The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  Valuta seekers would have found here all the sources of wealth Tilli had once afforded, together with a number Tilli had never known, such as caribou, wolf, ermine, Arctic hares, and, especially, musk ox, whose woolly pelts came to be valued almost equally with those of white bears.

  I conclude that, before the sixth century ended, most valuta men were working Greenland’s northeastern grounds. Those with homes in the Northern Isles probably overwintered in Crona, for it was a long journey between the two places.

  Sooner or later the distance between home and hunting ground would have persuaded valuta clans to emigrate to Tilli. Nor would it have been long before Orkney merchant skippers began sailing direct to Tilli to collect valuta for the southern trade, as well as to peddle southern goods to the island’s growing population.

  By the seventh century, most valuta clans had probably made the westward move. Thereafter their farfarers could sail to eastern Crona early in the spring and, if it suited them, return to their new crofts in Tilli in the autumn of that same year.

  The foregoing reconstruction of the settlement of Iceland flies in the teeth of orthodox histories of the island, which maintain that, with the possible exception of a few clerical hermits, it was terra incognita until the arrival of Norse settlers late in the ninth century.

  Belief in this view can be maintained only by rejecting weighty evidence to the contrary—evidence such as that which I have outlined in the note.3 There are also the findings of Dr. Margrét Hermanns-Audardóttir. 4

  Between 1972 and 1978, this Swedish archaeologist and her team began investigating the remains of a fourteenth-century Norse steading on Heimaey, one of the Westman group of islands lying off the south coast of Iceland. However, the excavation revealed that under the visible remains lay a sequence of at least ten earlier structures. The site was clearly much older than had been assumed. The archaeologists took carbon-14 samples and the resultant dates were an astonishment to all parties and a source of embarrassment to some.

  Dates obtained from carbon-14 tests, confirmed by stratigraphy and pollen analysis, showed that the first structure on the site must have come into existence about 250 years before the Norse occupation of Iceland.

  Worse was to follow. Hermanns-Audardóttir‘s carbon-14 chronology revealed that the method previously relied upon by Icelandic historians to date human habitations (a method which had placed all previously examined sites within the period of Norse occupancy) was evidently based on a false premise. Dates had been assigned according to the presence or absence in wall and roof debris of layers of volcanic ash from eruptions, the most important of which were supposed to have taken place around 872–74. Hermanns-Audardóttir’s data showed that the critical ash deposits, especially the so-called landnam and Katla layers, had actually been deposited at least a hundred years earlier. The corollary was that a considerable number of habitations, which had been confidently assigned to the Norse land-taking period, must have been occupied well before the Norse came to Iceland’s shores.

  But that was impossible! Icelandic history is adamantly predicated on the premise that the Norse did not reach the island until the latter half of the ninth century and that, when they did arrive, they found the country uninhabited except, perhaps, for a handful of anchorites seeking solitude at the end of the world.

  On a spring day near the end of the seventh century, Farfarer sailed from her home port of Swan Fiord in eastern Tilli bound for the valuta grounds in Crona. She had one call to make en route. Two elderly people and a young couple recently arrived at Easthaven from the small Shetland island of Hasco had booked passage to Heimaey aboard her.

  Most of Hasco’s people had already abandoned their hard-scrabble crofts to seek a new life in Tilli. The first-footers among them had chosen Heimaey rather than the mainland coast because it seemed better suited to island ways, even though its sulphurous volcanic vent made an unnerving neighbour. Heimaey had not much usable land to offer, but what there was was fertile, and the island’s snug little harbour provided one of the few secure refuges along Tilli’s southern shore.

  The first settler from Hasco built his sod-walled house, raftered with mainland birch and covered with turf, near a freshwater spring not far from the harbour. Since then, several houses had joined his around this spring, their small home fields making a verdant patchwork against the lava slopes beyond. A clutter of skin boats drawn up on the harbour shore testified to the little community’s ongoing reliance on the sea. A few cattle ranged the lower pastures, while sheep and goats roamed the high places. Small patches of barley brightened the green of the home fields, and succulent angelica, the wild celery of the north transplanted from Hasco, grew thick in the swamp below the spring.

  As Farfarer came abeam of Bear Islet (where a white bear had been killed some years earlier), she overhauled one of the settlers’ boats laden to the gunwales with the enormous, grey-green eggs of the great auk. Farfarer took the boat in tow while its crew scrambled aboard to pilot the ship into Heimaey harbour.

  Heimaey’s settlers had only good things to tell the new arrivals. The previous winter had been so mild there had been no need to stable their cows. In the autumn they had harvested grain enough to supply porridge for a year, with enough left over to brew a little ale for the Yuletide celebrations.

  More and more vessels were coming their way, they said. Some, like Farfarer, carried valuta men between Crona and crofts in Tilli’s eastern fiords. A few belonged to Orkney merchant traders. The previous summer a trading vessel all the way from Ireland had appeared, laden with, among other things, a variety of bronze dress ornaments with which to tempt male and female settlers alike.

  Much of the traffic consisted of westbound vessels bringing land-seeking immigrants together with their cattle, goods, and chattels. New crofts were being carved out of bogs, meadows, and birch copses along much of the southwest coast. Far from feeling they were at the end of the world, the Heimaey folk felt themselves to be quite at the centre of things.

  Their buoyant mood was somewhat shadowed when they heard from Farfarer’s passengers of increasingly bloody atrocities being committed by Northmen in the homeland. Nevertheless, one of the younger crofters could see a bright side even to this.

  “All the more reason for folk with yeast in their guts to come west. When was there ever a time someone or other wasn’t marauding about the home isles? Here in Tilli we’ve nothing worse to fear than a water bear amongst the sheep. We sleep easy, and eat well. There’s room enough hereabouts for all the men, women, and children in the Northern Isles to join us, have they the sense to do it.”

  “Aye,” agreed one of Farfarer’s crew, “and if Tilli should ever get too crowded, Crona’s not so far away. Its south fiords might be no such bad places to live, so I’ve heard. Maybe when I’m too old to sling me sleeping robes in the cuddy of a boat I’ll build a croft out there myself and settle down.”

  Immigration into Tilli increased markedly during the latter part of the seventh century. The climate had by then become so temperate that even more northerly parts of the island were probably able to attract crofters. A potent stimulus was the dire shadow of the Norse that was inexorably overspreading Shetland and Orkney.

  When, early in the eighth century, Northmen began seizing land in the Northern Isles, waves of Shetlanders, Orkneymen, and even Hebrideans fled west. Before that rush subsided, Tilli’s southwestern district was largely settled.

  Homesteaders arriving during the first half of the eighth century found a good choice of land, and a climate so benign they could grow barley and wheat and raise pigs and domestic fowl as well as cattle and sheep.

  A short-lived climatic deterioration that seems to have reached its nadir around the turn of the eighth century made things more difficult for latecomers; even so, a spell of mediocre weather was a small price to pay for being able to live in peace.

  Even after the Norse completed their occupation of Britain’s northern and western islands, refugees probabl
y continued to reach Tilli from mainland Scotland and from Ireland. Old enmities between Celts and Albans would have been submerged by the current catastrophe. Both peoples were Christian (though following different rituals) and both were being savaged by Norse pagans.

  The first half of the ninth century may have seen the heyday of Alba in Tilli, with little groups of croft houses clustered near the coasts wherever the quality of the land was good enough to sustain men and beasts. Settlement may even have spread into some interior valleys, such as Lagarfljót in the east.

  Far from suffering adversity as a result of having been driven from their old homelands, settlers in Tilli would have found themselves generally better off, with crofts producing as much as, or more than, those abandoned to the Norse.

  People involved in the valuta trade must also have been doing very well. As we shall see, farfarers seem to have rounded Cape Farewell before the end of the seventh century, and by early in the eighth were working new grounds as far north as Upernavik. Ice conditions would not have presented as formidable a problem then as they do now. In fact, by the middle of the eighth century the climate had become so warm that portions of the Arctic Ocean may actually have been ice-free in summer and the flow of pack ice southward into Baffin Bay so reduced as to pose no great difficulties even for seafarers in skin boats.5

  By the ninth century, crofters and valuta seekers in Tilli would have been enjoying a prosperity hard to equal in mainland Europe. It was inevitable that Vikings would get wind of it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ARCTIC ELDORADO

  Every spring for twenty years Farfarer had sailed out of Swan Fiord bound for the northeastern grounds of Crona. Twenty times she had returned to her home port deep-laden with meat, hides, fat, ivory, furs, and seal tar.

  She and her crews had served the clan well; but in recent years cargoes had diminished. This was, in part, due to the fact that valuta seekers had by then been hunting the northeastern grounds for over a century, but also to an influx of hunters from Tilli anxious to supplement the income from their home crofts. Competition was becoming stiff, and some of the most valuable prey animals were growing scarce.

  There had been much talk about this at Swan Fiord during the previous winter. Farfarer’s current skipper, a whipcord-lean man in his early thirties, had been particularly outspoken.

  “Too many hunters!” he bluntly told his fellow clansmen gathered around the hearth in the headman’s house. “And too few beasts. Musk ox nearly finished. Narwhals and walrus getting so leery you can hardly get nigh to them. And falcons! Those bloody crofters sail across for a month in summer and snatch every bloody fledgling! The grounds is overworked! We’d best find new ones soon.”

  “Where would we look, then?” someone asked.

  “Ah, well, you all know the odd ship has rounded Crona’s South Cape? They say they found good land down there, though not much of the kind of stuff we want. But supposing . . . supposing the western coast runs as far north as the east coast does. Wouldn’t there likely be grounds up there in the nor’west as good as ever there was in the nor’east? I says we has to go and see!”

  And so it was that next spring Farfarer bore away from Swan Fiord on a voyage which would lend new lustre to her name.

  For a time she held close enough to Tilli’s southern shore for her crew to relish the vibrance of budding birch forests and recently settled pasture lands on the river plains, but on the third day this pleasant scene was replaced by the dour lava coast of the Smoke Peninsula jutting out from the southwestern corner of the island. The sun was hanging on the horizon when the venturers took their departure from Cape Smoky—and from Tilli.

  The weather remained moderate and, two days after losing sight of land astern, the lookouts raised the white glare of Crona’s icecap. This time, instead of bearing to the north as she had always done before, Farfarer turned south. She was soon closing with a coast whose appearance was so inhospitable that her crew was not tempted to try a landing. Keeping a safe offing, they continued southward for three days to Crona’s southern extremity.

  Rounding South Cape, Farfarer sailed into a friendlier world. The Inland Ice was now only dimly visible in the blue distance. A vast country riven with sinuous fiords revealed itself between ice and sea. If not so green as Tilli, Crona’s southwestern shore seemed a veritable paradise by comparison with her eastern one.

  One full day’s sail to the northward from South Cape took Farfarer into a great bight full of islands and fiords. Here, the vegetation was sometimes almost lush, and birds and mammals, including caribou, abounded. However, here were no musk ox, few bears, and not many white foxes. And, although the surrounding waters were filled with fishes and many kinds of whales and porpoises, they harboured neither narwhals nor tuskers.

  Southwestern Crona was a place to attract a crofter, but not a valuta seeker. After a day ashore spent hunting caribou, the crew returned aboard, impatient to be on. Farfarer took up her quest but, to everyone’s disappointment, the coast trended westward for a day and a night. On the morning of the second day, the crew’s hopes quickened as they rounded a massive headland to find the land again trending north.

  Now they coasted a shoreline of spectacular headlands thrusting seaward between a succession of deep fiords. Since at this season it never really got dark they were able to sail by day and by night so long as the weather favoured.

  As time passed they began encountering occasional tuskers, and noted with delight that the numbers of these increased with the increase in northing. Three weeks’ sail beyond South Cape they bore eastward into a bight of such immensity it required almost a month to explore. Long before that month was out, the men from Swan Fiord knew they had found what they sought—here were new grounds whose promise exceeded their most sanguine hopes.

  THE VAST INLET ON GREENLAND’S WESTERN COAST embracing Disko Bay and Vaigat Strait, together with Umanak and Karrats fiords supports a marine fauna of stunning diversity and abundance. The surrounding ice-free lands are almost equally hospitable to birds and mammals. When, in later centuries, first Norse, then Inuit reached this region, it proved to be one of their most productive hunting grounds.1

  Here is how I see the human story of this region unfolding during the eighth and ninth centuries.

  The first valuta seekers found the new grounds so rewarding that, within a decade, most of Tilli’s professional hunters had joined in its exploitation. Nevertheless, it was not nearly as extensive as the northeastern grounds, so it was not long before latecomers (or especially keen hunters) began pushing still farther north.

  Beyond the Svartenhuk peninsula they met the Inland Ice pressing right to the edge of the sea with only a fringe of islands fronting its glacial cliffs. Still father north even the islands ended, leaving nothing but a glittering white wall curving west around the bottom of Melville Bay.

  This coast was, and remains, the birthing place for the greater part of the icebergs that infest North Atlantic waters. During the warm summers of the eighth century, titanic blocks of ice came tumbling into Melville Bay, virtually filling it with bergs. But there would have been little or no summer pack ice about in those times, so if a vessel stayed well off the coast, and if her people gave the floating islands a safe berth, they would have had little to fear.

  Before long some venturesome crew crossed the bay of bergs to find that the head of Baffin Bay and the adjacent reaches of southern Kane Basin nurtured an almost unimaginably abundant population of valuta animals, especially walrus. It was also able to provide a rich source of metal in the form of fragments of a huge nickel-iron meteorite that long ago had struck and shattered on Cape York’s icecap.2

  What ensued thereafter was somewhat comparable to a latter-day gold rush. Every seaworthy valuta vessel and competent crew that could be mustered sailed to the far northwest.

  Although the rush turned out to be relatively short-lived, it may have engaged several hundred people and a score of vessels—no insignificant num
bers for the place and times.

  The remoteness of the new discovery posed a problem. Since the over-the-bottom distance between Iceland and Kane Basin at the entrance of the high Arctic was of the order of three thousand miles, a round-trip voyage could take most of three months. Overwintering was essential for successful exploitation of these high Arctic grounds.

  As many explorers would discover the hard and sometimes fatal way, surviving the harshly inimical Arctic winter is no easy matter. Food and shelter are the prime requisites. Food can be found by those who know where and how to look, but finding shelter may be something else.

  Aboriginal Arctic dwellers solved that problem with the snow house. Valuta seekers found their solution in boat-roofed houses, a construction which had been traditional with them for centuries past. Their own vessels, upturned on foundation walls built of stones and tightly chinked with moss or sod, could protect them from the most extreme winter weather.

  During the relatively short time the high Arctic white gold rush lasted, it drew valuta men far into the eastern and central parts of the Canadian Arctic. Most built their camps and overwintered in the vicinity of the Arctic phenomena known as polynyas.

  These are bodies of salt water that either do not freeze at all, or freeze later in the fall and open earlier in spring than adjacent waters. They are mainly kept open by currents, both vertical and horizontal, though wind also plays a part. They range in size from a few acres to several hundred square miles. Wherever they are found, polynyas provide breathing and gathering places for sea mammals which would otherwise be forced to abandon the region during part or all of the winter season.