The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

Talk like this whetted the valuta seekers’ desire to press on, but they had to contain their impatience. Nearly a week passed before their pilots were willing to proceed, and then they insisted on bringing along a throng of Port au Choix compatriots.

  Crowded to the gunwales, accompanied by, and sometimes towing, several Tunit boats, Farfarer and her consort made slow progress. Through the better part of four days they coasted the edge of a low and boggy plain beyond which the Long Range Mountains angled ever closer to reach the sea at Bonne Bay.

  The voyagers did not explore Bonne Bay’s awesome complex of fiords but, after spending a day and a night stormbound in a haven near its mouth, sailed on under the shadow of towering sea cliffs.

  A day later they opened the green vista of a broad, island-filled bay extending deep into a heavily forested interior. This was Beothuk country. The pilots spotted a wisp of smoke on one of the islands and, steering towards it, entered a cove upon whose sandy shore stood several Beothuk tents.

  Despite what they had been told about the amiability of the island’s forest dwellers, the Albans remained somewhat apprehensive. The Okak and Ungava Tunit, too, were content to stay aboard until three Beothuks paddled out in one of their oddly shaped canoes which, seen from the side, looked like two birch-bark half moons joined together. Only after formal greetings had been exchanged did the mainland visitors go ashore.

  Beothuks, men, women, and children, crowded around the newcomers, and the Albans found themselves the centre of insistent, if friendly, curiosity. They prudently elected to spend the night on board ship, although the Island Tunit slept ashore where they were entertained with food and dancing in and about the bark-clad teepees of their hosts.

  Continuing the voyage next day, Farfarer led the way close under the hulking mass of Bear Head. By dusk she was abeam of Shag Island, whose shores were encrusted by walrus plunging into the sea in cascades of foam and spray as the ships approached. No one aboard needed to be told they had arrived at Tusker Bay.

  The town of Stephenville sprawls on the northeastern shore of St. George’s Bay. Five miles west of town the road splits. One branch continues on to the westward across a sea-swept gravel isthmus connecting the mainland with the almost-island peninsula of Port au Port. The other branch turns north along the mainland coast, skirting Table Mountain, whose 1,200-foot crest is crowned (or desecrated, depending on one’s bias) by a huge white dome vaguely reminiscent of a mosque minus its minaret.

  This is a radar dome—a relic of the 1950s when East and West were at nuclear daggers drawn. Intended to give warning of the approach of Russian bombers bound for the eastern seaboard of the United States, it has long since been abandoned. But if one cares to climb to it up a washed-out road that will no longer suffer cars, it affords a stunning panoramic view for thirty or forty miles around.

  The vista is dominated by the Port au Port Peninsula itself, a mass of limestone shaped like a titanic spearhead whose tip, Cape St. George, thrusts twenty-five miles westward into the pallid waters of the Gulf. Between the peninsula and the mainland lies Tusker Bay, now Port au Port Bay. Twenty miles long and twelve broad, it was until quite recently one of the richest repositories of marine life on the eastern seaboard of North America.

  On a September day in 1996, Claire and I stopped at the eerily silent fishing village of Boswarlos on the south shore of Tusker Bay to chat with the only person we could find—an elderly fisherman brooding over his gear. He told us the bay was now virtually abandoned.

  “Not enough fish left out there to keep the gulls from starvin’. I hauled seven nets this mornin’ and got four little mackerel, no more’n would feed me cat! ’Tis all fished out! Hard to believe, maybe, but they was even walrus here once—found their teeth and bones meself out on Shoal Point. And whales a-plenty. Even in my time porpoises was still thick as berries. And fish . . . cod used to drive in here chasin’ the capelin and herring like a spring tide! Fill your nets so full they’d sink to the bottom! And lobsters! When I were a lad they was two, three hundred lobster men in the bay, all makin’ a livin’. Nowadays they’s no more’n a dozen, and every one of them hard put to land the price of a case of beer!”

  Port au Port Bay, St. George’s Bay, and adjacent waters were once alive with fish—and with fishermen. Fifteenth-century Basque and Portuguese barks and whalers were followed here by fleets of French then English smacks and then by flocks of white-winged American, Canadian, and Newfoundland schooners. These were succeeded in their turn by motor seiners, long liners, trawlers, and, finally, by the ultimate fish killer of all—the stern dragger.

  They are all gone now. During our visit Claire and I saw not one fishing vessel at work on all the vast sweep of salt water bordering southwestern Newfoundland. Those once astoundingly fecund waters have been so drained of life that there is no longer any profit to be made from them.

  Which is not the way it was a thousand years ago.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR

  A NEW JERUSALEM

  THE CLIMATE CONTINUED TO IMPROVE DURING the first half of the tenth century and so, I believe, did the fortunes of the Albans.

  Here is how I envision those times.

  The Viking threat posed no imminent threat to Crona. The “happy warriors” in Iceland were preoccupied hunting down “cavemen” and other such vermin, or with splitting the skulls and burning the houses of troublesome neighbours of their own kind. The more entrepreneurial among them sailed east to the Continent to hire on as mercenaries.

  Occasional Norse hunters crossed Denmark Strait to the long-abandoned Alban hunting grounds in northeastern Greenland, but these visits would have been peripheral to Alban concerns.

  Traffic between Crona and Britain prospered. Vessels carrying churchmen and other travellers as well as goods came and went with little interference from the Norse because ships kept well south of Icelandic coastal waters. Trade had never been better, and prospects for the future looked even brighter as the seemingly limitless resources of the Great Island were unveiled.

  Word of its momentous discovery spread quickly through the maritime network to most countries bordering on the North Atlantic. It was soon common knowledge amongst European seafarers that a new land had been found far to the westward, one that harboured a mother lode of riches.

  Soon after the first Alban scouting vessel returned from Tusker Bay, valuta seekers began exploiting these southern grounds. Within a few decades, the only valuta men remaining in the northwest were those whose lives were inextricably blended with Tunit there. Ungava and Hudson bays became backwaters. Fewer and fewer merchant ships visited Diana Bay. After some thousands of years, the dominance of the north in Alban affairs was slipping away.

  Once Iceland fell into Norse hands, Cape Farewell at the southern tip of Greenland became the preferred western landfall for European merchant seamen. Ongoing skippers took departures from it, steering a direct course west to raise the mountains of Labrador. They then coasted south to Okak, the new trade entrepôt in the west.

  Most valuta clans had by now abandoned Crona, establishing themselves especially at Hebron Fiord and Okak Bight, where they were at once close to a mercantile port and within relatively easy reach of the new southern grounds. Valuta clans were joined at Okak by a scattering of crofting families who, either prescient or paranoid about the proximity of the Norse in Iceland, were drifting west.

  As of old, valuta clans tended to establish themselves along the outer coasts. Crofters preferred to homestead along the extensive river valleys running between the main fiords and the southern outliers of the Torngats. Here they built turf-and-log homes and outbuildings and husbanded their small herds of domestic animals.

  Although Okak valuta hunters spent their summers on the Newfoundland coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, neither they nor Okak’s crofters were tied to the steadings during the winter months. Some undertook prolonged hunting journeys westward into the mountains seeking moose, caribou, and black and grizzly bears.1 Others worked woodlands
closer to home, using deadfalls and snares to catch furbearers. Some preferred to hunt the outer coasts in company with Tunit friends or relatives, taking chiefly seals, small whales, white bears, and white foxes.

  Women, children, and old or incapacitated men remaining at the homesteads had enough to do. Although most of the stock foraged for itself, watch had to be kept for bears and wolves. People fished through the ice of freshwater ponds and lakes. They gathered wood. They made and repaired clothing and gear against the demands of the new year. When there was time and the weather was opportune, they visited neighbours, either on foot or on sleds drawn by shaggy little horses or, sometimes, by dogs.

  They lived in much the same way as did Europeans who settled Labrador in modern times. There was one notable difference. Because of adverse climatic conditions, Labrador livyers of the historic period have rarely been able to keep domestic animals, other than dogs.2

  During the summer Alban settlers looked after their animals; made what hay they could; caught and smoked or dried salmon, char, and trout; picked berries; and cultivated a few plants such as angelica.

  Round about midsummer, most people foregathered at the harbour on Okak Island to await the arrival of trading ships. This was a time for both mundane and religious celebrations. The Albans were practising Christians though they rarely saw a priest or other guardian of their faith. The summer gatherings also attracted distant visitors, including families of mixed race from the northern grounds who were finding themselves isolated from the mainstream of Alban life. These festivals marked the high point of the year but, as the century passed the halfway mark, news from Crona began casting a shadow over them.

  While Crona’s population had been growing at a normal rate, Iceland’s had exploded. In addition to the original in-pouring of land takers from Norway, thousands of Norse settlers arrived from the British Isles. These, facing fierce native uprisings together with invasions by Danes and others, had found it hard to hang on either to property or to life itself. In consequence, many decamped to Iceland. The combined exodus from Norway and Britain was so large that by 950 Iceland’s population is supposed to have been nearing thirty thousand.

  Useable land and opportunities to make a living in Iceland both grew scarce. More and more men found themselves compelled to seek a future off-island, and this at a time when the traditional Viking enterprises of piracy and brigandage in an aroused and vengeful Europe were becoming increasingly risky and unproductive.

  For more than half a century, Icelandic Norsemen had been used to voyaging east in pursuit of fame and fortune. Now some went westviking.

  The first black knorr to appear on Crona’s coast perhaps produced an effect out of proportion to the cause, for the Albans remaining there were no longer a contented lot. Because most valuta traffic was now bypassing Crona, fewer and fewer merchant ships were entering her ports to take on local goods and discharge European products. A mounting dissatisfaction with a way of life growing ever more constrained was being fuelled by glowing reports of the new world across the water to the south and west.

  The arrival of Norse pirates settled the matter for most Cronian Albans. They would have been grimly aware of what such raids presaged for the future. They had not forgotten what the Norse had done to their forebears in the Northern Isles and then in Tilli. The first raids on Crona triggered a wave of departures for the west.

  By around 960 the last valuta clans had exchanged homes in Greenland for new ones in the west. During the ensuing two decades most crofter families followed suit.

  Although Okak Bight was able to absorb many of the valuta clans, together with some few crofters, it could not accommodate the entire population of Crona.

  Fortunately there was no need for it to do so.

  By the middle of the tenth century, Albans had investigated the southwestern portion of the Great Island. Their descriptions of its fruitfulness, both on land and in the sea, had for long been the talk of everyone living in Crona. In small groups at first, then in ever-increasing numbers as migrant fever enveloped them, crofters abandoned Crona for a new Jerusalem in the west.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FIVE

  ERIK RAUDA

  BLOOD FEUDING WAS A WAY OF LIFE FOR TENTH-CENTURY Scandinavians, and Icelanders were no exception. Manslaughter—frequently a mere euphemism for murder—was commonplace. Every individual had a monetary value commensurate with his rank and connections. The lives of men or livestock could be paid for with almost equal ease. However, if blood money or other compensation was not forthcoming, a killer could face sentence of outlawry.

  An outlawed man had to leave the district or even the country itself, depending on whether his banishment was local or national. If he refused to go, anyone with sufficient will and might was at liberty to kill him, with legal impunity.

  Around 960 a man named Thorvald Asvaldsson was outlawed from Norway’s Jaedar district for multiple “manslaughters.” As many in his situation had done before him, he and his family, which included a redheaded son aged about fourteen, took refuge in Iceland.

  The Thorvalders were latecomers. By the time they arrived, all the good land had been taken, leaving little except the lava deserts of the interior, and the forbidding mountains and fiords of the northwestern peninsula, which had perhaps been the final refuge of now vanished Albans. Thorvald ended up in the latter, settling under the chill shadow of Dranga glacier.

  The sagas have little to say about what life in the north must have been like for the Thorvalders, but we can make an informed guess. A typical steading of those times consisted of a single room with low, turf walls. It possessed one doorway and no windows. Rows of posts supported a heavy sod roof and divided the interior into three narrow aisles. The centre aisle held an open fireplace; the outer two, raised earthen platforms upon which the family sat, worked, and slept.

  The economy of such a steading turned on meat and dairy products. Usually fermented to make a sour curd called skyr, milk provided the staple food. Butter, cheese, and skyr were hoarded against the winter months when half-starved cattle, stabled in terribly crowded, lightless burrows, went dry. In the impoverished north, dried fish, rancid seabirds and their sometimes putrid eggs, and seal meat varied the diet.

  When Thorvald’s boy, Erik Rauda (Erik the Red), came of age, he escaped from Dranga’s poverty by marrying into a prosperous family from the Haukadale district to the south. Here he acquired a holding—it was probably his wife’s dowry—and quickly demonstrated he really was his father’s son. Erik settled a disagreement with a neighbour named Valthjof by sending some of his slaves to unleash a landslide on Valthjof’s steading.

  Thereupon Eyjolf the Foul, one of Valthjof’s relatives, retaliated by killing the slaves. So, naturally, Erik killed Eyjolf, together with a companion called Duel-fighting Hrafn. This exploit enhanced Erik’s reputation, but got him into real trouble. Eyjolf’s kinsmen cited him for manslaughter and he was banished from the Haukadale district. He decamped in such a hurry he had to leave his precious high-seat posts to the care of Thorgest, another neighbour.

  That winter Erik and his family shifted from island to island in Breidafjord, living like the outlaws they were. When spring came Erik made a surreptitious foray back to Haukadale to get his high-seat posts. Thorgest declined to part with these, so Erik and his companions hid in a neighbouring woods and kept watch until Thorgest set off on a journey. Thereupon they raided the farm, seized the posts, and headed home.

  Nothing could ever be resolved that easily in Iceland. Thorgest chased and caught the raiders and in the ensuing mêlée Erik’s party killed two of Thorgest’s sons and several others of his supporters. These new “manslaughters” brought both the Breidafjord and Haukadale districts into the fray. In the spring of 981, Thorgest’s party forced an action against Erik, who again found himself outlawed. This time from all of Iceland—and for three years.

  Like his father, Erik chose the westward path. Unlike his father, he was not seeking a new homeland—not
yet, at any rate. He went west as a Viking, determined to make his time of exile as profitable as possible. He had a specific target in mind: Alba in Greenland.1

  The assertion that Erik was the discoverer of Greenland is at the core of one of the most enduring myths contrived in his memory. In truth, he was not even among the earliest Norsemen to reach Greenland.

  Landnámabók, that cornerstone of Icelandic history, describes how Gunnbjorn Ulf Kragesson, one of the first generation of Norwegian land takers in Iceland, was storm-driven to Greenland’s east coast as early as 890. Thereafter, and for generations before Erik was born, eastern Greenland was known to Icelanders as Gunnbjorn’s Land.

  Landnámabók provides a vivid account of another early expedition to Greenland, one that took place forty years before Erik went into exile. It offers a revealing glimpse of how life was lived in Iceland in those times.

  A man named Hallbjorn married Tongue-Odd’s daughter Hallgerd. The young couple spent the first winter of their marriage at Tongue-Odd’s house and there was little love lost between them. Snaebjorn Hog, who was a first cousin of Tongue-Odd, also lived there that winter.

  In late May, which was moving time in Iceland, Hallbjorn got ready to move out of his father-in-law’s house. . . .

  When Hallbjorn had saddled the horses he went to fetch Hallgerd from where she was sitting in her bower. When he called upon her to get up and come with him, she neither said anything nor did she move. Hallbjorn called her three times without result, then he sang a snatch of pleading song, but this did not move her either. At last he twisted her long hair in his hand and tried to drag her out of her chair, but still she would not budge. Thereupon he drew his sword and cut off her head.

  When he heard about this, Odd asked Snaebjorn Hog to ride in pursuit of Hallbjorn. Snaebjorn did so, accompanied by twelve men. They caught up with Hallbjorn, and in the ensuing battle three of Snaebjorn’s men and both of Hallbjorn’s companions were killed. Finally someone sliced off Hallbjorn’s foot and he too died.