The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  Heavily laden Alban boats, together with smaller Tunit craft, were soon converging on Diana Bay. Before another week was out Diana Island had become the scene of a tumultuous and festive trade fair attended by Tunit bands, parties of Alban valuta men from the clan stations, and a number of livyers of mixed Alban and Tunit ancestry.1

  Farfarer meanwhile had made heavy weather through a stormy day and night after leaving the coast of Crona. Then the wind had swung southerly, allowing her to reach across the Labrador Sea for Foggy Strait with a bone in her teeth.

  When, on the eighth day out from Crona, the lookout raised the northern tip of Labrador, the southern entrance to the Strait, none of the twelve men and five women aboard was more delighted than the skipper’s Tunit wife. This young woman was wildly excited at the prospect of returning to her own kind and land after a year spent with her husband’s kin in Crona. She had been made welcome there—but home was in the west.

  Farfarer met only streamers of mist as she entered Foggy Strait. Taking advantage of this rare good luck, her skipper shaped a direct course across the mouth of Ungava Bay to Pamiok Island in the estuary of the Payne River, some seventy miles south of Diana Bay.

  Small, barren, but advantageously placed, Pamiok was a valuta station originally shared by four clans. Two of these had combined their efforts and built a double-length foundation almost ninety feet in length designed to support two vessels overturned end-to-end. The other clans, one of them Farfarer’s, had built independent structures.

  Over the intervening decades, three of the clans had become livyers in the western grounds. In consequence, they had largely abandoned Pamiok, spending their summer seasons on the far coasts of Hudson Bay and their winters in company with Tunit by the shores of a great lake in the interior of the Ungava peninsula.

  EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1948 JACQUES ROUSSEAU, CHIEF archaeologist of Canada’s National Museum, accompanied by a young French anthropologist named Jean Michéa, set out to cross the Ungava peninsula from west to east.

  The four-hundred-mile canoe journey would take them up the Kogaluk River from Povungnituk Bay to Payne Lake, then down the Payne River to Ungava Bay. The route was unmapped and, according to Father Steinman, the priest in charge when I visited the Oblate Mission at Povungnituk in the 1960s, had not previously been travelled by white men.

  “Not in our time, anyway,” he told me, “though the Inuit say it’s a wellmarked road. Many cairns along the way. Big ones; not inuksuak. The old people say they were built by kablunait—white men—before the Inuit came into the country. I can show you a picture of one on the coast not far from here. It used to have a twin, but a couple of years ago prospectors pulled it down to see if there was a message in it.”

  The remaining twin stood (and I hope still does) on Cape Anderson, the northern point of Povungnituk Bay. A massive cylinder about ten feet tall and more than four in diameter, it is artfully laid up of flat stones, some of which must weigh three or four hundred pounds. Steinman told me there were more like it in the island labyrinth at the mouth of the Kogaluk River.

  Accompanied by an Inuk guide, Rousseau’s party set off from Povungnituk in a twenty-two-foot freight canoe. They noted the beacons in the mouth of the Kogaluk, and thereafter, at almost every point along the way where they might have gone astray, encountered what Rousseau described as “symmetrical and well-made cairns.”

  At the height of land separating the two watersheds, they entered a maze of lakes and streams in which they could have wandered for days had not the vital connecting portage been marked by a stone pillar visible several miles away. Four days later the travellers were in Payne Lake.

  The eastern end of this eighty-mile-long body of water constricts to form a narrows a few hundred feet wide and a mile long. Here the guide nosed the big canoe to the north shore. This, he told the white men, was the great crossing place of tuktu—the caribou. Indeed, the foreshore and the slope leading down to it had been so trampled by uncountable hooves as to have become almost as level as a highway.

  Beginning in late summer, the Ungava caribou herds come drifting south, only to be deflected eastward by the barrier of water. By the time they reach the Payne Lake narrows, innumerable small herds will have coalesced into an aggregation so vast that, after the animals have swum across, the shores for miles downstream will be whitened with a yardwide fringe of shed hair. Biologists estimate that as many as 100,000 caribou funnel through this defile annually.

  The guide’s ancestors, so he said, had always wintered here in order to take advantage of the caribou bounty. Rousseau and Michéa found the stony tundra along the north shore so heavily pocked with tent circles and house pits it had a lunar look. Moss-filled depressions were all that remained visible of semi-subterranean houses made of turf and stones. Michéa counted twenty-two of these, and later surveys have added at least thirty more. Even if all were never occupied at the same time, the land overlooking the narrows must, from time to time, have been the site of a virtual metropolis in what was otherwise a sparsely populated tundra world.

  Exploratory excavations by Michéa and Rousseau uncovered masses of caribou bones, and revealed that some of the people who had lived here during a succession of occupations had belonged to the Dorset cultures. This was, in fact, the first Dorset site ever to be found any distance inland from a salt-water coast.

  A few days later the little party continued on its way. They slipped swiftly down the Payne past two more tower beacons, then, near the river’s mouth, came upon one of the most extraordinary monuments in the Canadian North. It is a stela, or standing stone, almost nine feet tall, weighing in the neighbourhood of two tons. Upon the top is balanced a stone cross-bar more than four feet long. The bar in turn is surmounted by a granite block roughly fourteen inches square, set slightly off centre.

  The visual impact of this misshapen cross is stunning—if massively enigmatic. Standing on the floor of the valley, it cannot be seen from any great distance; but if one happened to be ascending the river in search of a Christian community supposed to be somewhere in the vicinity, it would unequivocally direct the searcher upriver and to the first of the beacons pointing the way to Payne Lake.

  Rousseau never forgot the cross, or the Deer’s Way. He was convinced that something of great historical significance was waiting to be uncovered hereabouts—something that did not fit into the seamless sequence of pre-Dorset, Dorset, Thule, and Inuit occupations of the Canadian Arctic that most professional archaeologists then espoused and, in fact, still do.

  In 1957, shortly after becoming director of the human history branch of the National Museum, Rousseau sent a new employee, William Taylor, north to investigate the sites.

  Taylor flew to Payne Lake, where he spent a month digging up Dorset, Thule, and Inuit artefacts. He also made some findings that, he would later tell me, “smelled of a European presence.”

  Although usually meticulous about reporting on his field work, Taylor never did publish a full account of the Payne Lake “dig.” When, many years later, I asked him why, he replied in forthright style that any suggestion of a European component in a pre-Columbian Arctic site would have “given the high priests of the profession conniptions. . . . I was a new boy in the field, so who was I to rock the boat? Besides which, I didn’t have any hard evidence.”

  At the urging of the Hudson’s Bay Company manager at Payne River Post, Taylor also visited Pamiok Island at the mouth of the Payne estuary. There he was shown what he described as an immense, stone-built foundation unlike anything previously reported from the North American Arctic. Taylor turned a few sods but left the island the same day. He never did return to excavate this extraordinary anomaly. But the ambivalence of his attitude towards it showed in the Inuit name he gave the site: Imaha—which translates as “maybe.”

  “Maybe what?” I asked him when we discussed the find.

  He smiled. “A good scientist slams no doors. Maybe some day somebody will come up with proof there was a bona fide
Norseman on Pamiok in days of yore. If so, I won’t be struck all of a heap, as the Limeys say.”

  I reminded him that archaeologist Tom Lee had found human skulls associated with the longhouse structures on Pamiok; one of them, according to physical anthropologist Dr. Carleton S. Coon of Harvard University, “probably European” and another “predominantly, if not fully European.” Lee had also found a corroded iron axe head typical of the kind used in tenth-century northern Europe. Metallurgic analysis by Canada’s Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources established that its composition and mode of manufacture were consistent with that period and place.

  There was also the presence in the vicinity of Pamiok (and of most other subsequently discovered Ungava Bay longhouses) of stone-built shelters designed to provide nesting places for eider ducks and so facilitate the collection of their down. Such shelters have been employed since ancient times in Europe’s northern islands, and are still in use in Iceland. There is, however, no evidence to show that North American native peoples ever constructed such devices. They are considered to be strictly a European artefact.

  Two ancient skulls from graves on Pamiok Island. One (on the right) is typical Eskimoan in character; the other (on the left) predominately north European.

  Taylor nodded as I went through the list. “It’s evidence, certainly, but it ain’t proof, Farley Imaha! But don’t expect me to come out with a Norse helmet on my head.”

  In 1967 Dr. William Taylor became director of Canada’s National Museum of Man, a post he held (as director, then as director emeritus) until 1994, when he died, full of honours and distinctions.

  Thomas E. Lee’s story is somewhat different. Lee was born in a fishing village in southwestern Ontario, where he also spent his youth. During the Second World War he served overseas with the Canadian Forces, returning to Canada in 1945 after surviving action in India and in Burma. He came home determined to realize a youthful ambition to become an archaeologist.

  In 1950 he went to work at the National Museum, where he soon acquired the reputation of being a maverick for whom doctrinaire conclusions posed an irresistible challenge. Some of his associates considered him politically naive. As he himself told me, he was contemptuous of “lickspittle scholarship.” Nevertheless, his work was of high calibre, and he remained with the museum until his chief and mentor, Jacques Rousseau, was ousted by a cabal of graduates from U.S. universities who established de facto control over the Canadian archaeological establishment.

  Lee’s sense of loyalty was matched only by his fierce Canadianism. He resigned from the National Museum and soon found himself effectively blacklisted in his own profession. For seven years thereafter he was unable to obtain a full-time archaeological job. Not until after Rousseau became director of Laval University’s Centre for Northern Studies did the tide turn. In 1964 Rousseau was able to hire Lee part-time to investigate the Payne Lake site and two years later took him on staff.

  Between 1964 and 1975 Lee made eight expeditions to Payne Lake, Payne River, and the Ungava coast. Always underfunded, understaffed, and under the guns of the archaeological establishment, he soldiered on.

  He spent most of the summer of 1964 and part of 1965 painstakingly excavating house pits at the Payne Lake narrows. Some of the pits had previously been sampled by Michéa, then dug by Taylor. Lee took his own excavations down through permafrost to the earliest occupation levels. His work revealed that some houses had been established by early Dorset, then occupied by late Dorset, Thule, and eventually Inuit of both the pre-trade era and modern times.

  Lee found that the final Dorset occupation layer exhibited a number of non-Dorset characteristics. These included peculiarities in the shape and manufacture of stone artefacts. But what most impressed him were the quantities of bone and antler which had been worked with metal tools—saws, drills, axes, and, evidently, knives.2 Three carbon-14 tests from the “metal tool-use” layers gave dates between 1200 and 1300.

  Lee believed Taylor had found similar material but, since Taylor did not publish a report on this aspect of his work at Payne Lake, we shall probably never know.

  Publication of Lee’s meticulously detailed report of his 1964 dig loosed the cat amongst the pigeons. After listing the anomalies found at the narrows site, he concluded: “These argue for Norse or other European influence, most easily explained by racial and cultural mixing.”3

  Thomas Lee atop a beacon tower in the Payne River estuary. This beacon is ten feet tall and six feet in diameter.

  “The European element would not have been composed of newcomers,” he wrote to me in 1978, “but in all likelihood consisted of people who had been in the country many generations and were well adapted to living as the natives did. At the Michéa (narrows) site they lived together in the same houses with Dorsets, bringing with them their own metal tool kits. They may have lived as one people, and perhaps that is the way we ought to think of them.”4

  With the summer of 1964 almost over, Lee happened on a canoe abandoned by airborne prospectors. A bear had ripped its canvas covering, but Lee repaired the damage as best he could with surgical tape then launched himself on a perilous reconnaissance of the south shore of the lake.

  There he discovered what he believed might be the earliest European settlement in North America. He named it the Cartier Site.

  In 1967, after visiting Pamiok Island, I flew in with Lee to see the Cartier Site. We waded ashore from the Otter, and Lee trotted me around, making sure I caught every nuance of the place.

  He told me that, when he first came to it, there had been little to see except some shallow depressions along a six-hundred-foot strip of foreshore. These had been vaguely outlined by grassy ridges from which occasional large stones protruded.

  “They reminded me,” Lee later wrote, “of filled-in cellar pits along a vanished village street... so regularly laid out I could hardly credit their presence here in the middle of the Ungava tundra. I sensed they did not belong to any native culture.”

  Three additional seasons spent excavating the site only strengthened his first impression.5 Removal of turf and a thin layer of stony soil revealed long and relatively narrow house floors paved with sizeselected stone cobbles from the beach. Rock-ballasted turf walls had long since collapsed, spilling their heavy stones across the floors. No post holes or remnants of rafters remained to suggest how these houses might have been roofed.

  Although even during the palmy days of the Little Climatic Optimum, Payne Lake was a long way north of the timberline, Arctic willows lived there. Unable to hold up their heads against winter gales, they spread out almost at ground level. Lee found some of these flattened little “forests” adjacent to his village site. Individual trees were only an inch or two in diameter at the butt, but their ground-hugging branches fanned outward as much as fifteen feet. Lee thought such willows might somehow have been used as roof framing, but was unable to determine how a structure strong enough to withstand winter winds and snows could have been contrived from such slender, curving branches. At that time neither of us had even heard of boat-roofed houses.6

  The floors of the Cartier houses were unlike any Lee had previously excavated in that they were almost totally free of artefacts, debris from tool making, or even kitchen and domestic garbage.

  “It was as if,” he marvelled, “they had been swept clean by a very fussy Dutch hausfrau. No bones. Only the merest traces of charcoal. Not even the kind of litter left by casual Thule or Dorset visitors, though both had camped on the site later on, tearing stones out of the house walls and other structures to make meat caches and to anchor their tents.”

  The cobblestone flooring of the westernmost house at the Cartier site at Payne House.

  Among the structures damaged or destroyed by later comers were three massive constructs, one at the east end and two at the west end of the site. All had been reduced to mere piles of stones. Although Lee did not fully excavate them, he concluded they had been large beacons torn down by Thule or Inuit hun
ters and converted into meat caches.

  How large did he think the beacons might have been? From the quantity of stones, he estimated each to have been of the order of four feet in diameter and perhaps three times that in height.

  Dating the houses by carbon-14 testing proved impossible because there was insufficient organic matter in association with the original structures. However, latter-day visitors had made use of the wall stones from one house to build a tent ring. Lee found a fireplace inside the ring containing enough charcoal for testing. The sample dated to circa 1390, thereby establishing that the longhouse from which the stones came must have been in existence before that date. Lee thought the village might have been built as early as 1000, and concluded that its builders had been Europeans or, at least, people with European cultural affiliations.

  Lee’s deductions and tentative conclusions carried no weight with the archaeological establishment. Conventional wisdom continued to maintain that only native peoples were to be looked for in the Canadian Arctic of pre-Columbian times. As the years went by, Lee found himself more and more marginalized within his own profession. He did not endear himself to his orthodox peers with a comment to the effect that, if one of them unearthed the Holy Grail in an Arctic dig, it would be ascribed to Dorset culture.

  Lee stubbornly continued to follow his own nose. Then Jacques Rousseau retired and his successor at the Centre for Northern Studies eased Lee out. Thereafter, Tom’s requests for modest grants with which to continue his investigations were rejected by all official funding agencies, including the Canada Council.

  Lee still refused to knuckle under. In the summer of 1982 he returned to one of his earlier, and most controversial, sites—Sheguianadah, on Manitoulin Island. Here, in the 1950s, he had unearthed convincing evidence that human beings had been living in the Americas before the last Ice Age. Such an early date was then unacceptable to the establishment, which rejected Lee’s findings. Today many archaeologists accept the probability that human beings were present in North America as long ago as thirty thousand years. Tom had hoped to confirm his earlier work with one last dig.