The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  Egede reported that when he arrived in Greenland the only inhabitants were Eskimos. The Norse had seemingly vanished, leaving nothing of themselves but long-abandoned ruins.

  Since Egede’s day countless scholars have busied themselves trying to account for the disappearance of the Greenland Norse. It has been variously, and often vehemently, maintained that they were exterminated by the Black Death; that they were massacred by incoming Eskimos; that they starved after plagues of insects defoliated the pastures; that they were destroyed by a deteriorating climate; that they were carried into slavery by British pirates; that they emigrated to North America.

  Scores of books and hundreds of learned papers have been devoted to finding a solution to the mystery, but only a few authors, Fridtjof Nansen and Vilhjalmur Stefansson among them, seem to have got close to the truth. Which is that the Greenland Norse never did disappear—they just changed shape.

  Shape changers are a recurring theme in the mythology of all native peoples. The Greenland Norse changed shape by intermingling with the natives.

  Almost every observation of Greenland natives back to 1500, which is about as far as the modern record goes, indicates that they were, and are, of mixed race, exhibiting significant differences from pure Thule-Eskimo culture in appearance, activities, possessions, and behaviour. Furthermore, most of the traditional accounts of interaction between Norse and natives preserved in folklore point to a prolonged and comprehensive process of intermingling.

  The present-day inhabitants of Greenland do not, as is sometimes claimed, display European characteristics simply because of their association with Danes and other Europeans who followed Hans Egede to Greenland. They do so primarily because they are the descendants of Eskimoan and Norse people who came to Greenland a thousand years ago.

  And who remain there still.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - THREE

  JAKATAR

  ALTHOUGH MY ALBAN QUEST SEEMED TO BE NEARING an end, I lacked substantive evidence that they had reached St. George’s Bay.

  One day I opened a book of sailing directions called the Newfoundland Pilot. This seamen’s bible is based on the work of Captain James Cook, who surveyed and charted the island’s coasts in the 1760s before going on to find fame and death in the Pacific. Since the Pilot contains all the information a mariner needs to sail anywhere in Newfoundland waters, I wondered if it might have something useful to tell me about St. George’s Bay. I came upon this entry:

  Head of St. George’s Bay . . . St. George’s Harbour is protected . . . by Flat Island . . . the settlement of Sandy Point is situated at the eastern end of that island and had, in 1945, a population of 250 . . . 3 ½ miles southwestward . . . are Muddy Hole and Flat Bay Brook. Cairn (Steel) Mountain lies 7 miles eastsoutheastward of Muddy Hole. It is a remarkable mass of ironstone, 1005 feet high. There are two stone cairns on the mountain, reputed to have been erected by Captain Cook.1

  Because Cook was the first person to describe and chart Newfoundland’s west coast I had already examined his journals, maps, and meticulously detailed notes. They had told me that in 1766 when he surveyed the coast it had no permanent European inhabitants. Fishing vessels—mostly French—worked the grounds seasonally, but seldom overwintered. Apart from such occasionals the only people Cook encountered were “a tribe of Indians” in St. George’s Bay.

  Cook made no mention of having erected any cairns. If he had indeed gone to the considerable trouble of building two beacons big enough to be visible well to seaward, on top of a mountain seven airline miles from shore (ten miles overland), surely he would have mentioned the fact. Although the first modern Europeans to settle at St. George’s Bay, c. 1830, may have attributed the beacons to Cook, I could find no grounds for sharing that assumption.

  But if Cook did not build them, who did? And when?

  An investigation on the ground seemed called for. I would have preferred to sail my own little Newfoundland schooner into St. George’s Bay to view Cairn Mountain from the sea but, alas, she had (as seamen say) taken the ground for the last time.

  So Claire and I settled for a half-ton truck which we took to Newfoundland in the bowels of the ugly box of a car ferry that plies between North Sydney and Port aux Basques.

  A fine September morning in 1996 found us belting north out of Port aux Basques on the Trans-Canada Highway between the massive granite paps that mark the southern terminus of the Long Range Mountains. Late in the afternoon we came to a bridge over a rapid-filled river. A sign told us this was Flat Bay Brook. We pulled off the highway for our first and much-anticipated view of Cairn Mountain and the twin beacons crowning its crest.

  There was a mountain before us, certainly; a prominent spur out-thrust from the flanks of the Long Range. But its bald dome was unblemished by cairns or by any other visible constructs.

  Were we in the wrong place? The topographical maps assured me we were not. Was the Pilot in error? Impossible! The Pilot is as nearly infallible as human authority can be. Baffled, we drove to a nearby forestry station and asked the middle-aged man in charge if he knew of any structures on Cairn Mountain, or Steel Mountain as it was now called.

  “That I do, surely. You’d be wanting to know about Bowaters’ fire tower. Well, sir, they tore it down some years past.”

  Of stone cairns he knew nothing at all, although he had been born and reared within sight of Cairn Mountain.

  “Not to worry,” he added with a Newfoundlander’s eagerness to please, “Len Muise might know a thing or two. His old dad used to be a ranger on the tower. I’ll give him a ring.”

  Which is how I came to meet Leonard Muise; a handsome, ruggedly built man in his mid-forties; dark-complected, dark-haired, and vibrant. Born near Cape St. George, he is a Jakatar.

  A prospector for many years, Len is now a mining instructor at the local community college in Stephenville. But he has always been, and remains, he told me, a countryman. “Far back as you can go my folk were countrymen. Fished and farmed on the shore in summertime, then, come winter, ’twas off into the country, to the woods, the mountains, and the barrens to hunt and trap’til spring. That was my people’s life. The finest kind!”

  Len told me that, as a boy, he had often climbed Cairn Mountain with his father and a cousin of his own age. While the elder Muise kept watch for forest fires from a tiny cabin atop a flimsy tower, Len and his cousin played war games in make-believe forts centred on two piles of stones on the crest of the mountain. These were the closest things to “cairns” he could remember seeing there.

  Len undertook to investigate the mystery of the missing cairns on my behalf. He discovered that both had still been standing as late as the early 1940s, but sometime during the war years Bowaters Pulp and Paper Company had ordered a fire-watch-tower built on Cairn Mountain. When the contractors found they needed heavy stones with which to ballast the tower, they tore down one of the two beacons.

  Ellis Parsons, eighty years of age, remembered working on the tower in 1953. He recalled that the remaining beacon stood eight or nine feet tall and had a circumference of at least ten feet. However, during the next few years it too was dismantled to provide additional ballast. By the late 1950s both beacons had been reduced to the rubble heaps Len and his cousin had used as forts.

  Not many St. George’s people are old enough to remember the “cairns” as they once were, but Len tracked down some who could. They agreed in describing the structures as cylindrical, or nearly cylindrical, towers eight to ten feet high, about four feet in diameter, and carefully laid up without the use of mortar.

  Neither Len nor I could find anyone who knew of a basis for crediting Cook with their erection, nor could anyone explain their purpose. Their location so far inland made it most unlikely they were intended to serve as navigation aids. It is at any rate certain they were not sited as range markers to guide ships into any of the Bay ports. Considering the time and effort which would have been required to raise them (each must have been composed of at least 120 cubic feet
of rock), there can be no doubt that they were built for some compelling reason. I conclude it was the same reason—and the same builders—that produced the tower beacons of Labrador, Ungava, and the high eastern Arctic.

  September is often the most splendid month in Newfoundland. So it was in 1996. The sun blazed upon us, warming the steady westerly breeze until it felt almost like a Caribbean zephyr. The nights were cool and brilliant. Day after day Claire and I explored the coasts; picnicked on sounding beaches; scrambled up hoary old hills through swathes of ripe blueberries; or drove into “the country” on rutted logging roads that snaked alongside rattling brooks at the bottom of darkly forested valleys.

  We spent much time listening to local people while sampling such examples of Newfoundland’s fabled hospitality as plum pie made from fruit grown in the maker’s garden; smoked eels; bottled moose; clam chowder; and bakeapple (cloud berry) conserve. Everywhere we encountered a robust optimism. Despite the failure of the sustaining fishery, and the several other desperate economic woes which plagued the island, these people were not bowed down. They remained calmly confident in and of themselves.

  “’Tis true enough they’s not many dollars on the go,” admitted an older man in one of the small Jakatar communities. “But what odds? We’ve plenty of garden truck, country meat, a cow and a pig, wood to burn and to build whatever we needs. We’ve neighbours and kinsfolk, and good times for all hands. We’ll weather hard times like we’ve always done. We’ll not come to any great harm, because ’tis a bit of heaven we’re in.”

  Here is how I envision that “bit of heaven” on a September day six hundred years earlier.

  Alba-in-the-West was preparing for winter. From Port aux Basques to the Codroy Valley, and along the green coasts of Port au Port and St. George’s Bay, crofters were out on their scattered little fields sickling the last of the season’s bere and oats. In the blueberry patches, boys and girls competed with fat black bears.

  Far out on the glittering waters of the Gulf, valuta men were homeward bound from a summer spent killing tuskers on the teeming beaches of the Magdalen, Prince Edward, and Miscou islands. Some had traded for peltries with natives of these islands and of the mainland, offering in exchange homespun cloth together with a few copper and iron wares. When metal goods were not to be had, valuta men traded blanks of Ramah chert.2

  Trade with Europe had always been subject to ups and downs. Even in the best of times only the most intrepid European merchant skippers dared the Atlantic crossing, and it was an exceptional year when more than one or two succeeded in reaching Alba-in-the-West. In some years none appeared and, due to baleful events then beclouding Europe, such lapses were becoming increasingly frequent. However, periodic shortages of European goods wrought no great hardships on the western settlers. Except for metals, they were essentially self-sufficient.3

  Centuries in the New World had altered many aspects of their lives. But not all. Although they had grown closer in blood and habits to the aboriginal inhabitants, they retained an allegiance to their ancient crofting heritage and to their Christian tradition. Although they lived in common with native races, and blended blood and culture with them, they nonetheless remained a people in their own right.

  And by the standards of the time—perhaps of any times—early fifteenth-century inhabitants of southwestern Newfoundland lived a good life.

  Their compatriots to the northward were not so fortunate. These faced the implacable encroachment of the Thule tide. Alban and Tunit resistance had combined to slow this invasion, but had not halted it. By 1300 Thule, which had succeeded in occupying the northern tip of Labrador, was posing an imminent threat to coastal peoples to the south.

  Those inhabitants who lived native fashion and were able to maintain mobility found the situation tense but not impossible. Those whose crofting dependencies kept them tied to one place found it unendurable. Eventually they abandoned Labrador.

  Thule oozed south with glacial certainty until, by mid-century, even a mixed Alban presence would no longer have been detectable as such in Labrador or in the old hunting grounds to the north and west. Tunit culture, whether of pure or mixed ancestry, itself vanished not long thereafter. Archaeologists believe the Tunit may have made their last stand in eastern Ungava and north-central Labrador, lingering there in recognizable form until around the end of the fifteenth century.

  By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Norse were effectively out of the Alban story. In Greenland, as we have seen, internecine strife, the collapse of Norwegian hegemony, and the arrival of Thule were eroding Norse dominance and influence.

  Iceland, too, was out of the western saga, having undergone a series of horrendous disasters. Four major volcanic eruptions took place during the fourteenth century and a succession of epidemics culminated, in 1402–3, in a devastating outbreak of the Black Death that killed two-thirds of the remaining population. Nor was this the sum of the island’s afflictions. Thereafter, her coasts and coastal waters increasingly became a battleground for hordes of rapaciously competing European fishermen, many of them no better than pirates. Instead of going raiding in distant waters, Norse Icelanders found themselves fully engaged trying to repel foreign despoilers of their own shores. Alban Icelanders had once tried to do the same. The wheel had come full circle.

  By the latter part of the fourteenth century, most of Europe was in a state of turmoil bordering on chaos. Wars and rumours of war were everywhere. The so-called Hundred Years War (1339–1453) between France and England was but symptomatic of a general state of political, religious, social, and commercial tumult and unbridled lawlessness. Piracy at sea and brigandage on land had become the norms of human behaviour.

  These disruptions seem to have been intensified by three factors. First was the appearance of firearms and their rapid evolution until, by 1400, they had become deadly weaponry. The second was the fifteenth-century evolution of the lodestone into an effective mariner’s compass. The third was a combination of population expansion and the beginning of long-term climatic deterioration which ruined crops and led to widespread famine and social disruption.

  The consequent ferment began bursting out of Europe in the latter part of the 1400s. It was borne abroad by a new breed of mariners in new kinds of ships who, with the aid of the perfected compass and the baleful power of firearms, were eventually able to carry the virus of manic greed to the uttermost parts of the earth.

  Zichmni’s little freebooting venture seems to have been a first flick of the lash destined to scourge the new world in the west. Other entrepreneurs soon followed his sea-track or made their own. History has recorded the names and exploits of only a very few of what, by the end of the fifteenth century, had become a burgeoning flood of European marauders ferociously competing for the avails of a virgin world.

  Not all were cut from the same sable cloth. Spaniards and Portuguese seem to have excelled in ferocity and brutality, especially in their chosen role as slavers. In 1501 Gaspar Corte-Real and his brother Miguel sailed from Lisbon on their second western voyage. They cruised the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador until autumn, when their two caravels turned eastward. Only Miguel’s ship reached home. Amongst other trophies, she brought seven captured natives: “men, women and children, and in the other caravel, which is expected from hour to hour, are coming fifty more.” Contemporary observer Pietro Pasqualigo added, “These resemble gypsies in colour, features, stature and aspect . . . are very shy and gentle but well formed . . . [the sailors] have brought from there a piece of broken gilt sword. . . . One of the boys was wearing in his ears 2 silver rings. . . . They will be excellent for labour and the best slaves that have hitherto been obtained.”

  How they were obtained is not described.

  Nothing is known of what happened to Gaspar’s vessel. It is not impossible that the fifty captives he had aboard proved to be something less than “gentle” slaves—revolted, took the vessel, and may even have managed to make their way back to a friendly co
ast.

  The earliest English venturers, mostly from Bristol, went west via the Icelandic fishery, nominally to exploit the astronomically abundant cod on the Grand Banks and in the waters of eastern Newfoundland. But they had no compunction about seizing anything else of value that came their way. Including people. If slaving was not their main enterprise, they nevertheless indulged in it. They decimated the natives, especially the Beothuks, killing them as vermin who interfered with the legitimate pursuits of honest working men by their occasional thefts of metal implements, sail cloth, and nets.

  The French were perhaps a little less savage, although the atrocities they are known to have committed were terrible enough.

  A point to bear in mind: at almost every first contact with Europeans the indigenes are described as having been welcoming and friendly. However, during subsequent encounters arrows were wont to fly in one direction while blunderbusses bellowed in the other. In short order the natives had been brutally disillusioned as to the intentions of, and the behaviour to be expected from, Europeans.

  Basques appear to have been something of an exception. Although their destruction of non-human life in the New World, especially of great whales, was horrendous, they seem to have committed few crimes against native humanity. They may have felt empathy with the indigenes because they themselves were treated as primitives by Europeans contemptuous of their ancient language and culture. Envy of the Basques’ remarkable seafaring abilities, and of their success as providers of most of Europe’s whale oil (a vital staple of the times), also helped place them beyond the pale.

  The pursuit of whales for oil and baleen led Basque ships into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Big, seaworthy vessels followed the great whales through Belle Isle Strait to become the forerunners of what would, during the sixteenth century, become a vast fleet of whalers. Many worked the western coast of Newfoundland, which became as familiar to the Basques as their own Bay of Biscay.