The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  Who were the people Gudleif encountered?

  If they had been indigenes, the skald would surely have said so since, by then, Icelanders certainly knew enough about Skraelings to be able identify them as such.

  But they could not have been Skraelings—because they had horses!

  The reference to horses has been used by a number of historians to discredit the whole story on the grounds that, as everyone knows, there were no horses in the New World prior to their introduction from Spain in the sixteenth century.

  But Albans had horses, and undoubtedly took them along on their westward migrations. Offspring of ancient equine stock are still to be found in the Northern Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. It should not surprise us if the hardy, hairy, native ponies which still persist (if barely) in Newfoundland carry genes from ponies Gudleif saw there almost a thousand years ago.

  If not indigenes—and nothing we are told about these people indicates this is what they were—who could they have been? I submit that they were Albans or, at least, people of mixed Alban and native stock.

  Thanks to the old Icelander, Gudleif and his people escaped with their lives. Perhaps they did even better than that. The saga’s failure to identify Gudleif’s landfall, or to locate its position even in general terms, is distinctly odd. Having sailed both to it, and from it, Gudleif must have known where it was. I suspect that the knorr’s cargo of European trade goods remained behind when Gudleif departed—having been exchanged for a lading of Alban valuta.

  It is surely significant that Gudleif did not proceed directly home to Iceland. Instead, he made a second transatlantic passage—all the way back to Dublin! This could hardly have been happenstance. But if he had disposed of his trade goods in Alba, Gudleif would have had nothing to sell in Iceland. He would, however, have had a cargo of valuta for disposal in Europe.

  I think anticipation of future business in Alba explains the reticence of the saga’s source about the whereabouts and identity of Gudleif’s land. These were trade secrets. The saga’s emphasis on the dangers and difficulties involved in trying to find the place, or in surviving there if one did find it, was probably intended to preserve the secrets.

  Albans had been Christians since at least as early as the seventh century. At the turn of the millennium Iceland and Greenland finally embraced Christianity. Thereafter all three peoples were brought together under the aegis of a single arm of the Roman church: the diocese of Hamburg and Bremen. The prelates of that see had powerful reasons to maintain close contacts with its distant western adherents, one of them being to ensure a steady flow of “pence for Peter’s purse”—and for their own.

  According to Icelandic annals, a Saxon or Celtic priest called Jon travelled west to “Vinland” in circa 1059. Scholars have suggested he was sent to convert the Skraelings, but the Church was not then interested in proselytizing “savages,” who, according to many ecclesiasts, did not possess human souls. It makes more sense to suppose Jon was sent to Alba-in-the-West to deal with affairs of the Hamburg and Bremen see.

  He was not the only churchman to go west. A legend on the Yale Vinland map informs us that

  Eric, legate of the Apostolic See and bishop of Greenland and the neighbouring regions, arrived in this truly vast and very rich land [Vinland], in the name of Almighty God, in the last year of our most blessed father Pascal [1118], remained a long time in both summer and winter, and later returned northeastward towards Greenland and then proceeded in most humble obedience to the will of his superiors.

  This was Bishop Eric Gnupsson, who may have come out to Greenland as early as 1112. He was not just Bishop of Greenland, but of the “neighbouring regions” (except Iceland, which had its own bishop). Presumably the “neighbouring regions” meant Vinland/Alba.

  The awkward-looking Flemish cog was the third merchantman to reach Alba in the summer of 1118, but her arrival prompted the most excitement for she carried clerics as passengers, and one of them was a bishop!

  Never before had a high-ranking prelate visited the New World. In fact, during much of their existence, Alban congregations had had to manage with no priest at all, or with one harried father shared amongst them. Now, so it seemed to the faithful, the distant princes of the church were making amends for long neglect.

  As the cog opened St. George’s Bay, Bishop Eric beheld a vast amphitheatre of darkly forested hills rising to heights of a thousand feet. Conspicuous upon the crest of an isolated hill a few miles inland from the only secure anchorage in the bay, two tall stone pillars thrust upward like the blunt fingers of a buried giant.3

  The ship sailed deeper into the bay, and the bishop saw that in many places the forests were fronted by grassland, most extensive near the mouths of the many streams and rivers. Embedded in this verdant strip stood unobtrusive clusters of croft houses and outbuildings.

  In due course the cog rounded Flat Island’s Sandy Point and came ponderously to anchor in the well-protected haven behind the island. Her approach had been reported hours earlier and a considerable crowd had assembled around a scattering of log cabins on Sandy Point, the nearest thing to a village in Alba.

  The bishop and his clerics could detect few overt indications of the prosperity Alba was reputedly enjoying, except in the festive clothing and ornaments worn by some of the welcomers. This was an unostentatious people whose affluence was mainly determined by the number of cattle on the pasture lands, and the quantity of food preserved in snug cellars and storerooms. If the bishop had not previously examined the manifests of cargoes delivered to Baltic ports by ships trading to Alba, he might have been deceived.

  Those cargoes had included some of the largest shipments of walrus ivory in memory. Port officials and merchants alike were realizing princely profits from these imports, whereas the Church was not receiving anything like what she deemed to be her proper share. It was one of Bishop Eric’s tasks to rectify this situation.

  When valuta men first entered Tusker Bay, they doubtless believed they had found the mother lode of walrus ivory. It could not, however, have been many years before they discovered the true mother lode barely a hundred miles to the westward. This was the Magdalen Island archipelago, anciently called Ramea, now renamed by the province of Quebec, Îles de la Madeleine.

  As late as the eighteenth century, the Magdalens were still hosting the greatest concentration of walrus ever reported in any one place. In earlier times these herds alone would have been able to provide enough ivory and other walrus products to satisfy most of Europe’s requirements. This was something about which Bishop Eric would have been well informed.4

  During his stay, which lasted at least a year, the bishop probably visited most of Alba-in-the-West. On his return to Europe, we can be sure he reported to his superiors what he had seen and heard. That report may still lie buried in the labyrinth of the Vatican archives, but verbal accounts of Eric’s travels in the New World would have circulated through ecclesiastical, maritime, and commercial circles in western Europe. If the existence and location of Alba had once been something of a secret, it would no longer have remained so.

  Since about 900 climatic conditions in the western Atlantic had been steadily improving, bringing longer, warmer summers; milder winters; and a decrease in stormy weather. By 1100 this trend had wrought great changes in the region, most of them advantageous to the Albans.

  Not so for the Tunit. Newfoundland Tunit were sea-mammal hunters first and foremost. Their principal prey was ice seals (harps and hoods), which every spring congregated by the millions on the pack ice of the Gulf to whelp and to nurse their pups. As the changing climate brought warmer weather, the thickness and duration of ice cover in the Gulf waned, until it could no longer provide secure seal nurseries. In consequence, most pelagic seals abandoned the Inner Sea to whelp instead on the Arctic pack along the coast of Labrador.5

  As the ice seals withdrew, some Tunit followed them north. The remainder underwent a metamorphosis, becoming so closely associated with Albans as
to become virtually indistinguishable from them.

  Alban ways of life themselves underwent momentous changes. A warm climate disastrously shortens the life of skin-covered boats and this, together with the presence of good timber in abundance, encouraged a switch to wooden ship construction. But wooden vessels require much more time and labour to build and, since the Albans were no longer faced with the necessity of making extensive ocean voyages, they built smaller vessels.

  There were no more oceanic Farfarers. New World Albans had become coastwise sailors.

  Something similar took place in Greenland during the same period. Although timber could be fetched from Markland, Greenlanders lost the knack, or the need, to build big vessels. In consequence, they, like the Albans, became ever more dependent on foreign bottoms to maintain their connection with Europe.

  Traders from England, Ireland, Flanders, and Baltic ports were now making transatlantic voyages . . . and reaping satisfying profits. Walrus ivory was in ever-increasing demand. New World furs continued (and would continue into modern times) to be avidly sought in European markets. Other valuta, such as falcons, maintained or increased their worth. Good weather, good markets, and good supplies of valuta worked to everyone’s advantage.

  While valuta men killed tuskers on the beaches of Tusker Bay and Ramea, and trapped fur in the interior of Labrador and Newfoundland, Alban crofters prospered along the southwestern coasts of the Great Island. Clement weather enabled them to extend their pastures and enlarge their herds. They were able to grow ample supplies of grain, including precursors to modern oats and barley.

  Crofting conditions were at their best in southern Alba, although they would have been good at Cupids too. They were less satisfactory at Okak, with the result that emigrants from there, together with a spillover from the St. George’s district, homesteaded the Codroy district and perhaps elsewhere as well.

  The Norse in Greenland were also doing well, both as crofters and hunters. They could obtain valuta (if not all they desired) from their own northern regions. By 1150 Greenland’s twin settlements were prospering as never before, and supporting a population numbering as many as three thousand people.

  As the twelfth century waned, the western regions of the North Atlantic were enjoying the best of times.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

  DROGIO AND ESTOTILAND

  THE NORTHWESTERN REACHES OF THE ATLANTIC were the scene of considerable maritime activity in the thirteenth century. During this time, a merchant vessel, which may have been, but was not necessarily, Norse, found her way into Kane Basin at the head of Baffin Bay. Here she came to grief, perhaps at the hands of aggressive indigenes, now called Thule culture, who had recently arrived from the west.1

  Archaeologists Peter Schledermann and Karen McCullough have unearthed bits and pieces of the ship and her cargo (including iron rivets and even some chain mail armour) from Thule ruins on the western shore of Kane Basin. Another Canadian archaeologist, Patricia Sutherland, found the bronze balance arm of a merchant’s scale belonging to the same period, on Ellesmere Island at a Thule site not far distant from Kane Basin.

  Around 1266 the ecclesiastical powers of the southern Greenland Norse colony sent an expedition into northwestern Baffin Bay, ostensibly to determine how far south Thule had penetrated, but quite possibly also to determine what had happened to the missing merchant ship.

  Vessels were sailing west as well as north into Arctic Canada. Icelandic annals for 1285 report the finding of a previously unknown land to the west of Iceland. Originally called the Down (Eiderdown) Islands, it was renamed Newland. Eight annal entries make ongoing mention of Newland and, in 1289, King Eric of Norway was sufficiently intrigued to send an emissary named Rolph to investigate it.

  We are told Rolph was in Iceland the next year “soliciting men for a Newland voyage.” The annals have nothing to tell about what success he had, but other sources provide some tantalizing glimpses of Norse west-faring during this era.

  These include five sagas, all partly fictitious, but based on traditional sources. I have reported on them in Westviking.2 They confirm Norse knowledge of Hudson Strait, which they called Skuggifjord, knowledge evidently acquired during several voyages to that region, any or all of which could have been concerned with the Newland discovery.

  Where was Newland? It could not have been in Greenland proper; nor could it have been in Helluland, Markland, or Vinland, all of which were then relatively well known. The annals specify that it was west of Iceland, which, in the parlance of the day, meant that it was to be looked for in the same latitudes as Iceland.

  Overleaping Greenland westward from Iceland takes us to that section of the north shore of Hudson Strait lying between Markham Bay and Cape Dorset. The coast here forms a bight about 160 miles long and 30 deep, packed with islands that even yet have not been fully explored, but which host the largest populations of breeding eider ducks in the Canadian Arctic. These islands lie between 63° 30’ and 64° 30’, latitudes that embrace the southern third of Iceland.

  In 1978 archaeologists excavating a thirteenth-century Thule house ruin at Lake Harbour, which is on Hudson Strait just east of Markham Bay, uncovered a wooden figurine dressed in European style, including a hooded cloak. The little figure has a cross carved on its chest.

  Nothing indicates that Greenlanders sailed south during this period, from which I conclude that Albans and their native allies continued to make Norse ventures in that direction unproductive.

  By this time Alban valuta seekers would have found their way around most of the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They would, however, have had little reason to settle there. Apart from Prince Edward Island, the Gulf had nothing to offer crofters comparable to southwestern Newfoundland, which was distant enough from Europe to strain the sea links between the two continents.

  Walrus products, and especially ivory, continued to be a mainstay of New World trade. The King’s Mirror, a Norwegian compendium dating to about 1250, tells us that in Greenland, everything that is needed to improve the land must be purchased abroad, both iron and all that they use in building houses. In return for these wares the merchants bring back [to Europe] the following products: reindeer skins, hides, sealskin, and rope of the kind which is called “leather rope” and is cut from the fish called walrus, and also the teeth of walrus.

  This robed and hooded figure bearing a cross carved on its chest was found in a 12th century Thule Inuit ruin at Lake Harbour on Hudson Strait.

  Also the teeth! In 1262 Bishop Olaf left Greenland carrying so much ivory aboard his vessel that, after she was wrecked on the coast of Iceland, tusks continued to wash ashore for three hundred years.

  In 1323 the papal legate for Norway and Sweden received tithes from the diocese of Gardar in Greenland amounting to about 1,400 pounds of walrus ivory. This was sold in Flanders, which had by this time become a major marketplace for New World valuta.

  The enduring importance of walrus is highlighted by these words about the Magdalen Islands, written in the late 1500s by that indefatigable chronicler of English voyaging, Richard Hakluyt.

  The Island . . . is flat and shoal: and the fish cometh on the shores to do their kind in April, May and June by numbers thousands; which fish is very big and hath two great teeth . . . and they will not go away from their yonge ones. . . . These beasts are as big as Oxen . . . the hides big as any Oxe hide. . . . The leather dressers take them to be excellent good to make light targets [shields]. . . . The teeth have been solde in England to the comb and knife makers at 8 groats and 3 shillings the pound, whereas the best [elephant] Ivory is sold for halfe of that. A skilful Phisition showed me one of these beast’s teeth and assured me that he had made a tryall of it in ministering medicine to his patients and found it as sovereigne [a remedy] against poison as any Unicorne’s horne.

  If the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dealt kindly with Albans in Newfoundland, they were less benevolent towards the livyers of Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait.


  Sometime around 1000 a formidable new people from Alaska began moving across Arctic Canada. They were bearers of the Thule culture, the ancestors of modern Eskimos.

  According to archaeologist Moreau Maxwell, they had experienced a long history of warfare with encroaching tribes from Siberia, and of internecine strife resulting from overcrowding in Alaska. They knew how to fight, and when they moved east, they carried wickedly effective, sinew-backed bows of Asiatic pattern.

  The Tunit were unable to withstand this alien tide. They had no knowledge of, or experience with, warfare; nor did they possess weapons designed for use against their own species. The Thule invasion rolled eastward, overwhelming the Tunit.

  Thule’s progress was as swift as it was deadly. By about 1200 the newcomers had reached Kane Basin and were in sight of Greenland. Less than a century later, they were at Disko Bay, halfway down the west coast of Greenland, and close enough to Norse settlements in the Godthaab fiords.

  Their penetration of the southerly part of Canada’s eastern Arctic was not so rapid. Although by about 1250 they had established a foothold on the northern tip of Labrador, for another century they got no farther south. They also failed to occupy the western coast of Ungava Bay.

  I believe this was because people of mixed Tunit and Alban ancestry were able to hold the intruders to a stand-off. After Thule belligerence had been blunted by time, perhaps the livyers melded with the newcomers to become the forebears of the modern Inuit of Hudson Strait, Ungava, and northern Labrador, a people who earned a reputation for stubborn and effective resistance to the incursions of latter-day Europeans.