The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  It is no accident that the largest assemblage of boat-roofed house foundations in the high north is concentrated around polynyas. Most are in the Smith Sound region, the remainder being adjacent to polynyas as far south and west as Devon, Little Cornwallis, Bathurst, and Somerset islands.

  Two 50-foot vessels of 15-foot beam would have sufficed to form a roof over the foundation at Prince Patrick Sound, Victoria Island, shown here in plan.

  One striking exception exists near the mouth of the Kuuk River on the west coast of Victoria Island. Slightly over one hundred feet long, this low-walled structure discovered by Dr. Robert McGhee, head of the scientific section of the Archaeological Survey of Canada, stands alone on a desolate stretch of stony beach. Of the right dimensions to have supported two vessels overturned end to end, it may have been built by farfarers seeking an unclaimed polynya or forced far to the west by adverse ice conditions. On the other hand, McGhee has pointed out that the Kuuk River leads to a glacial deposit of native copper known to have been exploited by the Inuit, which could have been a source of copper for valuta seekers too.

  Probably because of its isolation, the Kuuk River example is the best preserved of the forty-five boat-roofed foundations so far described or excavated. Most of the others have been quarried by natives for stones with which to build tent circles, meat caches, and shelters. Thule-culture people, impelled by a powerful animosity towards the original builders, may even have deliberately destroyed some of the foundations by systematically tumbling their walls. However, more than enough remain to provide a good idea of what the structures must once have looked like, of how they were built, and of how they functioned.

  Although varying from about thirty to a hundred feet, the majority are of the order of fifty feet in length. Except for those few designed to support two, or even three, ships set end to end, they have an average length-to-width ratio of 3.5 to 1, roughly the same as that of north European working ships from circa A.D. 1000.

  Walls were built only high enough to accommodate the curving shee of the covering vessel and to provide internal headroom. Few seem to have been even as much as four feet in height.

  An Alban vessel upturned on a stone foundation to provide a home for her crew might have looked like this.

  Since there is little soil or sod in the high Arctic, foundations were constructed entirely of stones (sometimes very large ones) chinked with moss and lichens. In the subarctic they were generally built of sods ballasted with stones. Turf and sods reinforced with wood provided building materials south of timber line—a combination that time has reduced to almost invisible mounds.

  Most were sited close to the high-tide and storm line. In several instances, rocks fouling a landing beach seem to have been cleared away to protect fragile vessels from damage when they were hauled ashore.

  Once emptied of gear, ballast, and supplies, a fifty-foot skin boat would have been light enough to be manhandled to a mating with a prepared foundation. Larger vessels may have been moved on rollers, then overturned and eased into position using their own spars as levers.

  There seems to have been only one (necessarily low) door, located in a side wall. There were no window openings, but well-oiled sea mammal skins are remarkably translucent. During the long winter night, the houses would have been lighted and, in the high Arctic, perhaps heated (Inuit style) by lamps fuelled with sea-mammal oil. Farther south, where wood was available for fuel, smoke could have presented something of a problem. But it would have been no trick to cut a smoke-flap in the “roof,” an aperture that could have been easily patched before the vessel again took to the water.

  Heating the entire interior of a large boat-roofed house would have been difficult. However, heatable cubicles could have been fashioned using animal skins (preferably caribou) for ceilings and curtain walls. This is a system I have myself used to good effect in the barrenlands of Keewatin.

  Boat-roofed houses would have provided spacious, comfortable accommodations for the times when they were being built and used. They would also have ensured the best possible protection, from weather and from hungry animals, for the vessels themselves during the long winter months.

  Valuta men took whatever of worth came their way, but concentrated on what was most rewarding. Walrus tusks and narwhal horns topped the list. Both animals gathered in polynyas, where they could be relatively easily harpooned.

  High Arctic valuta stations were essentially factories, producing not only ivory, but walrus hides and the substance called seal tar.

  Although bituminous (fossil-derived) tar did not become widely available in northern Europe until relatively recent times, large quantities derived from animals or plants were consumed in ship construction and maintenance. Some of this were produced from the gum of conifers, but most was made by evaporating sea mammal oil into a gummy substance generically known as seal tar.

  Whether sheathed in wood or hides, ships required a lot of tar. Skin boats (especially the seams thereof) had to be liberally and frequently coated to waterproof and preserve them. Wooden vessels had to be caulked with fibrous materials soaked in tar. Pitch, as the substance was sometimes called, was also used to coat masts and spars and, heated with other substances, to make cutch, a preservative for sails. Deck seams were “payed” with pitch, as were cordage splices. And wooden ships sailing in even moderately warm waters often had their entire bottoms coated with tar as a protection against the teredo worm.

  Vegetative pitch was always in relatively short supply, and was of indifferent quality because it tended to crystallize and shatter when it hardened. Pitch derived from sea mammals was much preferred, with walrus tar ranking highest because of its singular qualities of elasticity and endurance.

  We do not know the exact process employed by valuta men in making seal tar, but we have a partial description of how thirteenth-century Greenland Norse made it and, of particular interest, where they procured the raw materials.

  A medieval Norse history tells us:

  There at Greipar at the extreme end of Greenland they procured the largest quantities of seal-tar. . . . The melted blubber was stored in skin bags and hung in barred sheds until it hardened, and later on was prepared as it should be.

  Greipar has been identified with the Upernavik district, the most northerly region the Greenland Norse hunters are known to have hunted. We are not told much about the process they employed in making seal tar, but an experience of my own may throw some light upon that.

  In the autumn of 1947 I was travelling along the western shores of Hudson Bay in an old canoe whose canvas covering had become so frayed and torn that my partner and I had to spend almost as much time bailing as paddling. One day we saw a wisp of smoke near the mouth of a river. We put in and found a trapper living in a wooden hut whose roof had been water- and weather-proofed with a layer of black tar. I thought this might be just the stuff we needed to make the old canoe seaworthy.

  We explained our plight and were given a pail of what looked like asphalt but stank like dead whale. The trapper, originally from Labrador, explained that this was blubber-tar he had made from the fat of walrus killed for winter dog feed at Marble Island a short way up the coast.

  After we had gently warmed the stuff to a syrupy consistency on our benefactor’s tin stove, we applied a coating to the canoe. It soon cooled into a rubbery substance which kept the canoe from leaking for the remainder of our journey. My gratitude was great; but so was my curiosity about this remarkable substance. That night our host explained how he prepared it.

  First the blubber had to be diced into small pieces, then slowly heated “until the ile runs out o’ the gristle.” He stressed that the pot must not be allowed to boil or “‘twill be ruined, certainly.” When all the oil was floating free, the gristle was strained out. The pot was then pushed to the back of the stove and allowed to simmer until the contents became “thick as treacle.” Stored in an outhouse over a period of several months, it would eventually “cure” into a black subst
ance too thick to spoon, though not quite thick enough to cut with a knife, in which form it would keep indefinitely.

  I carefully noted all this in my journal, together with our host’s final remarks: “Yiss, bye, I sloshes dat stuff on me boots, me house, me canoes, and me old Peterhead boat. And nary a drap o’ water’ll get into ary one of they!”

  I can testify to the effectiveness of seal tar, and also to its redolence, which can be breathtaking and would make it a difficult product to market in our fastidious era.

  What I believe to be the largest walrus “factory” in the high Arctic is on the Knud Peninsula in southwestern Kane Basin. Here, in 1977, Canadian archaeologist Peter Schledermann found the first of several large and mysterious structures he called “longhouses.” For the next several summer seasons he carried out extensive excavations at this site.

  As has been the case with most archaeologists I have encountered, Peter has gone out of his way to help me in my own investigations, even though some of my interpretations challenge his. He insists, in his softspoken way, that his own conclusions are tentative, and therefore open to adjustment as new information emerges. One could wish that all historians, past and present, were of the same persuasion.3

  The Knud Peninsula site is dominated by one of the most fruitful polynyas in the eastern Arctic. Each spring Schledermann watched walrus by the hundreds congregate in its relatively narrow compass. Seals and small whales also made good use of it as a staging place on their annual migrations.

  The site is especially notable for the several stone-built enclosures that Schledermann calls longhouses and that I identify as boat-roofed house foundations. There are enough of these of the right dimensions to have served as single or multiple foundations for six or seven upturned vessels.

  Around them are ranged long lines of curious small stone constructs which Schledermann has christened hearth rows. Each unit in such a row typically consists of a small square or oblong fireplace to which a stone-built platform is attached. At least fifteen such hearth rows, containing in total more than 140 units, snake their ways about the Knud Peninsula site.

  Schledermann (and most other Arctic archaeologists) hypothesizes that the large foundations were ceremonial structures built by the people known to science as Dorset-culture palaeo-Eskimos. (For reasons which follow in the next chapter, I refer to these people as Tunit.) Schledermann thinks that the hearth rows, some of whose fire boxes still contain residues of sea mammal fat, may have served as communal cooking hearths for Tunit during mass assemblages.

  There are difficulties with this explanation. Tunit were spread very thin on the ground, with a population density of no more than a few families to several thousand square miles. It is not easy to imagine how they could ever have mustered sufficient numbers to account for the size and abundance of the “ceremonial” structures and hearth rows at the Knud Peninsula, or at any of the other related sites. Furthermore, there is no evidence at any of these places of anything like the number of actual habitations (tent rings, pit dwellings, and the like) which would have been required by so many people. Schledermann suggests they might have been communally housed within the ceremonial structures; but there is no credible explanation of how, in the treeless Arctic, such large buildings could have been roofed.

  Distribution makes it seem equally improbable that the longhouses should have belonged to the Tunit culture. All but three of the forty-five now known are in the eastern Arctic (east of Boothia Peninsula) and two of these are on the border between east and west. Yet a large Tunit population lived west of that arbitrary boundary. If longhouses were Tunit ceremonial structures, why were they not erected in comparable numbers in the west? Why, for that matter, have none been found in Newfoundland, which was home to a large Tunit community for more than a thousand years? It is surely also significant that longhouses in the eastern Arctic are massively concentrated in just two districts: Kane Basin–Smith Sound, and the northwest coast of Ungava Bay.

  If the Tunit did not build the longhouses, could these indigenes have been responsible for the hearth rows? I submit that these, too, were constructed by valuta men—that they were, in fact, tryworks for the production of seal tar.

  The heart of the tryworks employed by whalers of recent and relatively recent times was an enormous metal cauldron heated by a furnace. Valuta people possessed few metal vessels of any kind, and certainly none of sufficient size for large-scale processing of sea mammal oil.

  I conclude that, in lieu of large pots, they used batteries of small, nonmetallic units, each consisting of a stone platform fitted with side pieces designed to support a skin “pail” filled with chopped blubber. Stones were heated in an attached fireplace. When the stones became hot enough, they were tonged into the blubber-filled pail. When they cooled, they were tonged back into the fire. This process was repeated until the blubber was reduced to oil, whereupon it was ladled, or poured off, the gristly bits being recovered and used to fuel the next rendering. Essentially this would have been no more than the application of a cooking process common to many peoples who did not have fireproof pots at their disposal.

  Although the output from each such unit would have been small, one person could have simultaneously operated half a dozen or more hearths, and batteries of them could have approximated the output of latter-day metal trypots.

  Carbon-14 dates obtained by Schledermann from charred willow, bones, and fat found in six hearth-row fire pits range from about A.D. 700 to 900. The average of the corrected age is close to A.D. 800, suggesting that the hearth rows were last used within a few decades one way or the other of this date.

  I envision eighth-century valuta ships riding the northbound current up the west shore of Greenland to Smith Sound and Kane Basin, and some pressing on even farther to the westward. Departing Tilli in mid-spring, they would arrive on station with time in hand for a productive latesummer and autumnal hunt. Before the long darkness descended, the hunters hauled out their ships and overturned them on prepared foundations. Then they settled in for the long winter.

  Winter was no idle time. Foxes, wolves, and bears could be trapped, and caribou, musk oxen, and Arctic hares hunted when weather and moonlight permitted. Boredom would have been warded off by the presence of white bears attracted to the carcasses of dead sea beasts floating or frozen in the nearby polynyas, or to the stocks of meat, tar, and other edibles laid up by human hands. As long as walrus were available in the polynyas, the stinking hearth rows glowed and smoked.

  By the end of the ensuing summer—or perhaps the summer after that—it would be time to set sail for Tilli. Then vessels were repaired, tarred, launched, and laden; and one fine morning the long voyage home would begin.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TUNIT

  Winter was drawing to an end; and none too soon. We were hungry. Keeping twenty mouths filled through the long night is never an easy task. Sometimes it is impossible. Then the Snow Walker comes—first for the youngest children; then for the elders; and, finally, if food is still not to be found, for the hunters and the women of child-bearing age.

  This year it did not happen. The meat caches had been well filled the previous autumn, so we still had strength enough to trek across the heavy fiord ice to our traditional spring camp beside a polynya. We were guided to it by plumes of sea smoke rising from misty waters wherein heaved massive tuskers and sea unicorns.

  Poles from the travois upon which dogs had hauled the gear from our winter camp were erected to serve as teepee supports. Women and children scurried about gathering handfuls of shrubbery for fuel, while we men hastened to the edge of the polynya to conceal ourselves behind upthrust blocks of pressure ice, harpoons at the ready.

  As the days slipped by, the brief hours of daylight gradually lengthened. Blubber fires smoked blackly in a few of the ancient hearth pits that ran in rows across the campsite. Skin pots containing walrus meat bubbled as hot stones were dropped into them. Succulent smells wafted in the brisk air; and the bellie
s of dogs and people were filled to repletion. There was time to play and sing, and in the evenings to loaf about carving little images in ivory while listening to the old ones tell tales of other times.

  Tales such as this one:

  On a summer in the days of our forefathers, the People camped on an island from whose peak one could see the gleam of ice over that vast land that lies far to the eastward of us. The People had come to this place to gather seabirds’ eggs.

  Every day an endless procession of great whales swam northward past the bird island. One evening in the early autumn the People saw, coming across the strait towards them, a whale with an enormous wing sprouting from its back. They watched in wonderment until, as it came closer, they could see it was really a whalesized boat. Closer still, they saw figures moving about in it.

  As this giant boat made for the sandy cove on the shore of which stood the tents, the People grew fearful for they did not know whether the newcomers were spirits or living folk. Women retreated to the high ground and children hid among the rocks, but the men stood shoulder to shoulder on the beach.

  The boat dropped its sail and came to an anchor a short way off shore. A crowd of dark-bearded strangers stared intently at our people and we stared back as intently. Then one of our men stepped forward and laid his harpoon on the ground. At that, the men in the boat held their arms high to show they held no weapons. Someone shouted friendly sounds and soon all were shouting, and our dogs were going crazy. Not long thereafter the strangers paddled ashore.

  Then we could see they were men, like us, though hairier and with big noses, and dressed in strange clothing. But men—not spirits. Their words were a mystery to us, and ours to them. But they knew how to laugh, so it was not long before everyone understood there was nothing to fear from one another.