Pausing for a moment at my work, here in our Laurentian cottage, I gaze out the frosted windows at the winter countryside. Snow and ice mercilessly blanket the slumbering landscape while overhead an inverted bowl of darkened sky hangs heavy. Communities of skeletal birches blend effortlessly into the white panorama while pines, heavily burdened by season’s weight, sag in welcome contrast. Gusts of wind give rise to wispy billows of snow. Far out on the frozen lake, two tiny figures on snowshoes plod along doggedly. Outside, the thermometer reads -21°F; inside, it’s warm and cozy. Uncanny stillness envelopes the room, broken only by the gentle flickering from within the wood stove; I’m bathed in silence. Then the soft sound of the wind outside. It seems more like a drone, an enticing sound — perhaps not the wind at all. Is it possible that what I’m really hearing is the soft hum of the Arctic Siren’s beguiling song?
A.S. Troubetzkoy
Labelle, Québec
1
Earliest Explorations
THE EARLIEST WRITTEN record of possible Arctic exploration is that of Pytheas, a fourth-century B.C. Greek astronomer and geographer from Massilia (Marseilles) — “one of the most intrepid explorers the world has seen.” Without a doubt, this was a scientist of notable accomplishments, not the least of which, it is thought, was an estimation of Great Britain’s circumference to a 2.5 percent accuracy of twentieth-century figures. Additionally, he calculated the distance from Marseilles to northernmost Britain as being 1,050 miles, a figure 6 percent off modern calculations. Among his earlier discoveries was a method for the determination of latitude, and many credit him for having been the first to define the relationship of tides to moon phases.
In his book Περίτ ου Ώκαυού (On the Ocean), he recorded the events of a voyage undertaken by him to the far North around 325 B.C. Regrettably, the volume was lost in the seventh-century burning of the Library of Alexandria and all that has come down to us are garbled quotations and commentaries by Greek and Roman scholars. Pytheas’s account has it that he sailed out of Massilia (Marseilles), bypassed the blockades set up by the Carthaginians of the Straits of Gibraltar, circumnavigated Great Britain, and reached a place called “Thule,” or Ultima Thule, a six-day sail north of Britain. What the place actually was continues to baffle scholars, but a number of possibilities present themselves: the coast of Norway, the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands, or possibly Greenland. The most probable guess is that Pytheas reached Iceland, and if he did not actually penetrate the Arctic, he certainly attained a high latitude. His descriptions of the midnight sun and the “congealed sea” indicate that he might well have gotten to, or closely reached, the Arctic Circle.
What are we to make of Pytheas’s journey, particularly as scholars and commentators of the ancient world seem divided on the veracity of his account? The Greek geographer Strabo, for example, made no secret of his contempt for his countryman and he poured derisive scorn on the claimed voyage — jealousy, perhaps? In his seventeen-volume Geographica, penned some three centuries after the voyage, he writes, “Pytheas, by whom many have been misled … asserts that he explored in person the whole northern regions of Europe as far as the end of the world — an assertion which no man would believe, not even if Hermes made it.” As for Thule, he went on to comment:
[O]f all the countries that are named, [it] is set farthest north. But that the things Pytheas has told about Thule, as well as the other places in that part of the world, have indeed been fabricated by him … any man who has told such great falsehoods about known regions would hardly, I imagine, be able to tell the truth about places that are not known to anybody.[1]
Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and encyclopedist, on the other hand, endorsed Pytheas positively and he wrote of him as an authoritative figure. The commentary in Historia Naturalis is illuminating:
The most remote [point] of all is Thule, in which as we have pointed out there are no nights at midsummer when the sun is passing through the sign of the Crab, and on the other hand no days in midwinter. Indeed some writers think this is the case for periods of six months at a time without a break … Pytheas of Marsailles writes that this occurs in the island of Thule, six days voyage north of Britain … One day’s sail from Thule is the frozen ocean called by some the Cronian Sea …[2]
That Pytheas appears to have experienced the midnight sun is one thing — the phenomena is universal of Arctic regions and affects all of Thule’s nominated locations. Of the place he writes that there is “neither sea nor air but a mixture like sea-lung … binds everything together,” a reference perhaps to the ice packs or possibly to dense sea fog. All told, it is likely that the explorer had come in contact with drift ice, if not icebergs, and this gives Iceland greater credibility in the search for the real Thule. It cannot be discounted, furthermore, that Pytheas sailed the ice-strewn waters of Greenland’s east coast. An impressive journey it was, made all the more so by the primitiveness of the vessels at the time. The explorer’s broad-beamed, wooden boat of two, possibly three, masts could not have been more than 150 tons. Whether he had came to Iceland or not, the point is that the first Europeans apparently reached, or nearly reached, the Arctic Circle as early as about 325 B.C.
It may be supposed that Pytheas’s book and the commentaries on him were sufficiently controversial to discourage further interest in Arctic exploration for quite some time. Subsequent texts by Roman and early medieval scholars for the most part speak of the Arctic in speculative or fanciful terms. A widespread ocean surrounded the habitable world — beyond that, nothing. The polar region was the kingdom of the dead. It was a bottomless pit where perpetual darkness reigned. It was the dwelling place of the Cyclops. The pole was a gigantic magnetic rock rising out of the ocean. It “is a place of chaos, the abysmal chasm.” A place inhabited by people with swine heads, dog’s legs, and wolf teeth. And so on.
A fanciful 1606 map of the greater Arctic region produced by the Flemish cartographer, Gerhard Mercator. The North Pole is shown as a vast rock surrounded by open seas, while the magnetic pole is pictured as a mountain protruding through the waters separating Asia and America. The Northwest and Northeast Passages are clearly visible.
One tradition has it that the first of the medievals to venture into the far northern waters were Irish monks and it is they who discovered Iceland — or, if you want, rediscovered it. One such monk, Dicuil by name, in his book De mensure orbis terrae (Concerning the Measurement of the Globe), written in 825 A.D., tells of meeting up with fellow monks who claimed at one time to have lived in that same unidentified spot called Thule. Their descriptions of the place are vivid, for example: darkness reigning throughout the winter day, and summer nights being bright enough “to pick fleas from my shirt.” While the veracity of Dicuil’s report is open to question, it is more than probable that the monks of Ireland and Britain did know of some large land mass far to the north. After all, the Faroe Islands, which they had visited in the sixth century and were settled by the Norse a hundred years later, are a mere 280 miles from Iceland — a relatively short sail even for early medieval mariners. Whichever way one looks at it, the possibility is real that these intrepid monks may have set foot on Iceland before any Norseman.
The Norsemen, or Vikings, stemmed from the Teutons, whose ancestors migrated north through Denmark into Norway and Sweden, a part of the world until then outside European history. The new arrivals took up settlements along the viks, or bays of the rugged coastlines and their populations swelled. These were pagans whose ideas of conscience and sin were in direct variance to Christianity. Drink, women, and song were embraced with the same fervor as war, pillage, and slaughter. Such was the disposition of the “Northmen,” but additionally, these people were creative craftsmen and hard workers. Their structured society was based on a divinely ordained class system, within which prevailed a curious blend of monarchy and democracy. Kings were selected from royal blood; landowners acted as legislators and judges. The laws were strict and harsh punishments helped to keep law
and order — a parricide, for example, would be suspended by the heels side by side with a starved wolf similarly hung. Literacy was not universal, but it was highly respected and a rich literature came to be written. A vast collection of sagas has been bequeathed us — narratives written on sheepskin that detail heroic episodes of Norwegian and Icelandic history, accounts considered among the finest of medieval literary achievements.
The art of Viking shipbuilding produced the finest vessels ever to that time. Their slender and flexible boats were capable of withstanding the roughest North Atlantic seas, and at the same time of navigating rivers and shoals. The drawings are of two freight ships, one fifty-three feet in length and the other forty-five feet.
Vikings were polygamous, which only exacerbated the high birth rate. With the rapid growth of settlements, the limited agricultural possibilities of the coastlines were insufficient fully to meet community needs. Hunger eventually became a fact of life in many parts of the regions — or as one historian put it, “the fertility of women … outran the fertility of the soil.” The Vikings were master woodworkers whose talents were brilliantly reflected in the construction of sturdy sea-going vessels. Shipbuilding and accomplished seamanship were essential for the maintenance of intercommunity contact along the vast coastlines, made difficult otherwise by generally high mountains. Those who now found themselves in want, or simply the young and restless, took to their boats to forage for sources of food farther afield.
The hunt for food, coupled with the seemingly insatiable thirst for plunder expanded into a pursuit of slaves, women, and gold. Accounts of Viking invasions of the nearby British Isles and of continental coastal towns are legion, and within a century the scourge of the Norsemen was strongly felt in most coastal parts of northern Europe. The rich monasteries of nearby Britain and Ireland, with their gold chalices and silver plate, offered especially attractive targets for plunder; the depredations wrought by the Viking invaders were horrific.
Around 890 A.D. one Viking expedition sailed to the northernmost reaches of Scandinavia, and rounding Lapland it passed the North Cape at 71°N, the Kola Peninsula, and penetrated the White Sea. One of its stated objectives was “desirous to try how far that country extended north,” while another was to hunt for walrus whose ivory tusks were greatly valued throughout Europe. Heading the expedition was a Norwegian nobleman called Othere and since the North Cape and most of the Kola Peninsula are well above Arctic Circle, to him falls credit for being the first European to explore the Arctic in that part of the globe. Othere found himself not only at the backyard of the Slavs — soon to be overcome by his kin— but at the mouth of what was to become known as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route.
Fatalism was as much a part of the Norse character as tenaciousness and daring. Their gods would attend them one way or another, for they were allies and companions in adventure and battle, not paternal guides to behaviour and right conduct. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in the quest for food and plunder these fearless seamen eventually braved the open waters of the Atlantic, westward and to the north, into the unexplored where others had feared to sail — into the “bottomless pit where perpetual darkness reigns.”
Credit for the penetration of the Atlantic’s Arctic regions and for the discovery of the “New World” is popularly given to the Viking chieftain, Erik the Red, of whom much is written. Erik did indeed uncover the New World, but his springboard was the already discovered and populated Iceland, lying in mid-Atlantic at the Arctic Circle. If claims to earlier discovery of Iceland by Irish monks are discounted, the credit undoubtedly falls to the Vikings, and in particular to a certain Floki “of the Ravens.” It is this bold seaman who first ventured into the far reaches of northwest Atlantic and who in 870 made landfall in Iceland two centuries before Erik’s arrival. Floki was pleased to find that sections of the land’s coastline were cultivatable and suitable for cattle grazing, and he also judged the climate hospitable. (Climatic conditions were at the time more clement than they are at present.)
Within a few short years of Floki’s landing, Viking settlers arrived in numbers and successfully established themselves at Reykjavik and along the island’s western and northwestern coasts. These were not the hungry nor the restless; these were political refugees who quit their Scandinavian homes to escape the tyrannical hand of King Harold, “The Fairhair.” Harold, having “murdered, burnt and otherwise exterminated all his brother kings who at that time grew as thick as blackberries in Norway,” went on to abrogate the udal rights of landholders and to impose every sort of restriction on the population. The landowners were men “with possessions to be taxed, and a spirit too haughty to endure taxation” — individuals who cherished liberty and for whom freedom of possession and of movement was a sacred birthright. Lord Duffern describes an aspect of these astonishing early settlers:
They were the first of any European nation to create for themselves a native literature … almost all the ancient Scandinavian manuscripts are in Icelandic. Negotiations between the Courts of the North were conducted by Icelandic diplomats. The earliest topographical survey with which we are acquainted was Icelandic … The first historical composition ever written by any European in the vernacular was the product of Icelandic genius.[3]
And what was this land that beckoned to the Norwegian emigrants? Iceland continues today as a country of startling contrasts — a geologist’s paradise. The irregularly shaped island is home to rugged mountains, roaring rivers and waterfalls, subterranean thermal springs, geysers, and sparkling glaciers. With the exception of a small island off the north coast, the entire country lies just below the Arctic Circle, but in structure, relief, and climate, the land is definitely sub-Arctic. The settlements then and now are found along the island’s periphery where conditions are quasi-maritime and where farming is possible with careful cultivation. Iceland is one of the few Arctic territories in which no indigenous population existed at the time of European discovery.
Within seventy years of Floki’s arrival, the population of Iceland had blossomed from naught to forty thousand, and the figure doubled in the century that followed. In that lawless society the need for some form of political organization became apparent, and in order to attain this, the resourceful citizens established the Althingi, the world’s first parliament. The “Thing” lasted for over three centuries until 1262 when the island’s unique status as an independent republic was lost by a Norwegian takeover. It remained under the colonial rule of Norway until 1944 when it regained its independence, at which time the Althingi was re-established. (As an aside: if the British Parliament founded in 1295 is regarded as the “Mother of Parliaments,” surely Iceland’s Althingi may legitimately lay claim to being its godmother.).
The thirteenth-century Saga of Erik the Red tells us that Erik’s family had been forced to flee Norway on account of “some killings,” and that they fled to Iceland where the boy was raised. In 980, Erik became involved in a heated dispute with a neighbour — over a shovel, of all things. One confrontation led to another and the short of it is that Erik killed his antagonist just as he had earlier murdered a second neighbour in another dispute over slaves. Convicted of the killings, he was declared an outlaw and sentenced to banishment for a three-year period. But where to go? A return to Norway was not possible, so the only alternative was to move farther west where, he was certain, other lands would offer refuge. (It might be noted that on exceptionally clear days, Greenland is visible from the mountaintops of western Iceland, a distance of 175 miles.) Thus it was that around the year 982 that the hot-blooded exile sailed off on what must be regarded as one of the most notable voyages in the Arctic’s biography. A thirty-three year-old, accompanied by his young family and some retainers, set sail in an open boat with no compass and scant provisions into unknown Arctic waters — quite literally “into the setting sun” — propelled only by courage, determination, and a promising wind.
His vessel eventually reached Greenland, the landfall b
eing made near Julianehaab on the southwest coast. The bay and the surrounding coastline were ice-free, groves of stunted birch dotted the area, and the summer vegetation seemed plentiful. Since topographic and climatic conditions appeared promising and closely resembled those of Iceland, Erik determined to establish his party at that spot.
Barns were erected, hay was made, and the group took to their new surroundings. Three years passed and with his sentence of banishment completed, Erik returned to Iceland to gather more settlers for the land he had uncovered. Erik was a sharp salesman, for in his call for colonists he cunningly named the place Green Land, thus colouring it in significantly more alluring tones than Ice Land. Twenty-five shiploads of emigrants signed on to sail west — men, women, and children, who for the most part had been living on the poorer tracts of the Icelandic coast. Horses, sheep, cattle, serfs, and every sort of household goods and building material were loaded onto the ships before heading out to sea. And then disaster hit. A vicious storm arose and the small flotilla was walloped by three gigantic waves — “taller than mountains and they are like lofty pinnacles” — that slammed the heavily laden ships with particular force. Nine of the vessels foundered or returned to Iceland, but fourteen succeeded in making it to shore and discharged 350 colonists.
A rendering of the ninth-century Viking village at Hedeby at the southern reaches of the Jutland Peninsula. By the eleventh century, the settlement had developed into Denmark’s largest at the time.
“Green Land” proved to be something of a misnomer; life was seriously more difficult than anticipated. Sufficient tracts of arable land were few and far between, the soil was generally inferior to that of Iceland, and wood was hard to come by. Of necessity they resorted to fish which were abundant in the local waters. In summer months the colonists regularly travelled 625 miles north along the coastline as far as Disko Bay at latitude 70°, well above the Arctic Circle. Here they hunted for walrus and seal, not only for the blubber content, but for ivory and sealskin, which they used to fashion rope. A saga written in 986 relates that “they found many settlements, toward the east and west, and remains of skin boats and stone implements, which shows that to that place journeyed the kind of people … whom the [Norse] called Skrælings [Inuit].”[4] It was not long thereafter that the colonists came face to face with the indigenous people, who, much to their surprise, proved welcoming and hospitable. Initial relations between the two peoples were warm, but friction was not long in coming and lamentably the relationship soon deteriorated, eventually growing so antagonistic that bloody encounters became common.
Arctic Obsession Page 2