element of Alban blood and traditions in the Western Settlement might help explain the antipathy that developed between Eastern and Western Settlements.
5 Vilhjalmar Stefansson, Greenland (New York: Doubleday Doran and Co., 1942).
6 A study of skeletons from churchyards in the Western Settlement made in 1942 by K. Fischer-Møller indicates that there had already been considerable racial mixing between Norsemen and Eskimos, even before the Norse in the Western Settlement abandoned the church (K. Fischer-Møller, “Skeletons from Ancient Greenland Graves,” Med. Om. Gronl., vol. 89, no. 4 [Copenhagen, 1942]).
CHAPTER THIRTY - THREE
JAKATAR
1 Newfoundland Pilot, pp. 254–55, 1st ed. (Ottawa: Canadian Hydrographic Service, 1952).
2 Ramah chert flakes and artefacts have been found on the Magdalen Islands and several other localities around the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
3 Early settlers at St. George’s Bay may have been able to provide themselves with a limited amount of iron by smelting nodules of ferrous oxides known as “bog iron,” which are to be found in many bogs in Newfoundland. There is evidence that bog iron was smelted by the Norse occupants of the L’Anse Aux Meadows site C. A.D. 1000.
4 There can be no doubt but that both M’ikmaw and French contributed to the Jakatar inheritance. Both reached St. George’s Bay in the eighteenth century: the French as refugees from Acadie and the M’ikmaw as emigrants from Cape Breton Island. Both peoples were Roman Catholic and had long been closely associated.
Leonard’s reference is to Frank G. Speck, Beothuk and Micmacs, Indian Notes and Monographs, Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation, 1922). “The Micmacs claim to have had some knowledge of Newfoundland from remote times. They speak of a people called ‘ancients’ who lived on the southern and western coasts before the 18th century.”
5 Aymetic Picaud, a twelfth-century pilgrim to the Basque country, wrote that the Basque name for God was Jakue, which may have been a dialectic variant on the more usual Jainko.
CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR
THE COUNTRY PATH
1 King George IV Ecological Reserve Management Plan (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Parks and Natural Area Division, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1997).
INDEX
Page numbers appearing in italic type refer to pages containing illustrations, maps, and photographs. The notes are indexed as follows. If note material is taken out of context, the text page number may appear in parentheses; 343n1 (151) means page 343, note 1 (page 151 in text).
A
Acadians
Adam of Bremen
Adomnan:
Vita Sancti Columbae
Aedan mac Gabrain
Aesir
Agricola, Gnaeus Julius
Agricultural revolution
Aivalik (walrus)
Alaskans
Alba
origins of name
Alba in specific countries, see Baffin Island (Albania, Hvitramannaland); Britain; Greenland (Crona, Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement); Iceland (Thule, Tilli); Labrador (Okak); Newfoundland (Alba-in-the-West, Drogio, Vinland); Northern Islands (the Faeroes, Orkney, Shetland); Scotland (Albania, Pictland); Ungava
Alba-in-the-West, see Newfoundland
Alba Longo (Italy)
Alban, Saint
Alban Hills (Apennines)
Albania
Scotland
Albania (Balkans)
Albania in Baffin Island, see Baffin Island
Albania Inferior (Armenia)
Albania Superior (Caucasus)
Albans
in Baffin Island
in Britain
in Corsica
in Crona
in Elba
in Greenland
in Iceland
in Italy
in Labrador, Okak
in Newfoundland
Alba-in-the-West
Drogio
in Northern Islands
in Okak
origins of
in Sardinia
in Scotland
in Spain
in Ungava and western grounds
see also Emigration; Invasions
Alba (Romania)
Alba (Spain)
Albe, Saint
Albicci (Liguria)
Albicet (Spain)
Albii (Iran)
Albkhazastan, Albkhazastani
Alborz massif
Albula
Albunea
Alderney
Alf of the Dales
Algonkians
Alla Tarasova, MV
Alpine (Albin) massif
Alps
Alpuani
Amber
Ancient Emigrants (Brøgger)
Ancient People of the Arctic (McGhee)
Ancients, the
Andey
Angles
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Angmagssalik
Annals of Greenland
Annals of Innisfallen
Annals of Ulster
Annieopsquotch Mountains
Antoniniani, Roman
Antrim (Ireland)
Apennines (Alpes Poeninae)
Aphrodisiacs, use of seals in
Aquitainians
Arabia
Archaeological finds:
in Astrakhan
in Baffin Island
in Ellesmere Island
in Greenland
in Iceland
in Ireland
in Kane Basin
in Labrador
in Magdalen Islands
in Newfoundland
in Northern Islands
in Ungava
Archaeological Survey of Canada
Archaeologists, see individual Collins, Henry B; Fischer-Møller, K.; Harp, Elmer; Hermanns-Audardóttir, Margrét; Lee, Thomas; Lethbridge, Thomas C.; Maxwell, Moreau; McCullough, Karen; McGhee, Robert; Rousseau, Jacques; Schledermann, Peter; Sutherland, Patricia; Taylor, William; Thomson, Callum; Tuck, James
Arctic:
Canadian
central
eastern
high
western
Arctic and Antarctic Institute (Leningrad)
Arctic Circle
Arctic Institute of North America
Arctic Ocean
Ardrossan
Argyll
Ari Marson
Armenia
Armorica
Armoricans see also Emigration; Invasions
Arna-Magnean Library
Arni, Bishop
Arran
Arthur
Arverni tribe
Asia
Asia Minor
Astrakhan
Ath-Cliath (Dublin)
Atlantic Ocean
Atli, Earl
Atli the Red
Atrebates
Aud the Deep Minded
Augustine monastery
Australia
Aus
tria
Autochthones
Avalon peninsula
Avienus
Axe River
Ayr
B
Baccalieu Island
Baffin Bay
Baffin Island
Albania
Hvítramannaland
Baleen, whale
Balkans
Ballistae
Baltic Sea
Balts
Banishment, outlawing
Bardarson, Ivar
Bardastrandur
Barentz, Willem
Barfit, Peter (Pierre Beaupatrie)
Barnarkarl, Olvir
Barra
Barrenland Grizzly
Basques
language
in Newfoundland
whaling
Bathurst Island
Battle of Nechtansmere
Bay d’Espoir
Bay of Birds
Bay of Biscay
Beacons, see Towers, stone beacon
Bear Head
Bear Island
Bear Isles
Bear Islet
Bears
Beaufort Sea
Beaupatrie, Pierre see Peter Barfit
Bede, Venerable
De Temporum Ratione
Belgae
Belle Isle Strait
Belokany
Benedictine nunnery
Beorhtric
Beothuk and Micmacs (Speck)
Beothuks (Red Indians, Innu)
in contact with Albans