Appendix A: The Sources

An Introduction to the Ancient Scandinavian Documents Which Tell the Tale of the Westward Venturing

Nature of the Sources

The sources dealing with the Norse voyages to the west fall into three general categories. Least important of these are the fragmentary references and brief notices which are found scattered through the surviving body of Icelandic literature.¹ These serve to confirm what we are told in the major sources as well as to extend our knowledge of the individuals concerned, and in some cases they help to clarify obscure points.

The second category includes the minor sources, foremost of which are two primitive Icelandic histories, the Islendingabok, which is a brief résumé of the early Scandinavian history of Iceland; and the Landnamabok, which is a detailed genealogy of the more important early settlers and their families, enlivened with succinct accounts of many trivial and some major events in the history of the island. The original version of the Islendingabok, which is no longer extant, was written in the early twelfth century by Ari Thorgilsson. Compilation of the Landnamabok probably began at about the same time, and in its original form it may have been partly the work of the same author. Several recensions² of it exist although the original version has been lost.

The major sources consist of a number of vellums, most of which seem to have had their genesis in a single oral saga, or perhaps in two very similar and closely related oral sagas.

The Sagas

There are many types of sagas, including mythological tales, pure romances, family chronicles, highly embellished lives of kings, and sober factual accounts of historical events. The saga, or sagas, with which we are concerned belong in the last group. They were not written as deliberate history in the sense that the Islendingabok was, yet they are historical compositions in the proper sense of the word since they record the deeds of individuals; and these deeds are what, in the long run, comprise the true histories of nations and of peoples.

The original oral accounts which detailed the history of the western voyages have long since vanished into silence. It may be that there were two such parent sagas, but since this is a question which can probably never be resolved, I have chosen to refer to the original progenitor, or progenitors, in the singular as the Old Erik Saga. I do not know when this saga was composed. It may be that a skald living at the time of the great western voyages pulled together bits and pieces of previous saga accounts leading up to the major adventures and unified them into one sequential tale. In any event it seems certain from internal evidence—not least of which is the strong feeling that the skald personally participated in the latter events of which he sang—that the Old Erik Saga must have come into existence around the beginning of the eleventh century.

Most of our knowledge of the Old Erik Saga is contained in four vellum documents,³ three of which are closely related and seem to stem from a common written as well as a common oral ancestor. I refer to these three throughout the text as the Short Saga, the Erik the Red Saga, and Thorfinn Karlsefni Saga or Karlsefni Saga.

The Short Saga is a fragment of a transcript of what may have been one of the earliest written versions of the Old Erik Saga and which could date to as early as the beginning of the twelfth century. Unfortunately this fragment covers only the first part of the tale, beginning with the genealogy of Erik the Red and cutting off abruptly at the termination of Bjarni Herjolfsson’s voyage. This document was found in a huge compendium of ancient Icelandic literature which was transcribed into a single massive vellum volume, now known as the Flateyjarbok, at the instance of Jon Hakonarsson during the last half of the fourteenth century.

The Thorfinn Karlsefni Saga was found in a smaller, though similar, compendium known as the Hauksbok. This collection was compiled by, or at the orders of, Hauk Erlandsson, who was a lineal descendant of Thorfinn Karlsefni, during the first half of the fourteenth century. Someone—either Hauk or his hired scribes—has apparently polished this version into finer literary form, but its contents still remain essentially the same as those of its two brethren. Internal evidence makes it clear, however, that it is copied from a later transcript than the one which fathered the Short Saga fragment.

The closely related Erik the Red Saga is contained in yet another compendium, a vellum codex numbered 577 in the Arna-Magnean Collection in Copenhagen. It is somewhat cruder and rougher in style than the Karlsefni version. Although the extant copy was evidently transcribed (by an indifferent hand) near the end of the fourteenth century, it nevertheless appears to have originated from a slightly earlier transcript than did the Karlsefni Saga. Nevertheless both of these versions appear to have shared a parent transcript of a later generation than that which was the basis for the Short Saga fragment. They are very similar in all but minor details, and they have the same shortcomings. They share a major hiatus in that they fail to record Bjarni Herjolfsson’s voyage and, in effect, Leif Eriksson’s as well.

Our fourth source, which I refer to as the Greenlanders Story, is a special case. Although the surviving copy of it also forms part of the Flateyjarbok collection, it was not associated with the Short Saga in the Flateyjarbok and apparently bears no relationship to it. Neither does it appear to be a lineal descendant of a single ancient oral saga, as do the other three transcripts. Instead it is apparently a compendium in its own right, a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century reconstruction of the western voyages based on, and including some substantial sections of material from a variety of sources. Its author seems to have put together the material at his disposal and, finding it inadequate, to have himself supplied the missing links in order to produce a logical sequence. In so doing he was only anticipating what several hundred scholars have attempted to do since his time.

We do not know what his sources were. He may have drawn some elements from the vellum ancestor of the Short Saga, although he was evidently not familiar with the Erik the Red Saga and the Karlsefni sagas or with their immediate common ancestor. However, he did have access to information which is not to be found in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas. His account of Leif Eriksson’s expedition, contrived as it certainly is in its preliminary parts, is the only real account of that famous voyage to survive into our times. Thanks to the Greenlanders Story we are able to fill in the second of the two major lacunae in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, the first being the story of Bjarni Herjolfsson, which is supplied by the Short Saga.

The portion of the Greenlanders Story which deals with Leif contains the one major sequence which seems to be derived more or less in toto from an ancient source. For the rest the author seems to have had only fragments, vague reports and possibly some badly corrupted remnants of oral tradition to draw upon. His account of the post-Leif voyages is sequentially impossible—nevertheless it contains a good many morsels of valuable information which are not to be found in the other sources. Almost invariably these snippets throw special light upon the part played by the Greenlanders in the western voyages, and this is particularly helpful to us since we suspect that in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas a good part of the original references to the Greenlanders may have been edited out.

These three versions all seem to suffer from bias; only the Short Saga appears to be reasonably free from it. I have examined the evidence supporting this conclusion at some length in Appendix M and have concluded that the Greenlanders Story reflects the Greenlanders’ point of view in general and that of Leif Eriksson’s descendants and supporters in particular; while the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas do the same partisan service for the Icelanders in general, and for Thornfinn Karlsefni in particular. The Greenlanders Story may actually have been the work of a Greenlander (in which case it would be one of the very few Greenlandic works to have survived the disappearance of the Greenland settlements) as opposed to the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, which were transcribed by Icelandic scribes for Icelandic owners. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Icelanders of the fourteenth century may even have taken liberties with the original texts to the extent of deliberately omitting the section of the Old Erik Saga which dealt with the voyages of Bjarni and Leif.

Although the problems of coordinating the two conflicting versions are many, they can be resolved. When this has been done we find that we have a surprisingly complete account of all the western voyages from Erik the Red’s first visit to Greenland, to the final return of Freydis Eriksdottir from the doomed Vinland colonizing venture.

Authenticity of the Sagas

The accuracy and reliability of the saga material has been closely scrutinized by competent scholars, and they are generally in agreement that these old documents may be relied upon as being the authentic stuff of history, although errors in detail certainly do occur. Some moderns find it hard to believe that an account which originated nearly a thousand years ago could have survived into our time as anything more than a vague and much corrupted myth; but when we examine how the saga tales survived we find it easier to accept their essential authenticity.

The transcripts of the saga with which we are concerned were fixed in their existing physical form not more than three or four centuries after the events which they record took place. Consequently they have been subject to change and alteration during less than half of their total history. The active transmission period itself falls into two parts. From the date of the Old Erik Saga’s composition, which was contemporary with the events described, it was preserved by professional saga tellers and transmitted orally by them for a period which would not have been much in excess of a hundred years before being committed to parchment. During this century there was, in effect, no literacy in Greenland and very little in Iceland; and the phenomenal skill of the saga men in preserving and transmitting the oral traditions and history of their people would still have been in a highly developed state. Many studies have been made of the ability of illiterate peoples to transmit oral history accurately over long periods of time, and these show that the chances of any significant corruption taking place in a century or less are very small. A hundred years could have been bridged by only two or three generations of saga men, so that there need not have been more than two or three oral transmissions of it before it was first written down on vellum.

Unlike modern printed books, ancient vellum manuscripts tended to be long lived. They were originally produced by clerks (clerics: priests) of the Church, and each hand-written transcript required a great deal of work and was most expensive to make. Consequently it was treated as a treasure in its own right, quite apart from the enormous value which the learned men of the times put upon its contents. It was usually preserved in carefully guarded church archives although in Iceland, where literacy soon became widespread among the wealthy class, private ownership of vellums became fairly common. Such family-owned parchments were thought of as priceless heirlooms and were treated accordingly.

It is probable that no more than three generations of written transcripts intervened between the writing of the first vellum version of the Old Erik Saga and the production of those vellum recensions which survive into our times. In the case of the Short Saga fragment there may have been only a single intervening transcript generation.

When we consider these matters it should not surprise us to find that the sagas which recount the Norse western voyages are of a very high standard of accuracy.

Appendix B: The Ancient Weather

Climatic Conditions in the North Atlantic Region During The Period of the Norse Voyages

Prior to 3000 B.C. the whole of the region in which we are interested was under the influence of a great warming trend known as the period of Climatic Optimum. This was a time of warm, moist weather which saw the treeline advancing far to the north out over the now treeless tundra barrens of the Arctic, and which probably saw the summer disappearance of ice from the entire surface of the Arctic Ocean. From about 3000 B.C. until early in the Christian era there was a continuous overall deterioration in the weather, and it appears that about 500 B.C. there was a sudden sharp worsening of conditions which must have been almost catastrophic.

By the time Pytheas sailed north in 330 B.C. the arctic ice pack extended considerably farther south than it does today; thus there would have been nothing odd about his reported encounter with the polar pack only a day’s sail north of Iceland. Climatic conditions continued to be very bad until the fifth century A.D., with major cyclonic disturbances and cold, wet weather which would have hindered distant deep-sea voyaging during these centuries. However, during the fifth century the long-term adverse variation seems to have ended and an upswing toward a better climate began. By the beginning of the ninth century the improvement had become so marked that there was again little drift ice in the northern seas. Apart from being much warmer, the climate was also drier; there were fewer cyclonic storms, and there was a shrinkage of glaciers in Iceland and Greenland and on the Canadian Arctic Islands.

Once again there may have been little permanent ice in the Arctic Ocean; a condition which would have permitted exploratory (or accidental) voyages to proceed far to the north and which may have given rise to the persistent belief of later centuries in an ice-free Arctic Ocean which could be crossed en route to Cathay and the East. This belief motivated many arctic explorers, including Henry Hudson, and was not finally laid to rest until the failure of the Hayes Expedition in 1861.

This favorable long-term variation continued to produce an overall improvement in the northern climate until an optimum was reached at about the beginning of the eleventh century. This period has been named the Little Climatic Optimum and it lasted until the early thirteenth century.

Some of the characteristics of this period were described by the English meteorologists H. H. Lamb at the UNESCO Symposium on Climate Change held in Rome in 1961:

The arctic pack ice had melted so far back that the appearance of drift ice in waters near Iceland and Greenland south of 70 degrees north latitude was rare in the 8oo’s and 9oo’s A.D. and apparently unknown between 1020 and 1200 when a rapid increase in frequency began. . . . the annual mean temperatures [in southern Greenland] must have been 2 to 4 degrees C. above present values. It seems probable that sea temperatures in the northernmost Atlantic were up by a similar amount.

While an annual mean increase in temperature of only 2 to 4 degrees does not seem like much, it is more than sufficient to produce a major change in climatic conditions.

The Little Climatic Optimum with its relatively warm, storm-free weather and moderate precipitation was brought to an end by the beginning of an adverse variation which was destined to continue for five centuries and which brought about a severe deterioration in the north Atlantic climate. This deterioration was most pronounced between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. During this period the sea-water temperatures fell as much as 3 degrees C. below those of the Little Climatic Optimum. Thereafter, until about the mid-seventeenth century, there was a slight warming followed by another severe variation characterized by extremely cold winters, fierce cyclonic storms and heavy ice conditions which lasted until near the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then the north Atlantic region had been experiencing another warming trend.

It must be remembered that we have mentioned only the variations, or major cycles. But during the entire period under discussion there were innumerable short-term fluctuations, some of which climatologists have been able to pinpoint. For instance it is believed that there was a brief period around A.D. 1000 when stormy conditions prevailed. It is interesting to note that just prior to 1000 the sagas record a period during which there were such heavy gales that many voyages undertaken during those times came to grief.

Although the existence of the Little Climatic Optimum has been established, and the general conditions which it brought about are known, it is not so easy to describe in detail what the climate was actually like in Greenland and northeastern Canada during this period. In his book Climate Through the Ages (London, 1949), C. E. Brooks has drawn together most of the available information on Greenland’s climate during the period of the Norse occupancy. In his summing up he says:

When the country was colonized in the tenth century its climate was much more favourable than at present. . . . There was less ice than at present in the East Greenland Current and it is even possible that at first there was no ice at all: Baffin Bay seems to have been largely free of ice. . . . Toward the close of the twelfth century deterioration again set in and the ice conditions rapidly became very bad. The summer thaw became shorter and shorter and, about A.D. 1400, the ground became permanently frozen.

The archeological work of Dr. Paul Norlund in Greenland has produced some rather macabre evidence which demonstrates that the climate did deteriorate—in a very marked manner. Norlund excavated the Norse graveyard at Herjolfsness in 1921. At that time the ground of the graveyard thawed only to a depth of a few inches during the summer. But Norlund’s work showed that the level of the permafrost—ground which never thaws throughout the year—must have been steadily rising for a century or more before the Herjolfsness graveyard ceased to be used. He found the earliest coffins at a considerable depth, while the later ones were laid in increasingly shallow graves. The clothes found in many of the deep burials had been so well preserved by permafrost that they could almost have been put back into use. The fact that these graves had not been dug in permafrost in the first place was proved by the presence in the coffins of plant roots which could not have penetrated into frozen soil.

Norlund’s work proved conclusively that the South Greenland climate must have started to get colder after about 1200, and that the ground which at the time of the first burials could not have been frozen at all during the summer, gradually became permanently frozen to within a few inches of the surface.

Pollen research carried out by Knud Jessen in the vicinity of Gardar has revealed that certain species of small trees which became rare in Greenland in the later period of the Norse occupancy were much more abundant during the early period. Bog analysis in the Western Settlement by Dr. Johs. Iverson has revealed that there was an abrupt change in the character of the vegetation toward the end of the occupancy of that settlement (about 1325) consistent with what would have been expected from a period of colder weather. A zoologist, Dr. Degerbol, who examined extensive middens of animal bones at the Western Settlement, found the skeletal remains of a number of species of sea mammals, including the ca’ing whale and the white-beaked dolphin, whose range is restricted to much warmer waters than those which are presently to be found off Greenland. Geographers have shown that the outer edges of the Greenland Ice Cap have advanced closer to the coast than they were in the early period of the Norse occupancy, and archeologists have confirmed that a number of the ancient Norse farm-sites would not have been habitable if the glacial ice conditions of modern times had prevailed at the period when they were settled.

The sagas themselves make no mention of ice as a navigation hazard until late in the thirteenth century, after which there are frequent references to pack ice being encountered in northern waters. It has been argued that the voyage of Thorgisl Orrabeinsfostri, which took place about 997, came to grief because of pack ice encountered on the east Greenland coast. However, a careful reading of the saga makes it plain that this was not the case.¹

The detailed changes in climate in Labrador and Newfoundland are not so well documented because there has been little field work done in these regions as yet. But there is clear evidence that forest growth in southern Labrador, and in all regions of Newfoundland, has changed dramatically both in kind and in quantity over the past eight centuries. Pollen analysis from Labrador bogs and from points on the periphery of the region reveal that during the Little Climatic Optimum the range of many species of trees extended well to the north of their present limits. Hardwoods such as oak, which in eastern Canada are now largely restricted to southern Ontario, were found in relative abundance north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The limit of several coniferous species extended a hundred to several hundred miles farther north than it does at present. The northern range of hemlock, for example, was about two hundred miles to the north of its present limits.

Studies of the treeline in Ungava and in other parts of the Canadian eastern Arctic show marked evidence of a retreat which has allowed the open tundra to push southward during the last few centuries by more than a hundred miles in many places.

Historical records of Newfoundland climatic conditions may be properly said to have begun with the saga accounts of the Norse voyages to the west. From these it appears that the Newfoundland climate at about 1000 A.D. was more temperate than it is now, which is in accord with the Greenland findings. Records from the early colonial period show that the climate then was still considerably better than now. A letter from John Guy, who established a settlement in Conception Bay in 1610, says in part: “the doubt that have been made of the extremity of the winter season in these parts of Newfoundland are found by our experience causless; and that not only may men safely inhabit here without the need of stove, but navigation may be made to and fro from England to these parts at any time of the year.”

Captain Winne, or Wyn, writing in 1622, says: “The winter in Newfoundland is short and tolerable, continuing only in January, February and part of March ... neither was it so cold here the last winter as in England the year before; I remember but three several days of hard weather indeed, and they not extreme neither; for I have known greater frosts and far greater snows in our own country [England].”

Examples of places which at the present time have climates comparable to those of Greenland and Newfoundland in the tenth century are difficult to choose, because the local climate of any area is conditioned by too many specific influences such as the duration of daylight, the effect of prevailing winds, relation of exposed sea coasts to interior zones, and the effect of ocean currents. However, we can probably obtain a workable mental image of what weather conditions were like in southwest Greenland in 1000 A.D. if we think of it as having had a climate rather similar to that of the present-day Bergen coastal districts of Norway, but with a lighter rainfall and snowfall; while the climate of Newfoundland in the tenth century was probably much like that of west coastal Scotland, although with a greater amount of summer sunshine.

The intervening oceanic waters were much warmer than now, and the incidence of drift ice much reduced. In fact drift ice probably consisted of no more than seasonal fiord and channel ice formed in the high Arctic each winter, and more or less completely melted before summer was very old. The polar vortex of air circulation was apparently much reduced from its present size, and there were fewer big storms as a result, so that there would have been a higher incidence of clear weather and of the good visibility which was so important to Norse navigation.

Appendix C: Ancient Sea Levels

Harbor Sea Levels and Coastlines, in Norse Times, as These Relate to the Westward Voyages

The question of whether there has been any important change in sea levels between the tenth century and the present has loomed large in many commentaries dealing with the saga voyages. A number of authors who have been unable to locate suitable harbors for the Norse explorers in the areas they believed to be identifiable with Vinland and Straumfiord have explained this difficulty by assuming that the sea level has changed so radically that the harbors no longer exist.

Variations in apparent sea level are due to one of two factors, or to a combination of both. The land itself may have been rising or sinking, or the amount of free water in the oceans may have been changing due to the enlargement or shrinkage of great areas of glacial ice. Since the end of the last major glaciation and the retreat and disappearance of most of the continental glaciers, there has been little change in the volume of free water in the oceans, but there have been major changes in the level of some of those lands which were once covered by glacial ice.

Under the weight of the vast overburden of ice most of the glaciated lands were depressed, or “sank,” well below their preglacial levels. When the ice burden was removed, these lands began to rebound. The rebound process was, and is, an extremely complex one that is still taking place. The amount of rebound which has so far occurred varies from several hundred feet in some parts of the central arctic regions, to as little as a foot or two in areas along the southern fringe of the once glaciated region. Furthermore, the amount of rebound varies according to the landforms, so that some mountainous areas which were not so thickly covered by the ice show less rebound than do some low, plains areas. In other cases this situation is reversed. The rate of rebound also fluctuates without apparent rhyme or reason. The land appears to lift in stages and at erratic intervals. Relatively sudden uplifts of from several to as much as a hundred feet appear to have taken place followed by long periods when there was little or no rebound.

Because there are so many factors involved, and because the rate and degree of uplift is never constant even in one area, let alone between different areas, it is impossible to do as some authors have done and postulate a standard rate of change in sea level over many hundreds, or even thousands of years. Tectonic experts have concluded that while there was some rebound on the northeastern seaboard of the United States and in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, much of this was offset by the eustatic effect of the increase in the volume of free water following upon the melt of the major glaciers; thus they conclude that there has been no significant change in sea levels in these regions during the past thousand years.

The coasts of Newfoundland show a mild degree of rebound during the past millennium, but there is no agreement among the experts as to how much this amounts to. One fact is indisputable; the emergence of the Newfoundland coast has been highly erratic—a series of upward jerks followed by long pauses.

To complicate matters there is evidence that “tipping” of parts of Newfoundland has occurred in conjunction with the general rebound, so that some areas have actually been depressed slightly, bringing about a local rise in sea level. This effect is particularly noticeable in the Trinity and Conception Bay regions, where there is evidence that postglacial drowning has taken place. On the whole, however, it is thought that sea levels in this part of Newfoundland have undergone no important change during the past thousand years.

The Great Northern Peninsula shows evidence of a very strong degree of emergence. In the region of Hare Bay the land has lifted as much as two hundred feet, but most of this rebound evidently took place soon after the disappearance of the ice overburden and there is no evidence that there has been much change during the last millennium. Geologists have not as yet been able to obtain much exact data about the changes which have taken place in this region since Norse times, but there is another source from which we can obtain a comparison between sea levels then and now.

The examination of a number of Dorset sites which are known to have been occupied prior to A.D. 1000, and probably not much earlier than 400 B.C., demonstrates that there cannot have been any very marked change in sea levels during the past two thousand years along the coasts of the great Northern Peninsula.

A number of these sites, including Englee on the east coast and Parsons Pond on the west coast, lie between ten and twenty feet above present high-tide levels. They are often on exposed and open coasts and are therefore subject to the effects of abnormal storm seas. In the case of one of the Englee sites, houses were built and occupied at a height of only seven feet above present spring high-tide levels on a shelving beach wide open to the eastward.

These sites could not have been occupied if the sea level at the time of occupancy had been much above present levels. Most other Dorset sites which have been examined, including the Port au Choix site, also suggest by their location and orientation that when they were established and occupied the sea levels could not have been notably higher than they are at present.

On the other hand there is evidence, both from folk sources and from finds of French artifacts on beaches, that there has been an uplift of from one to two feet in the St. Anthony-Quirpon region during the past two hundred years. But it appears that this has been the result of a relatively abrupt local “jump” and there are no grounds for assuming that this uplift ought to be interpreted as meaning that the rebound has been taking place at the steady rate of a foot every century since A.D. 1000.

Although the data are certainly incomplete, it seems safe to conclude that any sea-level changes which may have taken place along those portions of the Newfoundland coast visited by the Northmen are not significant in terms of the harbors and havens which the Norse may have used, and which still exist into our times.

Appendix D: Norse Geological Concepts

In order to make sense out of the surviving fragments of the history of the Norse voyages to the west, we must be able to visualize the northwestern regions as the Norse saw them.

Our present concept of those regions has developed through many centuries of exploration culminating in a century or more of increasingly sophisticated scientific techniques which have given us what we believe to be a correct idea of the shape and position of the northern lands and seas. It should be obvious that our ideas of how this-part of the world looks, as we have described it on charts and maps and globes, would be totally foreign to an eleventh-century Norseman; but it is surprising how many authors, in their attempts to reconstruct the Norse voyages, have persisted in viewing the ancient world through modern eyes.

In Part I of this appendix I present a picture of the northern regions as I believe the Norse saw them. In Part II, I examine the evidence which substantiates the reconstruction.

I: How the Norse Saw Their World: A Reconstruction of How the Atlantic World Looked to the Norse Voyagers

To begin with, the Norse never did envisage Greenland as an island, nor even as the separate geographical entity which we know it to be. This should not make us feel superior, since it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that we were able to establish the fact that Greenland really was an island.

Neither did the Norse think of Greenland or of the more westerly countries adjacent to it as huge land masses. Their contact with all the western lands was peripheral in the strict meaning of the word.

They sailed along the coasts, farmed near the coasts, and hunted and fished off the coasts. They appear to have had no interest in the interior regions far from the sight and sound of the familiar sea. It is unlikely that they even speculated much about what lay behind the coastal regions, for there was nothing there to attract their interest. So far as they knew and believed, the interior regions were unfit for human habitation. They were a kind of amorphous void in which mythical and inhuman creatures dwelt.

When they first visited Greenland, the Norse apparently believed they were dealing with a number of independent “lands” or “islands,” although these discoveries actually represented points on an ill-defined section of the east Greenland coast. Probably well before Erik the Red made his first voyage west, many of these “islands” had come to be linked to one another as a result of Norse coasting voyages between them. Thus a linear concept of the country which was eventually to be known to the Norse as Greenland was taking shape in the form of a narrow strip of coast whose northern and southern terminations remained unknown.

Erik’s voyage during the years between 981 and 984 resulted in the unrolling of an immense new stretch of this littoral ribbon-world. He established that there was a continuous coast running from Angmagssalik southward around Cape Farewell and then northward to the vicinity of Melville Bay. In common with many relatively recent explorers, Erik concluded that Baffin Bay was closed at its northern end and consequently formed what the Norse called a hafsbotnin, a sea-bottom-bay.¹ Since Erik had previously discovered a stretch of coast (the east coast of Baffin Island) on the western side of this hafsbotnin he would have concluded, reasonably enough, that the ribbon-country which he had followed north to Melville Bay turned west, then south again, and therefore was continuous with the coast he had discovered to the west.

As the Norse saw it, the result of this voyage was the discovery of a great sea-bay fringed by a strip of land. They were a maritime-oriented people, and this was the natural conclusion for them to arrive at; whereas we would have been inclined to think of the discovery as consisting of several discrete lands which were separated from each other by a big bay. This is, of course, how we actually do envisage this region today.

Subsequent voyages throughout the period of the Norse occupancy of Greenland extended and confirmed the original concept. Although the Norse apparently noticed the existence of certain large inlets such as Jones Sound and Lancaster Sound far to the northwest, they would have had no way of knowing that these were anything other than very deep fiords extending for a greater distance in from the coastal strip than they had any desire, or need, to explore.

The odds were heavily against their ever making the discovery that the land we call Greenland was separated from the rest of North America by the narrow strait which begins at Smith Sound; and that the western coastal strip of their Greenland actually comprised the eastern shores of two vast islands which we know as Ellesmere and Baffin islands.

By the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century the Norse concept of the geography of the northern and western regions had matured into a unified system which was destined to survive, at least in Iceland, until late in the sixteenth century. As was to be expected, it was a maritime-oriented system whose center was the Western Ocean (the North Atlantic Ocean). This central sea was thought to be entirely ringed around by a band of land which was pierced by one or more mighty sounds called ginungagap which connected the Western Ocean with the Mare Oceanum, a hypothetical outer Ocean which itself surrounded the entire terrestial world.

Beginning at Finnmarken in the extreme north of Norway, the coast of the Western Ocean was believed to bear northeasterly to the bottom of a great sea-bottom-bay which is to be identified with the modern Barents Sea. Bjarmaland—Russia—lay at the bottom of this bay. Swinging north then west from the foot of the bay, the coast ran westward in high latitudes until it became one with the northeast coastal regions of Greenland, thereby enclosing the Western Ocean from the north.

This is not such a ridiculous idea as it appears to be. The Norse seem to have been aware of the existence of Novaya Zemlya and of the intricate Spitzbergen Island archipelago. During the warm climatic era they may even have glimpsed Franz Joseph Land, and it would have been quite natural for them to conclude that those known, but rarely visited, “lands” to the north were connected with each other and were in fact various parts of a common coast.

Somewhere due north of Iceland, and roughly in the vicinity of latitude 80 degrees north, this west-running coast turned southward, forming another sea-bottom-bay behind which lay a country known as Riseland—the Land of Giants.² Although there was never any clear-cut point at which Riseland ceased and Greenland began, the division seems to have lain somewhere between Spitzbergen and Kronprins Christian Land, which is the northeasterly extremity of Greenland. The Gripla Geography, an ancient Icelandic text, speaks of a glacier lying so far north on the east Greenland coast that the Icelanders could not or did not visit it, and this may have been the Flade Isblink Glacier on Kronprins Christian Land, lying nine hundred nautical miles due north of Iceland.

From the vicinity of this glacier Greenland ran south and then southwest, past Iceland, to Cape Farewell. Gripla enumerates three more glaciers on this coast, and all are identifiable. One of these was two weeks rowing distance from Iceland (a rowing-day was the distance which could be covered by a six-oared boat rowed by six men, and was between 30 and 35 of our nautical miles). Two weeks’ rowing distance is equivalent to about 470 nautical miles, which would identify this second glacier as part of the ice-sheet lying behind Godthaab Gulf, just north of Scoresby Sound, an area visited by Icelandic polar bear and sea-mammal hunters. The third glacier was a week’s distance, or about 245 nautical miles from Iceland, and was Midjokul, or what is now called Kronprins Fredericks Glacier. The fourth was said to lie close to the Greenland Norse settlements, and was called Hvitserk. It appears to have been the glacier which fronts on Prins Christians Sound at the south tip of the island.

It will be apparent from the data which Gripla gives on these glaciers that, at least in his time, the east Greenland coast was known to the Norse along the whole of its length.

At Cape Farewell, or Hafhverf as it was called, Greenland turned west and then north, and the 450-mile distance from Hafhverf to the Godthaab fiords comprised the inhabited region, or the Greenland Settlements. But Greenland itself continued northward a long way beyond Godthaab, to swing west again past Melville Bay then south down the west side of Baffin Bay to reach its southwest termination on the shores of Hudson Strait.

The Norse seem to have realized that Hudson Strait was not just another fiord. The tremendous tidal currents which are to be met with at the mouth of the strait—they run as high as seven knots—would have been evidence enough to convince any sea-going people that some huge body of water must lie to the westward. The Norse evidently concluded that this unknown sea must be Mare Oceanum and that Hudson Strait was ginungagap—a sound through which the Western Ocean communicated with the Outer Ocean.

South of this ginungagap, which made a natural boundary for southwest Greenland, lay a different country which included Helluland, Markland and Vinland. During the sixteenth century reports evidently reached Iceland that Newfoundland (Vinland to the Norse) was separated from America by a great strait (the Cabot Strait). Speculation then arose as to the possibility that this might be another ginungagap—but this all happened long after the period with which we are concerned.

The northern and northeastern Newfoundland regions seem to have been as far as Norse practical knowledge of the western lands extended. Icelandic theorists supposed that the Vinland coast continued south, then east, until eventually it linked up with the southwest coast of Africa, thus completing the enclosure of the Western Ocean from the south.

To sum up, the Norse conception of Greenland at about the end of the tenth century was of a narrow band of coastal lands fronting on the Western Ocean, and running from some indeterminate point well north of Iceland south, then north, then west, then south again down the east Baffin Island coast. This was the Norse Greenland; and this is how we must think of it if we are to understand the story of their western voyages.

We must also understand the Norse topographical nomenclature, which was largely based on whether or not a certain area was habitable. Thus the whole of Greenland, in their view, consisted of two primary divisions: the habitable parts, which they called bygdir, and the uninhabitable parts, called obygdir (ubygdir).

The Greenland bygdir eventually occupied the stretch of coast from just north of Cape Farewell to the Godthaab Bight. In later years this region was heavily populated at its two extremities. These were then known respectively as the Eastern Settlement and the Western Settlement (Ostri Bygd and Vestri Bygd). However, shortly before about 1000 Godthaab Bight seems not to have been settled at all although a Vestri Bygd did exist at that time. From evidence found in the Floamanna Saga account of the voyage of Thorgisl Orrabeinsfostri about 997, it is apparent that the name Vestri Bygd then belonged to the settlement on the group of fiords which make up the Ivitgut Bight and which lie due west of the Eastern Settlement and adjacent to it. As colonization pushed on to the north and west from Ivitgut, the name Vestri Bygd continued in use but came to include the Godthaab Bight. Eventually it seems to have referred exclusively to the Godthaab region, and the old Ivitgut settlement became known as the Mid Bygd, or Middle Settlement.

We learn from the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas that when Thorstein Eriksson married Gudrid, he went to take up residence on a farm at Lysufiord in the Western Settlement. Lysufiord was in the Godthaab Bight, and it looks as if this was the time when settlement of that region began, and as if Thorstein was one of the early settlers there. This would have been about the year 1000.

All the rest of Greenland consisted of obygdir; but the obygdir were themselves subdivided. There were deserts in the obygdir by which the Norse meant areas that were of no use to them for hunting, fuel-gathering, farming or any other purpose. There were also jokuls, which usually denoted glaciers but which also described snow-covered or ice-covered mountains. The obygdir also included the best hunting regions known to the Norse.

Greenland had three obygdir, all of them oriented from the settled area. The Ostri Obygd (eastern wilderness) encompassed most if not all of the east Greenland coast. The Nord Obygd (northern wilderness) extended northward from the settlements on the west Greenland coast at least as far as Uppernavik and may have come to include certain regions at the foot of Baffin Bay on Jones Sound and Ellesmere Island. The Vestri Obygd (western wilderness) originally seems to have meant only the coast of the Cumberland Peninsula, but the name may eventually have referred to most of the east Baffin Island coast.

It is important to note that few of the topographical names and geographical divisions were fixed in their final form at the time they were first bestowed. The scope and meaning of these names changed with the centuries. Some were replaced by other names, and some were lost. The Vestri Obygd is a particular case in point. Initially it seems to have been well known and to have served as a major sea-mammal hunting ground for the Greenland Norse; but as the centuries passed, knowledge of it began to dim.

Consequent upon the deterioration of climatic conditions which began early in the thirteenth century, the incidence of pack ice in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait increased to the point where direct voyages between Greenland and Baffin Island become extremely hazardous. Eventually the Baffin Pack dominated Davis Strait for much of the summer season, as it did again during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. At about the same period that drift ice was increasing, the cooling conditions would have begun to bring the sea-mammals southward down the west coast of Greenland and so into closer proximity to the Norse settlements. For these dual reasons the summer hunting parties gradually began to abandon the Baffin Island coasts and to conduct their sealing and whaling on the coasts lying northward. of the settlements—in the Nord Obygd.

After the early thirteenth century there are no further references to the Vestri Obygd. The lands lying due west of central Greenland, across Davis Strait, begin to take on a vague and even somewhat mythical character as direct knowledge of them faded. But they were never quite forgotten, and to the end of the occupation of Greenland by the Norse colonists, they were apparently considered to be an integral part of Greenland, even though they came to be known by such names as Furdustrandir and Greater Helluland.³

The loss of the name Vestri Obygd had important historical repercussions. Scribes engaged in transcribing the Icelandic records after the thirteenth century were sometimes confused by references in ancient manuscripts to a “Vestri Obygd” about which they themselves evidently had no knowledge. There seem to have been a number of occasions when these scribes undertook to correct what they presumably thought was a clerical error by deleting the letter “O” (or “U”) thus changing the name to Vestri Bygd, thereby initiating a number of confusions which have baffled and misled scholars ever since.

II: The Evidence Upon Which the Reconstruction is Based

The first reference to a land lying west of modern Greenland is found in the account of the first Norse voyage west of Cape Farewell—the voyage of Erik the Red. The reference is tantalizingly brief, but then the whole of the surviving account of Erik’s three-year expedition to Greenland can be set up in fifteen or twenty lines of type.

That summer [the first full summer he spent in Greenland] Erik explored the Vestri Obygdir, remaining there a long time and giving many local names there.

This is a succinct statement, but its meaning appears unmistakable. Nevertheless all but two or three of the authors who have commented on Erik’s voyage have insisted that the Western Obygdir must, of necessity, be located on the west coast of modern Greenland. They have concluded that it was impossible for Erik to have anticipated his son Leif in reaching North America proper, and they have put forward many arguments to convince us that Erik could not have crossed Davis Strait.

In the first place they say that because what we now call Greenland was completely uninhabited when Erik visited it, it would have been inevitable that he should have referred to its western coast as the Western Obygdir.

In taking this stand they ignore the fact that the saga account of Erik’s voyage refers to other localities he visited by names which were not established until after the Norse settled Greenland. Thus the saga says: Erik passed the first winter at Eriksey near the middle of the Eastern Settlement. Furthermore, the history of the name Vestri Obygd shows that it was in use after Greenland was fully settled from Cape Farewell north to Godthaab, and after the remainder of the west coast north of Godthaab had been given the general name of Nord Obygd.

It is clear from the saga accounts that Erik spent his first full summer exploring the Vestri Obygdir, from which we know that it must have been a land of some considerable extent. The saga then goes on to say that during his second summer he explored north to Snaefells, which has been satisfactorily identified as the glacier region north of Uppernavik on the west coast of modern Greenland. Thus if we are to accept a west Greenland location for the Vestri Obygdir we must believe that Erik spent two full summers exploring the west coast of Greenland. This is not impossible, but it seems improbable.

One other argument remains to be disposed of. It has to do with the confusion which has arisen because the Greenland Norse named their two major centers of habitation the Eastern Settlement and the Western Settlement. The historians and archeologists who set out during the nineteenth century to find the sites of the Norse settlements, went looking for them on the east and west coasts of present-day Greenland. When they eventually found the Eastern Settlement (Ostri Bygd) on the southwest coast, and the Western Settlement (Vestri Bygd) far to the northwest of that again, they and many who have followed them appear to have suffered from a bad case of disorientation.

One of the results was to convince some authors that when the Icelandic sources said “west” they may just as well have meant north,” and when they said “east” they may as easily have meant “south.” From this they have gone on to deduce that when Erik sailed north up the Greenland coast he thought he was sailing west, and therefore the Vestri Obygd was on the west coast of Greenland.

The truth of the matter is that the original Vestri Bygd really was west of the Ostri Bygd. Proof of this is to be found in what we are told in the Floamanna Saga about Thorgisl Orrabeinsfostri’s adventures (for the full account see Chapter 13). While Thorgisl was at the Eastern Settlement a polar bear appeared and caused havoc among the sheep of the two settlements which in approximately 997 constituted settled Greenland. The men of both Eastern and Western settlements got together and put up a bear bounty, which Thorgisl claimed when he had killed the bear. A little later he found some of his runaway slaves in the Western Settlement when he went there to collect the bounty. It is obvious that these two settlements must have been adjacent, and that one polar bear could not have been harrying the flocks at Godthaab and in the Julianehaab region at the same time. Since the Ivitgut settlement was adjacent to the Eastern Settlement, and lay due west of it, we have no hesitation in identifying it as the original Vestri Bygd. Furthermore there is no evidence of any sort to show that the Godthaab Vestri Bygd was in existence until about 1000.

The Ivitgut settlement has always posed something of a puzzle to Greenland historians. Aage Roussel, writing in the Arctic Encyclopedia, suggests that it might have been the first Norse refuge in Greenland since it has no church ruins and the farm ruins are small and crude. They show few of the architectural developments which took place over a period of several centuries in both the Godthaab and Julianehaab Bight settlements.

The solution to this problem would seem to be that the Ivitgut area, which was very poor pastoral country compared with the Julianehaab or Godthaab regions, was settled at an early date—before Christianity had taken hold—but that it was settled by second-wave immigrants who could not find land in the Julianehaab district. They moved west, perforce, and settled the Ivitgut region. When, at about A.D. 1000, a band of colonists decided to make the long voyage north to settle the Godthaab fiords, they were doubtless joined by many of the Ivitgut settlers. For a while the name Vestri Bygd continued to describe all the settlement sites west of the Eastern Settlement, but in the course of time the name came to identify only the major center of population, which was in the Godthaab region. When that happened, the more or less abandoned Ivigut region became known as the Mid Bygd, or Middle Settlement.

If Erik’s Vestri Obygd was not on the west coast of modern Greenland, where could it have been? It could have been, and I believe it could only have been, on the west side of Davis Strait.

That it did not include Labrador is established by the saga accounts of the Vinland voyages which show that this was unknown territory until it was glimpsed by Bjarni Herjolfsson in 985, and later explored and named Helluland by other voyagers.

This leaves Baffin Island; but Baffin Island has an eastern coastline almost 1000 miles long and we must narrow the field a little. The most likely location of Erik’s Vestri Obygd would seem to have been that portion of Baffin Island which lies closest to Greenland, and this is the Cumberland Peninsula.

This identification is strongly supported by certain passages in the saga accounts of the Vinland voyages, notably the description of the outbound journey of Thorfinn Karlsefni, where it is stated that the Vinland voyagers sailed from the Eastern Settlement to the Vestri Bygd (Obygd) and from there to Bjarney (Bear Island). From Bjarney they sailed south for two days and sighted Helluland (Labrador).

In some of the recensions of the Erik the Red and the Thorfinn Karlsefni sagas, the reading is Vestri Bygd. But in at least two versions, one of which is thought to be directly derived from the narrative verse of the ancient oral saga, the reading is Vestri Obygd. Thus, according to the Gronlands Historiske Mindesmaerker, the line runs: Sigdlu peir sidan undan landi i obygdir vestri [Sailed they thereupon from land to the western uninhabited country]. A second version reads: Thereupon they sailed from land to the western uninhabited country.

There appears to be no acceptable reason why the saga narrator should have bothered to note that Karlsefni sailed from Eriksfiord to the Western Settlement at Ivitgut (or even Godthaab) as part of the sailing directions for the route to Vinland. Since no other sailing instructions are given for the voyage between Eriksfiord and Bjarney Island, I deduce that this must have been a well-established route. I also note that all the sources state that Karlsefni sailed “from land” to reach the Vestri Bygd (Obygd), and this describes an open-water passage, not a coasting voyage, which a journey to either Ivitgut or Godthaab would have been.

If the reading of Vestri Bygd is accepted it then becomes necessary to place Bjarney Island somewhere on the west coast of Greenland but at a point from which one can reach Helluland by sailing south for two doegr, or about 240 nautical miles. There is actually no point from which one can do this; but some authors, assuming that the Vestri Bygd meant the Godthaab fiords, have concluded that Bjarney must have been Disco Island, which lies 700 miles north of Eriksfiord. A voyage to Disco seems like an extraordinary side jaunt (a total of 1400 miles) in the wrong direction for an expedition which was sailing, as Karlsefni was, to a place lying a long way south of Eriksfiord.

The identification of Bjarney with Disco, or with any other point on the west Greenland coast, poses an insurmountable problem of another kind. The saga says that Karlsefni sailed south from Bjarney for two doegr (240 nautical miles) and reached Helluland. Two doegr in the southern airt from any point between Cape Desolation and Disco would have taken Karlsefni into the middle of Davis Strait or the Labrador Sea—and nowhere else.

If, however, the correct reading is Vestri Obygd, there is no problem. Karlsefni would have crossed Davis Strait presumably at its narrowest point, which lies between Cape Burnhill in Greenland and Cape Dyer on the Cumberland Peninsula. Having arrived in the Vestri Obygd he would then have coasted south to Bjarney, which (as we shall show later) was probably Leopold Island, off Cape Mercy. From there he had only to sail for two doegr almost due south in order to reach Helluland—the northern portion of Labrador.

It is significant that when Karlsefni’s expedition left Eriksfiord it was accompanied by a man named Thorhall the Hunter. The sagas say that Thorhall had been with Erik the Red for a long time, serving as his hunter during the summer and as his farm overseer in winter. It is specifically stated that Thorhall had an extensive knowledge of the obygdir. The Erik the Red Saga states that he went on the Karlsefni expedition because of this knowledge, from which we conclude that he shipped as a pilot. A knowledge on Thorhall’s part of the Nord Obygdir would have been of no particular value to the expedition; but if he had possessed a knowledge of the Vestri Obygdir his presence would have been of great value. Thorhall probably did have this knowledge, having doubtless accompanied Erik on his first voyage to Greenland when, as the sagas tell us, Erik spent a summer exploring the Vestri Obygdir and presumably finding and “bestowing a name” on Bjarney.

There are a number of independent references in other sources to lands lying west of Greenland which are to be identified with Baffin Island, or the Vestri Obygdir.

In the Historia Norwegiae, written in the second half of the thirteenth century, we find this statement: “On the other side of the Greenlanders, to the northwest, hunters have encountered a dwarf-sized people whom they call Skraelings.”

The Cumberland Peninsula lies northwest from the settled parts of Greenland, and it is known to have been occupied by Thule culture Eskimos as early as the twelfth century.

In the archives of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen there is a manuscript known as AM 770c. It is a copy of an ancient Icelandic geography dating to the early fourteenth century. In part it reads:

On the west side of the great ocean [the Western Ocean] which reaches from Spain and which . . . spreads among the lands, are named in a northward direction first Vinland the Good; next Markland is named still to the northward; then are obygdir where the Skraelings live; then there are still obygdir as far as Greenland; and then there are two bygds, the West Bygd and the East Bygd. Beyond that there are hafsbotnar [sea-bottom-bays], jokuls and obygdir which turn toward Halgoland.

In this account we can easily trace the westward lands north from Vinland to Skraeling Land, which was a name applied to Helluland in the twelfth century, then “still obygdir as far as Greenland,” which would mean inhabited Greenland and include the Vestri Bygd and the Ostri Bygd. The concluding section of the account deals with the Eastern Obygdir and the land-ribbon running across the top of the Norwegian Sea to connect eventually with Norway.

The Gripla Geography gives much the same description but in reverse and with some variations:

North of Norway lies Finnmarken. Then the land turns northeast to Bjarmaland . . . from Bjarmaland there are obygdir lying across the north to Greenland. In front of these lie sea-bottom-bays. Then the land turns southwest and there are glaciers [on it]; and both fiords and islands lie in front of these glaciers [here the four glaciers which we have already mentioned are located on the east Greenland coast] the last is nearest the Settlements and is called Hvitserk. Then the land turns north [here follows a description of some of the settled fiords and an enumeration of Greenland churches]. Now is to be told what lies over opposite [settled] Greenland. That land is called furdustrandir. There the cold is so intense that it is not habitable as far as men know. South of it lies Helluland which is called Skraelingarland. Thence it is but a short distance to Vinland the Good, which some suppose is a projection from Africa. Between Vinland and Greenland is Ginungapap⁴ which comes out of the sea which is called Mare Oceanum and which surrounds the world.

The Gripla account, which was written after deteriorating climatic conditions had resulted in the isolation of most of Baffin Island from Greenland, does not mention the Vestri Obygdir by name, but speaks instead of furdustrandir. This word simply means remarkable coasts, and in this particular usage it may have been intended to emphasize the remarkable climatic differences which then existed between the Baffin Island and west Greenland coasts.

Four short fragments, evidently drawn from some common source, are also worth noting. These are AM 736, AM 764, AM 192 and AM 194. Two of them will serve to represent the group.

[AM 192] From Bjarmaland extend obygdir northward until the beginning of Groenland. South of Groenland is Helluland, then is Markland; thence it is not far to Vinland the Good. . . .

[AM 194] South of Greenland is Helluland, then is Markland; thence it is not far to Vinland the Good.

These fragments establish the fact that the three western lands, Helluland, Markland and Vinland, lay south of Greenland. Since none of them lie south of modern Greenland it is to be concluded that the Norse Greenland included the east coast of Baffin Island.

One other major source remains to be mentioned. This is a transcript made by the Icelander Bjorn Jonsson in the mid-seventeenth century, from an ancient (perhaps twelfth-century) Icelandic vellum which was a fragment of a larger document, since lost. The parchment fragment was evidently much damaged and difficult to decipher when Jonsson copied it. It is known as the Graenlandia Vetus Chorographia and it has received scant attention from most scholars since it cannot be made to fit the theory that the Greenland of the early Norse was essentially the same as the land we now call Greenland. However, when it is analyzed on the assumption that eastern Baffin Island was a part of Greenland, it ceases to present any real difficulties. Since it bears largely on several aspects of our subject I reproduce it here in full with a line-by-line analysis.

Greenland turns toward the southwest. The first part of the standard description of the lands stretching westward from Europe is missing, and the text begins where Greenland turns southwest from about the latitude of Iceland.

Most southerly is Herjolfsness and next to the west Hvarfsgnipa. The most southerly district in what is now modern Greenland is Herjolfsness. The most southerly place on the west side of Davis Straits is Hvarfsgnipa (Hvarf Mountain). The word Hvarf itself seems to have meant the “turning place.” There were several hvarfs in ancient Greenland, including one on the east Greenland coast not far north of Cape Farewell, which was the landfall for ships inbound from Norway and perhaps from Iceland. Another was apparently Cape Desolation, where ships turned north en route to the Godthaab district. Hvarfgnipa is to be looked for as a mountain where ships turn away from land. It is perhaps identifiable with the 3800-foot peak which stands just behind Cape Mercy at the south tip of the Cumberland Peninsula. Or, possibly, with a peak on the Cape Dyer headland.

There went Erik the Red the farthest and is then said to have gone to the bottom of Eriksfiord. Hvarfsgnipa was the farthest west reached by Erik during the summer he spent exploring the Vestri Obygdir. After he had completed that exploration he returned to the east coast of Davis Strait, where he wintered before sailing north to what he believed to be the bottom of the inlet we call Baffin Bay. The Davis Strait-Baffin Bay inlet seems also to have been called Hrafnsfirth at one time. However, both these names were eventually transferred to the two fiords in the Julianehaab Bight which were settled by Erik and Hrafn respectively.

On the east side where the land is called Hafverf is Star then is Spalsund, then Drangey. On the east side of the bay (Eriksfiord–Davis Strait), opposite the land where Hvarfsgnipa lies, is a place called Hafverf, which means “sea distance.” Hafverf is apparently a point near Cape Farewell from which sailing distances to Iceland and to Europe were calculated. Star is a homestead at the junction of five fiord arms just north of Cape Farewell. Spalsund is probably Prins Christians Sound, which connects with Star and through which ships bypassed the difficult and dangerous rounding of Cape Farewell. Drangey is an unidentified homestead or island in the southern archipelago.

Then is Solvedal. It is built farther east. Then Tolafiord, then Melrackness. Solvedal may be a farmstead the ruins of which were found at the present site of Igdlorssuit. Tolafiord is one of the several fiords east and south of Herjolfsness. Melrackness is a cape in that area. Beginning with Hafverf, the author has now dealt with the geography lying south of Herjolfsness.

Then is Herjolfsfiord church, then Hellisey and Helliseyarfiord. Then Ketilsfiord, two churches, then Hrakbjarney, Lundey, Syllenda of Eriksfiord, then Alptafiord, Suglufiord church, Hrafnsfiord. These are all known localities (most of which have been identified by archeologists) between Herjolfsfiord and Hrafnsfiord, which lies on the south edge of the main settlement area in the Julianehaab Bight. Syllenda of Eriksfiord appears to be a reference to the old name for Baffin Bay-Davis Strait, since it can have no connection with the later-day Eriksfiord lying deep inside the Julianehaab Bight. Thus this Syllenda may have been named during Erik’s exploratory voyage and is sited on the original Hrafnsfiord-Eriksfiord inlet (Davis Strait-Baffin Bay) as opposed to some other place of the same name which was located elsewhere, perhaps in Iceland.

The Sliettufiord goes out of Hrafnsfiord; Hornafiord, Ofundfiord, then there is Bishop’s seat, then comes one to the end of Eriksfiord, then Eriksfiord church; from it goes Austkarsfiord church, Halfgrimsfiord, Hvalseyarfiord. H ... F H ... F H ... F from Dryness, then Isafiord, thence goes Utibliksfiord, then Strandafiord. The author has here enumerated most of the fiords of the Julianehaab Bight; from south to north, with a mention of the Bishop’s seat which was at Gardar, and of Eriksfiord and the church built there by Erik’s wife. The names of three of the fiords seem to have been indecipherable on the original vellum, and Bjorn represented them by H ... F. Isafiord appears to have been the last fiord actually in the bight. Utibliksfiord and Strandafiord probably lie under the lee of the Nunnarsuit Peninsula, whose westerly point is Cape Desolation.

Then the Midfiords are built nearest. Then one is called Kellufiord, another Dyrafiord, then Thorvaldsfiord, Steinsfiord, Bergthorsfiord. The Midfiords lie in the Ivitgut Bight, north of Cape Desolation, and separated by it from the Eastern Settlement. The author again lists the main fiords from south to north.

Then there is six days’ rowing in a six-oared boat with six men to Vestri Bygd. From the north limits of the Midfiords to the mouth of the Gothaab Bight, which contained most of the later-day Western Settlement homesteads, is about 180 nautical miles. The distance which could be covered by a six-oared boat in a day was a standard distance measurement representing between 30 and 35 of our nautical miles. Thus six such days represents a distance of 180–210 nautical miles or very nearly the correct distance between the Mid Bygd and the Vestri Bygd.

(Here are enumerated the fiords.) This is an interjection by Bjorn, who evidently found that the next section of the vellum was indecipherable. We know the names of some of these fiords (including Lysufiord) from other sources, but we do not know how far north the Western Settlement region extended. The author of the Chorography probably gave us this information, but damage to the ancient vellum has now deprived us of it. The text again becomes intelligible with the following phrase: Then is the Vestri Bygd from Lysufiord six days’ rowing. Up to this point there has been no difficulty in following the Chorography. But here, as a result of the loss of that section of the original which Bjorn Jonsson could not read, we come to what appears to be an insurmountable stumbling block. At any rate it has been so considered by most scholars.

Either Bjorn was able to decipher enough of the missing section to lead him to suspect that it was a list of the fiords of the Western Settlement or, which is more likely, he naturally assumed this was the case because this was how the author had treated the Eastern and Middle settlements. There is no reason to find fault with his judgment. But what are we to make of the statement that to the Western Settlement from Lysufiord, which itself lay in the center of the Godthaab Western Settlement, and was the most important and heavily settled of the fiords, is a distance of six days’ rowing, or between 180 and 210 nautical miles.

Did the author of the Chorography suddenly become nonsensical at this juncture? Or did Bjorn Jonsson miss more than just a list of the fiords of the Western Settlement? And, if he did miss something else, what was it?

To accuse the original author of having suddenly gone off the rails is ridiculous since up to this point he has demonstrated his ability to present a concise and accurate description of Greenland—a description which is quite unmatched for detail in any other source which we possess. The most reasonable conclusion open to us is that the indecipherable portion of the vellum contained something in addition to a list of the Western Settlement fiords.

What appears to be missing is an explanatory phrase, or word, preceding “Vestri Bygd” which either in its own right or by reference to a part of the indecipherable description of the Western Settlement, identified a locality which marked the limit of the Vestri Bygd district. Applying this as a working hypothesis, we read the phrase:

Then is the [limit of the] Vestri Bygd from Lysufiord six days’ rowing. By analogy with the author’s mention of Hafverf in the south and Hvarfsgnipa to the west of Greenland, we deduce that our hypothetical landmark would have been a prominent and easily recognizable feature which would have served as a good reference point from which directions could be given to other localities.

All we are actually told about this supposed landmark is that it lies six days’ rowing distance from Lysufiord. However, we know that it must lie toward the north. The author of the Chorography has already described the coast from Hafverf north to Godthaab Bight, and he would hardly refer back to a locality lying six days south of Lysufiord, which would take us back to the Mid Bygd. It could not lie west of Lysufiord, since a distance of even 210 nautical miles to seaward comes nowhere near the opposite land of Baffin Island, the nearest point of which lies 320 sea miles from the mouth of the Godthaab Bight.

A distance of 140 nautical miles in a direct line north from Lysufiord (or 175 nautical miles following the coast) brings us to the most prominent feature on the west coast of Greenland south of Disco Island. This is the Cape Burnill headland and the mountain behind it. The headland is in itself not spectacularly impressive, but just behind it a tongue of the inland ice cap thrusts out almost to the sea, and near its seaward tip looms a 7300-foot rock peak—the highest on the west Greenland coast.

From the crest of this mountain it is possible in clear weather, to see the land loom of a sister peak rising to a height of 7100 feet from behind Cape Dyer at the eastern extremity of Baffin Island. With the assistance of mirage effects—and mirages are common in these latitudes—modern observers have been able to see, with the naked eye, the loom of the glaciers which lie far behind Cape Dyer.

Can this be the lost locality which lies six days’ rowing distance from Lysufiord? It is so prominent a landmark that it must have been well known to the Greenlanders and the author of the Chorography would have been unlikely to omit it in his description of the Western Settlement district. It must certainly have had a name, and the name may still exist in the Icelandic sources.

In the oldest surviving version of the Old Erik Saga, the Short Saga, we are told that when Erik finished his exploration of the Vestri Obygdir he wintered at Holm, an island near Hrafnsgnipa (Hrafn’s Mountain). The following summer he sailed north from Holm “into Hrafnsfirth”⁵ until he thought he had reached the bottom of what was evidently Baffin Bay, near Snaefells. As we have shown in Chapter 5 this account refers to a voyage up the west coast of Greenland from the general vicinity of the Western Settlement, perhaps as far as Melville Bay.

Hrafn’s Mountain and the great peak behind Cape Burnill may well be one and the same place. We know from other sources that it was standard practice for Norsemen on voyages into unknown seas to take advantage of coastal mountains in order to gain an idea of what lay ahead of them. When Erik first sailed north from what was to become the Eastern Settlement, he would almost certainly have paused below the Cape Burnill peak in order to send some of his party to scale its crest. It is a made-to-order lookout and it is surprisingly accessible. From the crest on a clear day—and we assume they chose such a day—the observers would not only have been able to detect the presence of a glacier-capped land far to the west of them. They would also have been able to see that the coast they were following continued into the north for an indeterminate distance.

The man who climbed the mountain and who provided the information which suggested that Baffin Bay might be a great inlet could have been the same Hrafn who returned with Erik to Greenland in the settlement year of 985 and who took up residence near Erik at the fiord which came to bear his name. But before the settlement was made, and during the exploration voyage, it seems possible that the name Hrafnsfiord was bestowed by Erik on the sea-bottom-bay which was presumably discovered from the peak of Hrafnsgnipa.

Thence is six days’ rowing to Karlbuda, then three days’ rowing to Bjarney. Karlbuda means Karl’s Booth or Shelter, and can be taken as referring to a hunting camp as distinct from a permanent place of habitation. It probably belonged to one of the summer hunters who went off from the settlements each year in search of walrus, narwhals and other sea mammals which were not sufficiently numerous on the settlement coast. Bjarney means Bear Island, or an island where polar bears—the only kind present in these latitudes—were hunted.

Wherever Karlbuda was located, it could not, as we have already shown, have been six days from Lysufiord. It must therefore have lain six days from somewhere in the vicinity of the place we have identified as Hrafnsgnipa, either to the north or to the west.

If it was to the north it would have had to be in the vicinity of Disco Island, and Bjarney must then have lain three days farther north, or somewhere near the Umanak Peninsula. But we have already established, through our examination of the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, that Bjarney could not have been in the vicinity of Disco, but was almost certainly in the Vestri Obydgir of Baffin Island.

Let us now look west from Hrafnsgnipa. We find that it is 185 nautical miles, or six days’ rowing distance, from Cape Burnill to Cape Dyer on a crossing which enables voyagers to keep sight of land, either astern or ahead of them, throughout most of the passage if the weather is clear.

Cape Dyer is on the Cumberland Peninsula which for reasons enumerated elsewhere would have been a better hunting ground for the Norse of the tenth century than any part of the west Greenland coast south of Uppernavik. It seems clear that Karlbuda is to be looked for near Cape Dyer.

Bjarney lay three days from Karlbuda. It could not have lain to the north for this would make nonsense out of its use as a way-station during Karlsefni’s voyage for Vinland. Three days’ rowing south of Cape Dyer (105 nautical miles) takes us to Cape Mercy, the southeast termination of the Cumberland Peninsula, off which lies Leopold Island. Both Leopold Island and the whole eastern coast of the Cumberland Peninsula are still good polar bear country. Leopold Island meets all requirements for Bjarney and in addition provides a 2000-foot departure landmark for any vessel, such as Karlsefni’s, proceeding farther to the south.

Twelve days’ rowing around——ey Eisunes Adanes on the north side. With this mutilated sentence the surviving fragment of the Chorography comes to an end. But, imperfect as it is, we can perhaps make something out of this final passage. The missing word which ends in “ey” is the name of an island, and it may be Bjarney, although not necessarily so. Eisunes means Coal Point, and Adanes means Eider Duck Point. The twelve days’ rowing around may refer to Cumberland Sound, since the length of its coastline from headland to headland is roughly 380 nautical miles. To row around the sound and return to Leopold Island would consume about twelve days.

There are many capes on the north side of Cumberland Sound, and eider ducks nest on a number of them as well as on the islets lying nearby. There are also numerous deposits of soft coal on Baffin Island, and at least three have been reported from Cumberland Sound.

This is about all the Graenlandia Vetus Chorographia can tell us. We cannot complain, for it has told us a great deal.

Considering the quantity and quality of the evidence, it is hard to understand why so many commentators have resolutely closed their eyes to the likelihood that the Greenland Norse reached and explored part of Baffin Island very early in their history.

There is nothing particularly remarkable in such a feat. Men who could and did sail confidently from Norway to Iceland and Greenland would hardly have found the 185-mile-wide Davis Strait much of a barrier. Just as it was inevitable that the Europeans who reached Iceland should soon have found Greenland, so it was equally inevitable that the Greenlanders would soon have found Baffin Island.

That Erik the Red should have been the first to do so is a tribute to his daring and his energy; but there is nothing about such an exploit to place any strain on our credulity.

Appendix E: Norse Sea-going Ships

The Construction and Characteristics of the Ships Which Crossed the Western Ocean

The ships used by the western voyagers were trading vessels—knorrir as the type was called throughout the Scandinavian world. The knorr was a plebian relative of the aristocratic Viking longship, for both sprang from a common ancestry in the little clinker-built skiffs of the northern fiords whose origins are lost in the mute aeons of the stone ages. But while the longship developed as a swift and fearsome blade with which the raiding Vikings could let the blood of the coastal peoples of Europe, the knorr developed out of the need for a staunch, cargo-carrying ship which could endure the northern seas.

Longships were fit to terrify entire populations of landsmen, and their dragon-beaks could be thrust into the most protected bays, and even far up rivers running into the very heart of alien lands. But they were quite unfit to face the violence of the open sea where the only terror they could engender was in the hearts of their own passengers and crews. Countless Hollywood films, historical novels and even staid histories of the Viking era notwithstanding, the longship was a seafaring man’s abomination and was seldom voluntarily hazarded far from the comforting shelter of land except under conditions of dire necessity. Inordinately long and narrow and with almost no freeboard, the longship either broke her back or swamped if she met really heavy weather. Furthermore, longships’ crews were often composed of men who were better butchers than seamen. The Viking crews and their longships were well wed; both were shaped for and devoted to the arts of destruction; and had but little other purpose.

It was quite different with the knorr. She was a working ship, and her people were working men. They were sailors, perhaps the best sailors of their times, and their ships could hold their own with any sailing vessels of comparable size that have ever gone to sea.

Like the longship, the knorr was clinker-built, usually of thin oak planks lashed with withes to naturally curved timbers, and fastened to each other with soft iron rivets. She was double-ended, had a single mast and single square sail, and was steered by a side steering oar. There the resemblance ended. The knorrir which plied between Norway and Iceland, on to Greenland and finally to the coasts of North America had a much greater displacement than did the longships. Some were more than a hundred feet overall, and as much as ninety feet on the waterline. They were shallow built, but very beamy and with a good freeboard. They had cutwaters fore and aft and a long, if somewhat shallow keel which improved their sailing qualities when on the wind. They ranged between forty and eighty tons displacement, and could carry from twenty to forty tons of cargo on an ocean passage.

They were utilitarian ships, but they were still lovely to look at for their lines curved sweetly aft from the high stem post to the equally high afterpost; and they had about them a delicacy of appearance which today is found only in yachts. But they were by no means fragile. Their unique construction was designed to give them strength through suppleness rather than through a massive and rigid construction. Because the planks were only lashed to the frames, and because planks and timbers were made of thin and pliant wood, the knorr could “work,” as seamen say, which means that when she was under extreme stress she could twist and writhe like a living thing, easing out from under the sea’s hammer blows and giving when the strain grew unbearable. She was resilient, and very, very tough. Because she was shallow draft, light for her size, and with a broad beam, she kept the surface of the ocean like some great sea-fowl instead of driving through it as would a modern deep-hulled ship.

She was steered by means of a side rudder called the steer-board which was mounted on what has ever since been called the starboard side of the vessel. The tiller was brought in over the after gunwale at right angles to the center line of the ship so that it passed athwartship, enabling the steersman to push forward on it, or to haul back with the full power of both arms. This was an advantage which was lost when the stern rudder became popular. The side rudder had yet another advantage. It was pivoted at its mounting on the side of the ship so that a very deep, thin and therefore efficient blade could be used which, when the ship entered shallow waters, could be tilted up to clear the bottom. As a result of this arrangement knorrir could operate in as little as five feet of water and could enter almost any small cove or harbor, or they could be run right up on the shore, if it was sand or mud, with no danger of damaging the vital rudder.

Internally the hull was one big open hold with a small foredeck and afterdeck. A bailing well was provided abaft the mast, and another forward. Pumps were unknown then, and bailing was done by a man who stood in the well to fill a wooden bucket which his mate then swung up and overboard by means of a lever arrangement.

The single mast was placed just forward of midship and was very strongly stepped in a huge wooden fish. On big knorrir this mast was sixty feet long and stout in proportion. A wooden platform at the masthead was sometimes provided for the lookout.

The ship’s gear was simple, and mostly made of wood. A drum windlass was mounted just forward of the afterdeck and was used for hauling up the sail, by means of a halyard passing through a hole near the top of the mast; for bringing home the anchors; and—when set up taut—to turn the halyard into a backstay. Anchors were usually of the type known as kiliks, a framework of supple rods encasing a long, heavy stone and fitted with four wooden flukes. It is an intriguing fact that kiliks dating to 1200 B.C., excavated from a Danish peat bog, are identical in design and construction with kiliks in general use today in Newfoundland, Norway and other northern maritime countries.

Blocks for the running rigging were made of hardwood and were not fitted with sheaves but had smooth holes worked in them to allow the passage of the ropes, which in most cases were made of walrus hide, which is almost frictionless when wet or oiled.

Knorrir normally carried two ship’s boats. On deep-sea passages these were lashed upside down in a fore-and-aft position on top of the cargo, one forward of the mast and one abaft of it. The afterboat was generally a six-oared, clinker-built, scaled-down version of the parent ship twenty to thirty feet long. It could be rowed or sailed.

Since there was no decked-over hold, cargo was placed on the flooring and covered with tarpaulins made of hides. These were waterproofed with seal-tar (seal oil evaporated to the consistancy of thin, black treacle) or sometimes with butter. They were stretched over the ship’s boats, whose keels supported them in the same way a ridgepole supports a tent, and were lashed down in the scuppers on both sides of the vessel, leaving just room enough for a man to pass along close to the gunwales. The scupper holes which carried away the water that fell on the tarpaulins did not open out through the sides of the vessel but drained through the flooring into the bilges, from which the water had to be removed by bailing. Bailing was the bane of life aboard these ships, for they took a lot of spray, and sometimes solid seas as well.

The single immense squaresail was made of coarse woolen cloth to which strips of walrus or seal hide were stitched diagonally to hold it in shape. One or several rows of reef points were fitted and the sail could be reefed either by making the reef points fast to the yard or by lowering the yard and putting a reef into the loose-footed bottom of the sail. The foot of the sail was clewed down to pin-rails set between the projecting upper sections of the ship’s timbers; and the two sheets from the yardends were belayed to cleats on the afterdeck. Standing rigging consisted of one or more pairs of stays made fast below the gunwales with deadeyes. Parrels were used to hold both yard and sail to the mast.

The most unusual piece of sailing gear was the beitass. This was a removable pole which functioned rather like a spinnaker boom. Its heavy end was seated in a socket on the deck abeam of the mast, and the lighter end was fitted to the forward leech of the sail in order to keep it stretched and drawing when the ship was sailing on the wind. This point of sailing was called beita, from which modern sailors derive the term “beating” to windward.

It is an almost universal misconception that with their single big squaresail, Norse vessels could only run off before the wind. In fact they could and did sail to within five or six points of the wind, largely due to the employment of the beitass. Nor is this mere speculation. Twice during modern times replicas of early Norse ships have crossed the Atlantic. The first of these was a replica of the Gokstad ship—a tenth-century vessel found in a ship grave in Norway. She was of the type known as a karv, an intermediate form partway between the longship and the knorr, but not as seaworthy as the latter. Nevertheless this replica, built of similar materials and of the same construction as the original, sailed from Bergen on April 30, 1893, and reached Newfoundland safely on May 27. During the passage she encountered several severe storms and most of the passage was made against headwinds; but when she was reaching, with a favoring breeze, she was occasionally able to log a speed of 11 knots.

The other crossing was made in 1932 by a replica of a small knorr, 60 feet overall, with a 16-foot beam and a 3-foot draft. This little vessel, the Roald Amundsen, made her westward passage along one of the routes followed by Columbus, but she improved on Columbus’s best time by something over 30 per cent. Not content with this remarkable passage, her skipper, Captain Folgar, then sailed her back to Norway by way of Newfoundland. Using the beitass pole Folgar experienced no difficulty in sailing her within five points of the wind.

The skippers of both vessels—and they were men of wide experience in sailing ships—were full of praise for the sea-going qualities of the karv and knorr, and it is clear from an analysis of their logs that the replicas performed better than any known sailing vessels designed before the beginning of the nineteenth century, and of many which were designed after that date. Compared to the knorr, the lumbering, top-heavy monstrosities which carried Columbus, Cabot, Cartier and the Cortereals over the Western Ocean were sea-going death traps, as indeed the records prove they were, for the roster of these later-day ships which were lost on the Atlantic passage is legion.

Of course the knorr would not go to weather with the efficiency of a modern fore-and-after. Apart from the fact that she would not point so high, she tended to make more leeway, for despite her deep steering oar, which acted like a leeboard, she had little hold on the water. Nevertheless when running free, or reaching, a knorr could have held her own with some of the most famous of our latter-day banking schooners.

Knorrir even had auxiliary power in the form of heavy sweeps, usually three pairs forward and two or three pairs aft. With a man standing to each sweep the ship could be propelled at two or three knots in calm waters, and this speed could be increased by using the afterboat to tow the parent ship.

If these vessels had any major defect, it lay in their accommodations. They were not built for comfort. There was no galley, and no way of cooking, except on rare occasions when calm weather made it possible to light an open fire on a hearth of stones rigged just forward of the afterdeck. For the most part passengers and crew subsisted on cold rations. If they were lucky they quenched their thirst with beer. The accommodations were limited to the unlighted dog-kennels under the two decks. These dark, triangular spaces were only ten or twelve feet long and not more than twelve feet broad at the widest part. They were rarely as much as five feet high, so that they offered no headroom.

The crews were surprisingly large considering the size of the ships—usually fifteen to twenty men. This was in part due to the need for much muscle to man the bailing tubs and to supply auxiliary rowing power; but it was also due to the ever-present possibility of battle, particularly on the European approaches, where Viking pirates lurked. Even in Iceland and Greenland big crews were useful, for though the knorrir were trading ships, and usually came in peace that peace could often be maintained only by a show of force. Both Icelanders and Greenlanders, as well as most Europeans, had a way of taking what they fancied from the cargo of a trader and paying for it only if it appeared certain that the trader could enforce his claims.

The captain of a knorr was generally its owner, and was officially its helmsman. On long passages he would be relieved by trusted subordinates—usually relatives of his. It seemed to be an almost invariable rule that only freemen were shipped as seamen aboard the trading vessels, possibly because the temptation toward, and opportunity for, rebellion was strong aboard such ships.

The carrying capacity of the knorrir seems phenomenal to us, for there were occasions when a knorr would ship her own crew, plus twenty or more human passengers, half a dozen small northern cattle, a flock of sheep and goats, and tons of miscellaneous cargo including sufficient forage to keep the animals alive for two or three weeks. The cattle, and probably most of the human beings, lived under tarpaulins stretched over the hold while the rest of the people, including women and children, must have been packed into the tiny cabins like worms in a can. Nevertheless the passengers at least enjoyed plenty of fresh air, which was a good deal more than could be said for those who traveled in the noisome deep holds of the immigrant ships which plied the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century.

Sailing a knorr in good weather must have been a magnificent experience. As the cutwater snored through the long Atlantic swells, the bone in the vessel’s teeth would have foamed up high and white. The motion must have been light and easy, with none of the heavy lurching and stomach-heaving pitching of the deep-hulled vessels of our day. Even when running fast before a brisk breeze, she must have been a joy to handle, for the deep rudder, pivoting on its own axis, would have required only a light touch on the tiller in order to make the vessel answer smartly to the steersman’s wishes. Under favorable conditions the knorr would have been an ocean-yachtsman’s dream, and in fact in northern Norway they still build and sail pleasure yachts which are essentially only scaled-down versions of this ancient ship.

Appendix F: Norse Navigation

How the Norse Found Their Way About the Oceanic World

One of the major obstacles to an understanding of the Norse ocean voyages lies in the general belief that the arts of deep-sea navigation are of relatively recent origin.

This belief has no basis in reality. We know, for instance, that the prehistoric peoples of the Pacific were highly accomplished oceanic navigators. Using accurate star charts in conjunction with a delicate instrument made out of a coconut shell and designed for measuring stellar altitudes, Polynesian sailors of ancient times were able to get about in their vast ocean, only remotely dusted with islands, with a facility which modern men were not able to surpass until well into the eighteenth century.

The Pacific peoples were not unique in this regard. We know that as far back as 300 B.C., Pytheas, the Massilian Green mathematician, was able to determine latitudes. We know that the astrolabe was in use by Hipparchus around 150 B.C. It is true that during the Dark Ages much esoteric knowledge from ancient times was lost, but it is also true that most of the practical knowledge garnered by the ancients survived. The navigational arts were of an intensely practical nature, and what had been learned about them by the Cretans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans would have been maintained in being, since the continuity of man’s use of the sea and ships never suffered a serious interruption. Unlike land lore, valid sea lore is not subject to loss with the death of its parent society, for it is of universal import and becomes the common property of seamen everywhere.

During the period when the Western Mediterranean area was plunged into chaos and decay, a functioning knowledge of seamanship and navigation was preserved, if not improved upon, by Arab sailors. As southern Europe returned to a semblance of civilized organization, this knowledge was redistributed to various western peoples. The Basques, who were among the modern world’s most competent seamen, appear to have learned the ancient navigational arts, including the ability to determine relative latitude, from the Arabs before the end of the ninth century. By the year 912 their ships were voyaging as far north as the Faeroe Islands, where Basque sailors must inevitably have made contact with Norse seamen, with a consequent interchange of seafaring knowledge.

The Norse were themselves in direct contact with the Arab world at about this same time, and they displayed a keen interest in some aspects of Arab learning. One early Norse king even imported an Arab mathematician to his court to instruct the Northmen in this science—a science which we may believe would have included information on methods of locating a position on the surface of the earth through the use of stellar, or even of solar sights.

That the Norse could determine latitudes, and that they did make use of this knowledge on their long western voyages, is apparent from the historical records. However, their concept of latitude was not the same as ours. They never devised a linear grid calibrated in degrees and stretching from the poles to the equator. What we think of as latitude was, to them, the difference in altitude of a celestial object as this difference was observed between two points. The navigator would know that the North Star stood at a certain altitude when viewed from his home port. If he voyaged north of his home port the altitude of the North Star would increase, and if he voyaged south it would decrease. By measuring the amount of altitude variation he was able to determine how far south or north he had voyaged. Such a measurement gave him his latitude relative to his reference point, in terms of units which could have been completely arbitrary so long as the observer knew what distance was represented by one of the chosen units.

The North Star, or Guiding Star, as the Norse called it, is, for all practical purposes, a fixed point in the heavens. It neither rises, sets nor circles. It does not alter its position with the seasons. It appears to change position in the sky only when the observer changes his latitude. The North Star rises as one goes north until, at the pole, it stands straight overhead. As one goes south it sinks until it reaches the horizon at the equator. For purposes of latitude determination it is at its most useful when it stands between 20 and 80 degrees above the horizon, since within these limits its altitude can be most easily and accurately measured.

A rough latitude (accurate to within four or five degrees) can be obtained by anyone observing the North Star with the naked eye. With practice such a visual observation can result in a “fix” accurate within two or three degrees. However, a really accurate latitude can be obtained by using an instrument of such a simple nature that it could be conceived of and constructed by any illiterate savage, providing he had the need for such an instrument to spur him on.

All that is required is a straight stick about three feet long which has been marked with equidistant notches. If the notches are cut one-half inch apart, the “instrument” can be made to measure latitudes to within half a degree, or thirty miles.

Such an instrument is simplicity itself to use. The stick is held vertically at a standard distance from the eye, with the bottom of it on the line of the horizon and with the North Star appearing against the notched edge. The number of notches between the bottom and the star is then the star’s altitude in arbitrary units. Assuming that the user has previously established, by trail methods, the distance which is represented by a difference in altitude of one notch, he can immediately determine how far to the south or north of a known reference point he is, or in other words his latitude relative to the reference point.

If instead of a stick the observer fashions a flat piece of wood into the form of a quarter-circle and marks off degrees on the arc he can, by holding the instrument so that the flat base is along the horizon and the North Star appears to touch the edge of the arc, read off his actual latitude in degrees. Such a home-made device enables the observer to obtain latitudes accurate to within a quarter of a degree, or fifteen miles.

An instrument of either type can be readily used at sea. With such an instrument it would have been comparatively easy for the Norse to make long ocean crossings by a method which was still in use as late as the early twentieth century, and which consisted of sailing along a parallel of latitude. There is considerable evidence in the sagas to show that the Norse used this method—particularly on such routes as the direct passage between Norway and Greenland, which was one frequently followed. This is an open-water passage in excess of 1000 nautical miles from last sight of land at the Faeroes to first sight of Greenland’s east coast. It was imperative that an accurate course be followed on this passage since any serious southerly deviation would result in the mariner missing Greenland entirely. Direction could not have been maintained by the use of lodestone or compass for the Norse did not possess these instruments. Neither could it have been maintained over such a long passage by any form of dead reckoning or by observing winds and seas. Such a course could have been maintained only if the mariners involved were able to determine their relative latitude at reasonably frequent intervals. In effect, they had to keep the North Star at the same altitude from day to day, in order to steer a true west course and make their desired landfall.

Although the form of the instrument used by the Norse is lost to us, we do know its name. In a fifteenth-century reference to the Norse voyages, a reference which is apparently drawn from a twelfth-century source, we find this statement: “It is told that Karlsefni [Thorfinn Karlsefni, who made the most important of the New World voyages about A.D. 1004] made a husanotra of wood and then went to seek Vinland the Good.” In the Greenlanders Story there is another reference to a husanotra—one again in a context which makes it appear that it was an important piece of equipment for anyone undertaking a distant voyage.

Attempts to identify the husanotra have entertained many scholars. The old Norse word has been minutely dissected and analyzed, and the most highly qualified linguistic authorities have concluded that it meant such widely diverse things as “a house-neat timber,” “a wooden ornament associated with the castle abaft the mast,” “a weathervane or other instrument at the point of a gable of a house, or on a ship,” “an ornament on a ship’s bow or stern,” and even “a wooden broom.” These explanations were obtained by attempting to make literal sense out of the root meanings of the composite word.

Modern scholars have obviously lost touch with the tenth-century meaning of the word; but older scholars evidently knew what husanotra meant, in the common usage of Norse times. Saxo Grammaticus, a famous clerk of the Middle Ages, translated the Norse Saga of Arrow-Odd into Latin, and when he came to the word husanotra he translated it as gubernaculum. During the sixteenth-century, gubernaculum meant a device for assisting in steering a vessel or controlling her course. Moreover, in its original Latin sense it meant a device for governing or controlling an action.

Torfaeus, in his Historia Vinlandiae, translates husanotra as cornis. Modern scholars do not seem to have understood what he meant by this word either, although its derivation from Latin and Greek makes it clear that Torfaeus was referring to a device, or instrument, having a curved edge, which would be a partial description of a simple astrolabe.

Werlauff, in Symbolae ad Geographiam Medii Aevi ex Monumentis lslandicas, translated the word as scopae—another word which is no longer in use, but whose Greek root means to aim or to look out; and which in medieval use meant a sighting device.

If these older translations, which were a good deal closer in time to the original than any current efforts, are not enough to show that a husanotra was some sort of navigational instrument, the context in which the word is used in the sagas would seem to establish the fact. The saga tellers considered the husanotra to be an object of such value and importance that it merited attention even in their condensed accounts of the great western voyages. It was a device which was associated with the success of protracted voyages into strange waters. They would hardly have bothered to mention it if it had been something as trivial as an ornament, or a mere weathervane.

Finally, the conclusion that early Norse sailors could and did determine relative latitudes with remarkable exactness is convincingly supported by an analysis of the Sigurd Stefansson map of Helluland, Markland and Vinland.¹

While the ability to determine relative latitude was of immense importance to the Norse western voyagers, it had its limitations. Much of their sailing was done in high northern latitudes, where in summer the period of darkness during which the North Star could be seen was of short duration or nonexistent. Consequently we are not surprised to find that major oceanic voyages were usually undertaken as early as possible in the spring, or as late as possible in the summer, when too much daylight would have been less of a problem. Too much daylight not only made it difficult to obtain latitude fixes from the North Star, it also deprived the navigators of the use of the sun as an aid to maintaining direction, since in very high latitudes the sun tends to circle the horizon instead of rising approximately in the east and setting in the west.

Nevertheless there were times when open-ocean voyages had to be made during a period of continuous daylight, or when the sun and stars were obscured by clouds. It such cases the Norse navigators relied on alternative methods of maintaining course.

Foremost among these was the use of landmarks. It was the almost invariable custom for a Norse skipper bound deep-sea to take his departure from the most prominent landmark on the home coast and to shape his course toward the most visible landmark on the desired foreign coast. In our day, when compasses are commonplace, we have forgotten just how useful such a procedure can be; nevertheless the landmark system of sailing is still in vogue in some remote areas and among peoples who do not have the compass. It is surprisingly effective if the landmarks are prominent enough; and on the mountainous coasts of Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador prominent landmarks are to be found in abundance.

Under conditions of good visibility a lookout at the top of a fifty-foot mast can see the peak of a 7000-foot mountain from a distance of 110 miles. Given perfect visibility, he can see the “loom” of such a peak from as much as 125 miles distant. Helped by a mirage—and mirages are commonplace in high latitudes—the range of visibility may be increased by as much as an additional 40 per cent.

Although viewing conditions may seldom have been ideal, they probably were on the average fairly good over the waters sailed by the Norse during the generally good weather which prevailed throughout the tenth century. In any event we know that one of the major conditions which governed the departure of a knorr on a deep-sea voyage was clear weather which would enable her navigator to maintain his direction “over the stern” for as great a distance as possible.

The value of this method of navigating can be grasped if we consider that, assuming near-perfect conditions of visibility, it would have been, and still is, possible to sail from Norway to North America by way of the Shetlands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland and Baffin Island without ever being out of sight of land for more than two hundred miles, or thirty-six hours at the average speed of a knorr. Even under moderate viewing conditions such a voyage could have been made without the navigator’s being forced to rely on dead reckoning for more than a few days at a time.

The method of steering a knorr may itself have had a direct connection with the ingrained habit of using landmarks. Knorrir were steered with side rudders rather than with stern rudders. This meant that instead of pointing along the ship’s longitudinal axis, the tiller was athwartship. Thus the helmsman could stand facing astern or ahead with equal ease. When making a departure he could face the stern and so maintain course until the chosen landmark sank below the horizon. When an arrival landmark was picked up ahead of him, he could as readily face forward and so direct his course toward the new mark.

One other important aspect in connection with landmark sailing was that it became customary to refer to open-sea distances between two places as being measured from last sight of the departure landmark to first sight of the arrival landmark. Consequently Norse sea distances were out-of-sight-of-land distances and could be as much as three hundred miles short of actual shore-to-shore distances.

The use of landmarks and relative latitudes did not by any means exhaust the Norse navigator’s repertoire. He also made extensive use of what we shall call “sea marks.” These were of particular importance to him during stormy weather when neither landmarks nor the sun and stars could be relied upon.

Under such conditions a helmsman could hold his course by reference to the direction of the wind. If the wind veered or hauled he would be made aware of the change by the divergence between the wind, and the sea or swell, and so could make the necessary corrections which would enable him to maintain his original course. Although this may sound like a very imprecise method, a practiced seaman of today can still hold his course by watching wind and water, and do so with almost as high a degree of accuracy as if he were steering by a compass.

Many other kinds of sea mark were also used. In one set of sailing instructions for the direct course between Norway and Greenland it is specifically stated that the navigator should hold far enough to the north so that he would encounter the numerous pods of whales which “lie half a day south of Iceland.” Even now sadly depleted pods are to be found in this region, where they gather to feed on rich beds of krill.

Seabirds were invaluable sea marks. Many species of oceanic birds tend to maintain rather definite range limits over the open waters of the Atlantic, a fact well known both to ornithologists and to modern seamen of the Atlantic fishing fleets. Furthermore their abundance in any given area is usually an indication of good fishing grounds, which in turn mean shoal waters or undersea banks that usually lie adjacent to mainland shores. Up until the middle of the eighteenth century navigators sailing from England for Newfoundland kept a sharp lookout for the first appearance of noddies, whose presence in any numbers was an infallible indication that the ship had arrived over the Grand Banks. That the Norse made similar use of birds is indicated in the saga account of Thorstein Eriksson’s voyage, during which he was blown east until he reported encountering sea birds of those species which were to be found off the coastal waters of Ireland.

The usefulness of celestial objects was not limited to the determination of latitude alone. The North Star was a fair indicator of true north—the only north the Vikings knew, since magnetic north came into use only with the compass—from which the other directions could be ascertained.² The sun, when the latitude was not too high, was also helpful in establishing directions. It is a known fact that peoples who do not use the compass, such as the Chipeweyan Indians of northern Canada, can so develop their sense of direction that a brief glance at the sun at any time of the day will enable them to orient themselves with amazing accuracy. The Norse deep-sea navigators would unquestionably have developed a similar aptitude.

Since they had no compass, the Norse thought of directions rather differently than we do. They used the whole horizon as their rose, and divided it into eight cardinal segments called airts. Each airt could itself be divided into three parts, each being equal to 15 of our degrees. However, for the most part the courses recorded in the sagas are given in terms of full airts. Thus: “they sailed southwest” tells us that the general course lay in the southwest airt between west-southwest and south-southwest.

There is some archeological evidence to suggest that the Norse may have made use of a crude azimuth ring. This was essentially a circle inscribed on wood and marked off in airts and fractions of airts. It could be oriented to the North Star or to the sun. However, such a device would have been of very limited value to people who did not have the compass. It could have been used only on favorable occasions to obtain a rough check on the vessel’s course.

In order to properly appreciate the achievements of all ancient navigators, and of the Norse in particular, we must disabuse our minds of the conviction that a compass is absolutely essential to the success of a long voyage. The truth is that the discovery of the compass nullified the need for man to make use of his natural abilities for direction finding—attributes which all animals possess. When the compass came into general use these abilities began to atrophy through lack of use. However they still exist in vestigial form and can be honed to a high degree of usefulness. As late as the 1940’s it was the regular thing for fishing schooners from eastern Newfoundland to sail to the Funk Islands and from there direct to Battle Harbour in Labrador, a distance of 200 miles out of sight of land, without any compasses at all. The skippers of these small ships, most of whom could not afford to buy a compass, had so developed their innate faculties for sensing and maintaining direction that they could dispense with the compass, at least “on such short passages as they.”

The Norse expressed sea distances in terms of a standardized unit based on how far a ship could run in a day under average conditions. In very early times this unit, which was called a doegr, or day, was based on the average distance a six-oared boat could be rowed during daylight hours. Later, when ships got bigger and began to go deep-sea under sail instead of coasting under oars, the doegr developed a second value based on the average distance a knorr would sail in twenty-four hours.

The value of the short doegr can be deduced from a mass of data relating to coastal voyages in Scandinavian waters. It appears to have been equivalent to between 30 and 35 of our sea miles. The long doegr seems to have been based on an average speed of five knots, and thus represented a distance of about 120 of our sea miles. This figure, which has been deduced from saga records, is in such close accord with the actual figures obtained from the performances of the two replicas of Norse ships which sailed across the Atlantic that it can be safely accepted as being accurate within rather narrow limits.

In order to make navigation by dead reckoning work during long voyages, Norse seamen would have had to be able to estimate how far the ship had actually run in a given time. Such an estimate could have been obtained by making use of the ancient and apparently universal method of dropping a chip of wood off the vessel’s bow and seeing how long it took to reach her stern. The time interval may have been measured with an hourglass, but more probably it was measured by repeating a standardized verse while the chip floated by. The word of the verse which the observer uttered at the exact moment the chip came abeam of the stern would tell him, as a result of previous observations, that the ship was traveling at, say four knots, or the Old Norse equivalent to that unit of speed. The Norse may also have used a slightly more sophisticated procedure whereby a float or “log” to which a long length of line was attached was thrown over the vessel’s stern. Knots were tied at stated intervals in the line and the number of knots which paid out in a prescribed period of time gave the vessel’s speed “in knots.” This was known as “streaming the log,” a phrase which remains in use to this day.

Two other navigational aids remain to be mentioned. One was the sounding lead. We have no concrete evidence to prove that it was used by the Norse, but it is such a simple and obvious aid that the stupidest sailor would be bound to think of it sooner or later. It would have been indispensable when approaching land in thick weather. It is worth noting that for several hundred years navigation to and from the New World was accomplished almost exclusively by means of the three L’s—Lead, Log and Latitude. The compass was used only to help maintain direction between latitude fixes, for it was not very reliable until refinements on it in the nineteenth century made it so.

The question of whether or not the Norse used charts has seldom been debated. Most scholars have flatly stated that they did not. Yet every other seafaring race of whom we have any extensive knowledge constructed and made use of some form of chart or sea-plan. The Polynesians used open matrices woven from grass, with nodules to indicate symbolically the important data. Behring Strait Eskimos inscribed distances and directions on flat pieces of whalebone. Natives of the Indian Ocean burned or punched holes in sheets of cloth to indicate the relative distances and bearings between ports.

Although no original Norse charts have been recovered, some of them must have survived until relatively recent times. The Stefansson Map, which was drawn from ancient Icelandic sources, could have been derived only from data laid down in visual form by voyagers who had charted Labrador and Newfoundland.

Norse charts probably showed courses in terms of airts, and distances in some conventionalized manner. Relative latitudes would doubtless have been indicated. Coasts were probably sketched in roughly. As with many primitive charts, the scale was probably not constant over the whole drawing. Sections which contained nothing of special interest to the navigator would have been much compressed in area and generally simplified in treatment.

Charts were perhaps not as valuable to Norse navigators as oral sailing directions were. These were of vital importance, as we know by their frequent inclusion in the saga accounts. A typical set of sailing instructions from the sagas gives: (1) The departure landmark; (2) The direction, in airts; (3) The distance, out of sight of land; (4) The arrival landmarks.

As with the rest of the oral transmissions of those times, which were memorized and passed on by men who had become in effect living books, the fidelity of such directions was of a high order. An outstanding example is preserved in the saga account of Bjarni Herjolfsson’s voyage, which took place in 985 and which was probably not committed to writing until about 1100. The surviving description is nevertheless so exact that anyone with a degree of familiarity with the North Atlantic and with the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador can still trace out the voyage with every assurance of having got it right.

Armed with standard sailing directions, and with a comprehensive knowledge of navigational methods, supplemented by a well-developed instinctive skill, Norse navigators stood every chance of making successful passages even over the dark waters of the Western Ocean. These men were not casual venturers upon the sea; they were highly professional and very competent seamen of a kind whose like has now all but vanished from the earth, under the influence of mechanical propulsion and the electronic navigator.

They were also brilliant improvisors. In the Islendingabok we read of the exploit of one Raven-Floki who wished to make a voyage to Iceland but who did not have sailing directions for the voyage. Floki set out to go there anyway, and as navigation aids he carried a number of ravens. Ravens, as Floki evidently knew, are land birds—and nonmigratory. They do not have to make passages across large expanses of open water, and seldom do so voluntarily. When a raven is freed from a ship it will promptly make for the nearest land it can see. From a height of 5000 feet—at which altitude the big black bird is still easily visible from sea level—a raven can probably see land ninety miles away, and high land a great deal farther off.

It is recorded that on the first day out of sight of the Faeroes, Floki released a raven, which circled a few times and then struck off on the vessel’s back track, toward the Faeroes. On the second day another raven circled for a long time high in the pale sky, and finally returned to perch upon the vessel’s mast. But on the next day, the raven climbed to a great height and then flew purposefully off toward the west. Following it with their eyes until it vanished, the Norsemen set their course by that of the bird and in due time raised the coast of Iceland.

Some people deride this account as being apocryphal. There is no reason to think that it is anything of the sort. On the contrary, the use of ravens by the sailor who later came to be called Raven-Floki was no more than what one might have expected from a seafaring people who were very closely attuned to the world in which they lived.

Appendix G: The Ancient Map

A Discussion of the Sigurd Stefansson Map Showing Norse Discoveries in America

The archives of the Royal Library in Denmark contain a remarkable map known as the Stefansson Map. It is a copy of an original drawn by an Icelandic cartographer named Sigurd Stefansson in the year 1570.¹

The Stefansson Map shows the eastern and western coasts of the North Atlantic north of about latitude 50 degrees. What makes it of prime importance is that it accurately pinpoints the locations of Helluland, Markland and the Vinland of the Karlsefni expedition. This map has been a thorn in the flesh of those who have tried to place Vinland in New England, since it unequivocally locates Vinland on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.

The original source of Stefansson’s information is not known, but in 1607 a Dane named Hans Poulson Resen apparently made use of the original Stefansson Map (not the copy which we possess) in constructing a map of his own showing the Norse discoveries in the west, in whose legend he incorporated the information that the original source was an ancient chart, rudely delineated, and made some centuries earlier. Resen’s map deals only with the western coast of the North Atlantic and he has grossly distorted the Helluland-Vinland section, perhaps in order to rationalize it with the most imperfect knowledge of this area which existed among contemporary European cartographers. In one respect, however, it is almost perfect agreement with the Stefansson Map, and this is in its delineation of Greenland.

That the centuries-old original to which Resen refers cannot be Stefansson’s 1570 map is obvious. Resen must therefore have been referring to a common source of great antiquity which he probably never saw himself, since he worked in Europe, but which he knew to have been the basis for Stefansson’s map. Stefansson worked at the monastery at Skaholt in Iceland, and it is known that at that time the archives of the monastery contained a great many very early Icelandic documents which have since been lost. It follows that the basis of at least the western portion of the Stefansson Map was an ancient chart or charts preserved in these archives.

There seems to be no other rational way to explain the origin of this map. Consequently we conclude that the Norse navigators of the period of the western voyages were able to draw charts, and in fact did so; and that these charts were no haphazard scrawls but represented the Canadian coast with an accuracy which was not approached by the cartographers of mainland Europe until well into the seventeenth century.

The section of Stefansson’s map which deals with the early Norse discoveries (as distinct from the portion representing the European coast, and which he presumably drew from contemporary sources) is most startling in the accuracy of the relative latitudes given to prominent landmarks. The latitude grid on the existing map was imposed by Stefansson or the later copyist and is modern; nevertheless whoever imposed it must have had an original frame of relative latitudes at his disposal on the original source map, from which he was able to convert to the modern grid.

All of the latitudes of North American localities on the original map appear to have been relative to Cape Farewell on the south tip of Greenland. When Stefansson or the copyist set out to convert these to the modern latitude grid, he evidently did not have an accurate latitude for Cape Farewell, since he places it 3 degrees 5 minutes too far north. But all the plots for landmarks on Labrador and Newfoundland (with one exception which we will deal with later) also show approximately a 3-degree displacement to the north according to the modern grid. This means that relative to Cape Farewell the landmarks are positioned with an astonishing accuracy, and one moreover that few if any maps or charts of this part of North America prior to about 1680 could begin to match.

It is indisputable that whoever made the voyages from which the original data for Stefansson’s map was drawn, must have been capable of obtaining relative latitudes with a precision which would have been considered extraordinary in the seventeenth century. Since there is no record of any European of Stefansson’s period, or before it, having made a voyage from Cape Farewell to Cape Chidley and then along the entire Labrador coast, concluding with an exploration of the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, there seems to be no alternative but to give the credit for this superb example of position fixing to ancient Norse seamen. Since it is also evident from the inscriptions on the map itself that the voyages must have been contemporary, or nearly so, with those recorded in the Erik the Red and Karlsefni sagas and the Greenlanders Story, there seems to be no escaping the conclusion that the Stefansson Map records the discoveries made on those early voyages and, in particular, on the Karlsefni expedition.

Karlsefni himself, after his return to Iceland, might well have drawn a chart of his explorations—a chart which eventually found its way into the archives of Skaholt. At some later time this chart might have been combined with a chart of Greenland and eventually this combined chart could have been incorporated by Stefansson into his map of the northern reaches of the Atlantic.

The Stefansson Map certainly appears to be composed of three separate sections. From Iceland eastward the latitudes are roughly accurate on the modern grid, and the delineation of the British Isles, the northern islands, and Iceland is in agreement with what is shown on other maps of circa 1570.

Greenland is represented in considerable detail, including, off its eastern coast, the island of Jan Mayen, which does not appear to have been discovered by the Norse until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Considering also the inaccuracy (in terms of modern latitude) of the Cape Farewell latitude, we conclude that Stefansson’s source for this portion of his map was probably a chart dating from shortly after the beginning of the thirteenth century.

The Labrador-Newfoundland segment is in such close accord with the saga accounts of the Karlsefni voyage that it can be assumed to have been derived from the explorations of the early eleventh century. There is, however, one gap in the composite map and this lies in the delineation of the Vestri Obygd, or the Cumberland Peninsula area of Baffin Island. Baffin Bay itself is shown much shrunken, and its west coast is shown as a straight line, from which we deduce that Stefansson had no detailed map of this area from which to work and therefore simply connected up the foot of Baffin Bay with the northern tip of Labrador by means of a piece of undifferentiated coast. His failure to treat of this area suggests that the western exploration chart showed only new lands. If this chart indeed originated with Karlsefni, we would not expect him to have concerned himself with known lands, including his Greenland departure coast, or the Vestri Obygd.

This failure to delineate the Baffin Island coast has misled some scholars into assuming that the bulge marked “G” (Helluland) on the Stefansson Map is intended to represent the Cumberland Peninsula. However, the latitudes of the north and south terminations of this bulge are those of Cape Chidley and the Kaumajet Peninsula, respectively; while the position of the bulge relative to Greenland confirms its identification as the mountainous section of the Labrador coast lying between Cape Chidley and the Nain Bight, as does the delineation of Ungava Bay behind the bulge.

The large bight on the Stefansson Map lying south of Helluland represents Nain Bight. Its north and south extent is accurately shown, but the depth of the bight is exaggerated. This is readily understandable since it would have been nearly impossible for any early voyager to obtain an accurate idea of how deep it was. The entire bight is so choked with islands as to confuse even modern navigators, and the low-lying mainland shore behind these islands strengthens the impression that the bight is far deeper than it actually is.

The second bight on the Labrador Coast, shown just below Markland, is the Grosswater Bay-Sandwich Bay bight, and is accurately outlined as well as being very nearly correct as to scale.

The projecting peninsula marked Promontorium Winlandiae is the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. Its axis is incorrect since it is shown to run almost due south while in reality it runs off south-southwest by west. As a consequence of this distortion, the relative latitude of Cape Bauld is not correct either, but is in error by a degree and a half. It is most unlikely that this distortion existed on the original chart. What seems to have happened is that Stefansson, or a copyist before his time, tried to rationalize this southernmost portion of the map into agreement with a belief which was current before the fourteenth century that the Vinland Promontorium was connected with Africa by a coast of unknown length which ran far to the south and then swerved eastward to become part of the African coast. The commentary on the Stefansson Map itself suggests this: “Our people were of the belief that this [Vinland Promontorium] closed the ocean off from the south: but I gather from the reports of more recent [travelers] that either the sea, or a gulf, separates it from America.”

That the orientation of the peninsula has in fact been distorted is demonstrated by the results achieved when one restores the peninsula to its correct axis. When we swing it (as I have done on the accompanying map) so that it runs off to the south-southwest by west, we find that the relative latitude of Cape Bauld becomes correct. This is the way it must have appeared on the original chart, for if there was one place at which the Norse voyagers had ample time and opportunity to check and recheck their latitude it was at their Straumfiord Camp, a few miles from Cape Bauld.

The general legend on the map, which is presumably Stefansson’s own work, requires comment.

1. These lands, which the Angles reached, have the name of parched and dry, from the dryness of the sun or the burning of the cold.
2. The nearest of these [lands] is Vinland, which they call “the good” because of the fertility of the soil and the fruitful growth of usable materials. Our people were of the opinion that this closed the ocean off from the south. But I gather from the reports of more recent [travelers] that either the sea or a gulf separates it from America.
3. A rocky region, of which there is frequent mention in history.

The land the Angles or English reached is southeastern Labrador, but exactly to whom Stefansson is referring is unknown. Perhaps he is referring to one or other of the Cabots, who seem to have visited southeastern Labrador between 1497 and 1499.

The reference to Vinland the Good is a clear indication that Stefansson was drawing on data belonging to the Vinland exploration period. Stefansson himself was not too sure of the actual geography in the vicinity of Vinland, and this is understandable since he was exposed to three conflicting ideas about it. The original saga accounts (and presumably the voyage charts) indicated that the Strait of Belle Isle (Straumfiord) was a closed fiord, and gave no idea of how far south Vinland itself extended. The medieval geographers concluded that Vinland had to be connected with Africa since they thought of the entire Atlantic as an enclosed sea. Stefansson himself seems to have been aware of the fact, which was widely known by 1500, that there was a strait (Cabot Strait) to the south of Newfoundland.

The comment on the “rocky region,” or Helluland, is interesting, for it confirms what we know from other sources—that this area remained well known to the Icelanders and Greenlanders for a considerable period after the original exploration voyages.

For the rest, the Stefansson Map speaks for itself, confirming in every important particular the fact that the Norse explored the eastern Labrador and northern Newfoundland coasts, and establishing the locations of Helluland, Markland and the Vinland of the Karlsefni expedition.

Appendix H: The Vanished Dorsets

A Description of the Dorset Eskimoan Culture and of the People the Norse Called Skraeling

In 1925 Dr. D. Jenness of the National Museum of Canada examined a number of ancient artifacts which had been collected near Cape Dorset in southwestern Baffin Island. Dr. Jenness demonstrated that these relics belonged to a hitherto unknown culture to which he gave the name Cape Dorset.

Since then a great many Dorset sites have been discovered, and a number have been excavated so that it is now possible to draw some conclusions about this mysterious people who at one time occupied most of the eastern arctic regions of North America.

Although I have consulted most of the available sources dealing with the subject, much of the synthesis which follows is based on the recent evaluations of Dorset culture by Dr. William Taylor of the National Museum of Canada, and on information obtained from Dr. Elmer Harp of Dartmouth College. However, neither Dr. Taylor nor Dr. Harp can be held responsible for my interpretations.

The Dorset culture appears to have developed in situ in the Foxe Basin-Hudson Strait area of the eastern Canadian Arctic and to have originated from a Siberian neolithic people who were the first human beings to reoccupy the Arctic after the passing of the last glaciation. These ancient people, who are conventionally referred to as Pre-Dorset, had reached Cape Denbigh in Alaska by 3500 B.C., and sites occupied by their descendants and dating to about 2000 B.C. have been found in northeastern Greenland. Little is known about them as yet, but some time around 800 B.C. they seem to have been gestating a new and largely indigenous culture which by about 600 B.C. had become recognizable as Dorset.

Dorset began to spread rather rapidly, obliterating its parent culture in the process. It spread westward back along the old migration routes (which had brought the Pre-Dorset people into the eastern Arctic), as far as Bernard Harbour. It spread northward to occupy some of the most remote of the high arctic lands, including Melville and Ellesmere islands. From Ellesmere it crossed to Greenland and worked southward down both coasts at least as far as Disco on the west and Angmagssalik on the east. It also spread southward from its Foxe Basin cradle to Ungava and then down the Labrador coast to the Strait of Belle Isle. From there it worked westward perhaps as far as Anticosti Island. It also crossed the strait and worked down both coasts of the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.

Considering the truly vast area that it came to occupy, we can conclude that the Dorset culture was not only a most vigorous but also a highly effective cultural complex. Until quite recently many authorities believed that Dorset was either an Indian or a composite Indian-Eskimo culture; however this view can no longer be sustained. The Dorsets were neither Eskimo nor Indian as we understand these terms. The most likely theory of their origin is that their Pre-Dorset ancestors stemmed from the same basic stock which eventually gave rise to the Eskimo peoples. Thus the Dorsets are related to the Eskimos, but they were not necessarily Eskimos themselves. Dr. Taylor believes that they spoke a variant of the Eskimo-Aleut language. They almost certainly wore a form of the tailored fur garments which are distinctive of Eskimoan and related cultures throughout the circumpolar regions. They used skin-covered boats. They may have built snow-houses, and they certainly built semi-subterranean houses which belong to the Asiatic neolithic tradition. Finally, they were a littoral folk and hunters of sea mammals rather than inland dwellers.

From the evidence of archeology, and in particular as a result of the five-year excavation program which Dr. Elmer Harp has recently completed at the Dorset site of Port au Choix in Newfoundland, a good deal can be deduced about their way of life. Port au Choix seems to have been occupied by Dorsets, at least seasonally, for nearly a millennium, and they built more or less permanent houses there. These were rectangular structures, sometimes with a rounded back portion, from twenty to thirty feet in length and fifteen to twenty feet in width.

The main floor space was excavated to a depth of a foot or two below the surrounding ground level, and low walls of turf and stones were raised outside this excavation, perhaps to an additional maximum height of two or three feet. No evidence remains as to how these large houses were roofed, but it was probably by some system of wooden or whalebone rafters covered with hides and turf. The rear of the house was raised above the general floor level to provide a large bench where people presumably slept in one communal bed. There seems to have been a central hearth and there may have been earth benches along the side walls facing the hearth. Seen from some distance away the houses must have resembled low earth mounds or hillocks; but they would have been roomy, warm and comfortable dwellings for all that external appearances were against them.

We know little about the Dorsets’ physical appearance. The Norse, who encountered them in Newfoundland and Labrador shortly after A.D. 1000, have not left very clear descriptions except to say that they were swarthy and, by Norse standards, ill-looking; and that they had remarkable eyes and broad cheeks. What is notable about these first Norse contacts with Dorsets is that no mention is made of their having been small of stature. Apart from the meetings in Newfoundland and Labrador during the first decade of the eleventh century, the Norse sources contain only one other account of contact with a people who could have been Dorsets. This is found in the Floamanna Saga in connection with the story of Thorgisl Orrabeinsfostri, who was shipwrecked far to the north of the Greenland settlements, apparently on Baffin Island, about 997. Thorgisl met natives who are described as giants or, more accurately, as very large people. These could only have been Dorsets, since the succeeding native race—the Thule Eskimo—did not occupy these regions until the twelfth century had begun.

The latter-day Norse had a great many contacts with Thule Eskimos. There are numerous references to them in the sagas and in other sources, and the Thule people are almost invariably described as being dwarfish, or pygmylike. This is most significant in view of the fact that the Thule people preserved and handed down to their descendants of modern times many stories of their own contacts with the Dorsets, whom they called Tunnit. In every case these stories speak of the Tunnit as being larger and stronger than the Thule authors of the tales. In many cases these Eskimo folk tales specifically describe the Tunnit as having been giants. Skeletal material of undeniably Dorset origin is very scarce, but what little has been recovered seems to support the belief that the Dorsets were an Eskimo-like people of larger stature and more robust build than contemporary Eskimos.

The idea, which has been proposed and maintained by some recent authors, that the Dorsets were a pygmy race seems to have originated in part from the small size and delicate nature of their artifacts. The Dorsets were among the world’s most talented workers in stone, and the majority of their points and edge tools are indeed small. This was not because they were a race of midgets; it was due to the fact that they and their forebears had developed such a high degree of technical proficiency in the manufacture of stone implements that they were able to reduce the unwieldy stone tools and points used by less accomplished cultures to smaller, lighter and more efficient proportions.

In addition to possessing a truly remarkable skill as workers in that intractable material, flint, the Dorsets were marvelous artists. A considerable number of their bone and stone carvings have been found, and not only are these the earliest examples of true art so far discovered in the North American arctic regions; they are good enough to hold their own with any native sculpture produced in the Arctic since their time.

Because the Dorsets occupied such a huge portion of the north for so long, local variants in their culture undoubtedly developed here and there. However the Dorsets with whom we are particularly concerned—those who lived in Greenland, along the western shores of Baffin Bay, Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea, and in Newfoundland—seem to have been pre-eminently a seal-hunting people.

Whereas later Eskimo peoples hunted all types of northern sea mammals, including both great and small whales, seals and walrus, it seems that the Dorsets in the areas with which we are most concerned concentrated on seals. Of course they made use of many other kinds of animals, including fishes, birds and land mammals, when the opportunity offered. Nevertheless, the seal remained the core of their culture, and according to the evidence of extensive bone middens in Greenland and Newfoundland they displayed a marked predilection for one particular species of seal—the pelagic and migratory harp seal, which is by far the most abundant member of its family in the northern waters of the Atlantic.

Wherever seals were to be found in sufficient numbers, there the Dorsets built their houses or pitched their skin tents. Fanning out from the rich sealing waters of Foxe Basin and Hudson Strait, they followed where the seals led. Their westward movement does not concern us, but the northward and eastward movements do. The Dorsets seem to have appeared in Greenland while their culture was still in a formative stage. An early Dorset variant known as the Sarqaq culture was in existence there by about the seventh century before Christ, but well before the beginning of the Christian era true Dorset had taken over and was established at least as far south as Angmagssalik and Disco.

The pelagic seals went where they could find their chosen food-fishes. These fishes in turn went where they could find their food, and so on down to the ultimate link in this food chain, the ocean plankton. But the optimum range of plankton, and consequently the range limits of many species of fishes upon which the pelagic seals depend, is largely determined by climatic conditions, of which water temperature is the most important single element. When it rises much of the plankton, together with the fishes which feed on it directly or indirectly, and the seals, who feed on the fishes, move to colder waters, and vice versa. Thus the seal populations shift as the general oceanic climate shifts; and as the seals shift their range so also must those peoples who depend upon them for a livelihood.

Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries there was a period of severe climatic regression in North Atlantic regions, one of whose results was a pronounced southerly extension of the ranges of many arctic sea mammals. Walrus were breeding in the Gulf of St. Lawrence while harp seals were being killed in large numbers off the coasts of New England.

Climatologists have demonstrated that between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500, the North Atlantic regions suffered from an even more severe regression, which became most intense between about 180 and 350 A.D. During this period the southward extension of the ranges of arctic sea mammals must have been very marked, and it was during this period that the Dorsets ventured farthest to the south.

However, during the sixth century A.D. the period of cold weather came to a close, and the climate began to grow steadily more genial. By the eleventh century the water temperatures in the vicinity of Greenland had risen by as much as three degrees Centigrade, which must have resulted in a tremendous change in the biotic conditions in the sea, and which world have been more than sufficient to bring about a drastic northward shift in the range of the pelagic seals and many other sea mammals.

If the sea mammals went north, the Dorsets would have followed; and this is probably the explanation of why Erik the Red met no natives in Greenland when between 981 and 983 he explored the coasts from Angmagssalik on the east around Cape Farewell and north up the west coast probably as far as Melville Bay.

There are excellent modern analogies for this postulated northward withdrawal of the Dorsets. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century a minor warming trend began to affect the North Atlantic regions. By the early 1920’s the seal population on Greenland’s west coast had thinned out to the point where the Eskimos could no longer make a living by seal hunting unless they went north at least as far as Uppernavik. The Danish authorities had no desire to see a mass migration of the Eskimos to the north, and the Eskimos themselves did not wish to move, so a compromise solution was found by starting a fishery for cod—a species of fish which until that time had been rare in Greenland waters, but which in its turn was moving north.

On the east Greenland coast the evidence of a northward withdrawal of the seal population and a consequent drastic reduction in the size of the Eskimos population was even more apparent. Prior to 1828 the east coast Eskimos had little or no contact with European civilization, and in fact were almost unknown even to the Danes who administered the island. During the years 1828–1830 an expedition was sent north up the east coast and this party found fairly large numbers of Eskimos.

In 1884 another expedition went north, this time reaching Angmagssalik. It discovered that during the years since 1830 the Eskimo population of the coast between Cape Farewell and Angmagssalik had declined by about 50 per cent, and there were clear indications of a rapidly decaying culture. The answer to the riddle of what had happened to these people was not hard to find. They themselves explained it to the Danes. The seals were going, they said. The pack ice in the East Greenland Current was diminishing, and the seals were going.

If the Danes had not arrived when they did and if they had not provided a substitute economy for these Eskimos, the East Greenland coast south of Scoresby Sound would have been devoid of Eskimo inhabitants within a few more years.

Something similar seems to have happened to the Dorsets in the Baffin Bay-Davis Strait-Labrador Sea regions when the Little Ice Age came to an end and the climate began to grow warmer again. However the northward withdrawal of seals and Dorsets would not have taken place at the same rate on both sides of this great sea inlet. This is because the west coast of Greenland is washed by a northward-flowing current which is warmed by the waters of the Irminger Current; while the opposite coasts are washed by a southward-flowing polar current running directly out of the Arctic Ocean. Its waters would have remained very cold until the warming trend had become well established.

The Dorsets who occupied Newfoundland are believed to have reached the Strait of Belle Isle well before the start of the Christian era, and recent carbon-14 dates from Port au Choix seem to confirm that this site was first occupied almost 2400 years ago. At one time or another the Dorsets occupied the whole west coast as far south as Cape Ray on the Cabot Strait, and the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula, probably as far south as Little Harbour Deep. They may also have occupied the Baie Verte Peninsula and Horse and Grey islands. Pack ice conditions in the waters off these localities would have favored them as major breeding grounds and concentration areas for the vast harp seal herds.

Early in the autumn the harp seals migrate southward from their summer range among the arctic islands, following the Canadian and Labrador currents down the west side of Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. In late February and March they congregate among the pack ice of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off the northeastern coasts of Newfoundland, where the females climb up on their chosen pans and whelp. The pups remain on the ice until they are old enough to swim, a matter of two to three weeks, and during this period they and their mothers are very vulnerable. This is the time when the great kills are made by sealers—kills which even recently have run as high as half a million animals in a single season. Often an onshore wind sets the pack tight to the coast, and when this happens shore-sealers walk out across the pans from land and kill large numbers. If the ice remains off the coast, shore-sealers sometimes row out to it in small boats.

The whole west coast of Newfoundland and the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula must have been a veritable sealer’s paradise during the very cold epoch which saw the arrival of the Dorsets.

The Newfoundland Dorsets did not come to an uninhabited land. They encountered people of an ancient Indian culture which Dr. Harp calls Boreal Archaic and which was the precursor of the Beothuk culture. The Dorsets displaced these early residents from the coastal regions and, over the succeeding centuries, the newcomers prospered and became a numerous and relatively settled race. Although many sections of the coasts they occupied have not as yet been studied by archeologists, more than twenty habitation sites have already been discovered. Most of these have the appearance of considerable age and permanence; a natural consequence of the fact that the Dorsets did not have to go looking for the seals—the seals came to them, and in such numbers that they were doubtless able to obtain most of their annual requirements of fat and oil, and much of their meat, during the months that the great herds were near their coasts.

At the Dorset site at Port au Choix the accumulation of seal bones has to be seen to be believed. It covers several acres and in places it is almost a foot deep. Nor is it unique. Some Dorset sites on the east coast of the peninsula have been turned into gardens by local families, and they plant their turnips in soil which is still so rich and black with the remains of seals that it is actually greasy to the touch. Although some of these gardens have been worked for a century, it is still an annual spring chore to pick out and cart away barrowloads of ancient seal bones.

It appears that in February or March of every year the Dorsets congregated at the best sealing stations along both coasts. Using skin boats when necessary, or walking out over the pack ice when possible, they made huge kills of young harp seals. They probably smoked or dried large quantities of meat, and stored still more of it in deep pits where it would keep for a surprisingly long time. Blubber was no doubt rendered down and stored in skin or bladder bags.

The Newfoundland Dorsets were not, however, entirely dependent on seals. They also made extensive use of the excellent salmon rivers which abound on the peninsula, and they probably hunted caribou in winter. The west-coast Dorsets would have been particularly well off in this regard, for the great barrens and flats of the west coast once harbored one of the largest herds of caribou in Newfoundland—a herd which probably numbered in the tens of thousands.

As long as the cold climate continued to bring multitudes of harp seals to the coasts each spring, the Newfoundland Dorsets would have remained a numerous and vigorous people. They must have had some contact with the Boreal Archaic or proto-Beothuk Indians, but there is no evidence that there was much conflict. The Dorsets depended primarily on hunting seals off the coasts; while the Indians depended on caribou hunting in the interior of the main part of the island. Their lives seem to have been almost devoid of the influence of war, and they appear to have developed as peaceful peoples.

However, when the climate began to warm toward the Little Climatic Optimum, things changed for the Newfoundland Dorsets. Over a period of several centuries the seals became steadily less abundant and harder to reach from shore. As long as the polar current—locally the Labrador Current—continued to bring an adequate quantity of winter ice south to form the whelping pack off the Newfoundland coasts, the seals would have continued to breed there and to carry on their age-old pattern of migration. But as the Labrador Current grew warmer the pack would have diminished in size and would have tended to remain farther off shore, away from the eastern coasts. Something similar would also have been happening in the gulf, but there, under the influence of the prevailing westerly winds, the remaining pack would still have tended to drive against the west coast of the Great Northern Peninsula, even as it shrank in size from year to year.

Within the past half century there has been a noticeable decrease in the size of the Atlantic sealing pack coincidental with a warming trend in the weather. Sealing skippers of long experience say that the area of the main pack—the “front” as they call it—has shrunk by at least 50 per cent during the last forty or fifty years. This shrinkage has now resulted in an almost total cessation of the shore-sealing activities which were once carried on along most of the northeastern coasts of Newfoundland. There is now little or no shore-sealing from the north and east coasts of the Great Northern Peninsula. However, shore-sealing is still carried on from the west coast, and reasonably large kills are made there even though they are not comparable to the kills of fifty years ago.

By analogy, and from the various data at our disposal, we can reconstruct what probably happened to the Newfoundland Dorsets as the Little Climatic Optimum approached its peak. Sealing in the Strait and on the east coast would have been the first to suffer. Perhaps as early as the sixth or seventh century A.D. it would have been difficult for the north- and east-coast Dorsets to make an adequate living from the sea. Nor did they have broad coastal barrens full of caribou to fall back upon, since on the east coast the Long Range Mountains border the sea and fall into it in abrupt cliffs.

Some of the east-coast Dorsets may have crossed over to join their relatives on the west coast, but here too the sealing would have been falling off. Perhaps the remainder drifted north, seeking waters where the seals still lived in quantity, or perhaps they simply died out and disappeared.

By about A.D. 1000, when the climate was approaching its warmest period, the remaining west-coast Dorsets must have been having a hard time getting enough seals. In fact their sealing had probably fallen off to the point where it alone would not support them. They could have survived only by relying more and more heavily on caribou, and probably they did so. But even so their numbers had evidently declined to the point where only a vestigial population still remained in Newfoundland.

These survivors were the Skraelings whom the Norse encountered on their Vinland voyages. It is an ironic fact that the Dorsets seem to have vanished from Newfoundland within a century after the Norse had abandoned hope of settling the country—a decision which was forced upon them by their conflicts with a people who were about to disappear not only from Newfoundland, but from time itself.

Shortly after the Norse encountered them in Newfoundland, the Dorset people as a whole came under a much more formidable pressure from another race. The Thule Eskimos, whose culture seems to have originated in Alaska, had begun to sweep eastward. Although they may not have been the physical equals of the Dorsets, they had a far more sophisticated and adaptable hunting culture. They used kayaks, had dogs (which the Dorsets apparently never owned), and dog sleds, and hunted every kind of sea mammal from the great baleen whales down to the smallest seals.

The Thule people, who were the forbears of modern Canadian and Greenland Eskimos, were aggressive as well as able. Within a century or so of their arrival in the eastern Dorset area they had obliterated the Dorset culture. We do not know if this was brought about through a process of annihilation or absorption. Perhaps some Dorsets were absorbed into the Thule society, but from the surviving tales of conflict between Thule and Tunnit peoples we conclude that most of the Dorsets, who seem to have been generally a rather tractable and unwarlike people, were either killed or driven to areas where they could not support themselves, and so went down into oblivion. At about the end of the eleventh century the last of them appear to have vanished and to have been supplanted by Eskimos. It is possible that some remnant groups survived for a little longer in such remote places as the northeastern tip of Greenland; but of this we have no certain knowledge.

The Dorsets were a primitive people in the historical sense, but they nevertheless possessed a highly developed culture. They were apparently peaceful and contented specialists who had found an ideal niche for themselves, but who lacked the will or the strength to defend it against aggressive interlopers. In all likelihood they were a more civilized people—in the most meaningful sense of the word—than the Norse, who thought of them, and treated them—as semi-human savages.

Appendix I: The Westmen in Iceland and Greenland

Some of the Evidence Demonstrating a Celtic Occupation of Greenland and Iceland Before the Arrival of the Norse

I: Iceland

Some of the most convincing testimony to the fact that Westmen—a term used by the Norse to describe inhabitants of the British Isles in general—were settled in Iceland when that island was first visited by the Norse is to be found in the Norse historical records themselves.

This testimony is of particular interest since it occurs in two works which were not written until the middle of the twelfth century, long after Iceland bad become a Christian community; while the records from the actual period of the Norse “discovery” of Iceland, when the Norse were still pagans, make no mention at all of Celtic occupancy; and in some cases they state categorically that the island was uninhabited. The reticence of the early chroniclers is what one would expect, for they were undoubtedly as narrowly chauvinistic as we still are today.

The silence was eventually broken by two Icelandic historians who were prominent Christians and whose religious loyalties had presumably modified their racial patriotism to the point where they felt compelled to make at least peripheral mention in their written works of the unhappy Celtic Christians who had been supplanted in Iceland by the Norse.

One of these works is the Islendingabok, composed by Ari Thorgilsson, circa 1120. The other is the Landnamabok, one of whose recensions seems to have been a joint effort by Ari Thorgilsson and Sturla Thordarsson, and which dates from a little later in the same century.

The Islendingabok tells us that at the time Norse settlement began:

Iceland was covered with forests between mountains and the seashore. Then Christian men whom Norsemen called Papas were here, but afterwards they went away because they did not wish to live here together with heathen men, and they left behind them Irish books, bells and croziers. From this could be seen that they were Westmen.

The Landnamabok version differs only in details:

Before Iceland was settled from Norway there were here people called Papas. They were Christians. . . . There have been found remains of them [such] as Irish books, bells, croziers and other things which show that they were Westmen. These were found in the east at Papii and Papylia. Moreover it is stated in English books that at this time there was trafficking between the two countries.

The Landnamabok contains two other references, one of which is an incidental aside in a lengthy genealogy. It deals with the land-taking in Iceland of a Norseman called Ketil the Foolish:

Ketil . . . settled land between Geirland’s River and Firth River above Newcome. Ketil dwelt at Kirkby [Place of the Church], there the Papar had formerly had their abode.

The other Landnamabok reference is an account of the first successful attempt at settlement by the Norse, when Ingolf and Hjorlief established themselves on the south coast of Iceland about the year 874. This account contains a peculiar story which is intended to explain how the Westman Islands, which lie just off the southern shore, got their name.¹ According to the Landnamabok explanation, some of Hjorleif’s Irish slaves murdered him and then fled to the Westman Islands, where the avenging Ingolf tracked them down, slaughtered some and drove the rest to destruction over the high cliffs. This tale is full of clumsy inventions. It is much easier to believe that while there may indeed have been a slaughter of Celts, those unfortunates were in fact settlers who had been in occupation of the islands for some time, or else they were refugees driven from the mainland of Iceland; and that the name commemorates the Celtic occupation rather than the dubious deeds of a handful of slaves.

Sturla Thordarsson’s comment that according to “English” books there was trafficking between Iceland and the British Isles prior to the arrival of the Norse requires more consideration than it has usually been given. The “English” books of which he speaks no longer exist, but the suggestion seems to be implicit that they referred to regular voyages, and there would have had to be a reasonably large Celtic population in Iceland to have made such long voyages worthwhile.

There is, however, one book extant which does speak of a Celtic voyage to Iceland long before the Norse got there. It is called De Mensura Orbis Terrae (On the Measurement of the Earth) and it was written by an Irish cleric called Dicuil, at the court of King Louis the Pious in France. Dicuil may have written his book as late as 835 or as early as 800. In it he has some curious things to say of Iceland:

It is now the thirtieth year since some clerics who dwelt upon that Island [Iceland: he calls it Thule] from February to August told me that not only during the summer solstice but also during the days near that time, toward evening, the setting sun bides itself as if behind a small hill so that there is no darkness for even a small time.² A man may do whatever he wishes, even to picking lice from his shirt just as well as if it was by the light of the sun . . . therefore it is evident that those are in error who have written that the sea around Thule is frozen . . . [since] these clerics who sailed there did so during a time of the year when naturally it would be at its coldest, and landed on this island, and dwelt there ... but they found that one day’s sail from it toward the north, the sea was frozen.

This tells us that a group of clerics, who were perhaps passengers on a merchant ship, landed on Iceland in February—a time of the year which no sane man would have picked for a voyage to that island unless he was sure of some sort of prepared reception awaiting him. Significantly, these clerics noted that earlier descriptions of Iceland, which had stressed the coldness of its climate, were no longer applicable—as indeed they would not have been in the eighth century after three hundred years of steadily improving weather. The fact that they commented on this at all is an indication that Iceland had been visited during the cold climatic era preceding the fifth century.

Dicuil does not quote the clerics as saying anything about settlements; but there is no reason why he should have done so. He was writing a scientific treatise dealing with mathematical and geographical matters, and he draws upon information from the clerics—who were the only relatively educated men in those times—only in order to obtain data with which to support his own thesis.

The Celtic occupancy of Iceland appears to be confirmed by recent archeological work during which seventh- and eighth-century Celtic religious and art objects have been uncovered at a number of Icelandic sites. An interesting fact about these sites is that some of them have been known for a long time, but it has always previously been assumed that they were Scandinavian. It is not difficult to understand how such an error could have arisen; Norse farm buildings, tools and household equipment of this period are difficult to distinguish from their Celtic counterparts in general and are almost indistinguishable from the structures and materials used by mixed Norse, Celtic and Pictish settlers in the Outer Islands and the Hebrides.

This is a point to be kept in mind; for it has a bearing on the problem of determining what happened to the Westmen who fled from Iceland when the Viking invasion of that island began in earnest.

II. Greenland

There is as yet no indisputable archeological evidence to support the contention that Westman fugitives from Iceland settled in Greenland. No exclusively Celtic artifacts or undeniably Celtic sites have been reported. The possibility has not been publicly entertained that some of the very early Greenland sites, which have all been assigned to the Norse settlement period by the Scandinavian archeologists who excavated them, might have been originally occupied by Westmen.

Such prior occupation is difficult to demonstrate due to the resemblances which existed between Norse and Westman buildings and artifacts of this period. The problem is further complicated by the likelihood that Norse immigrants to Greenland would have occupied the very sites used by earlier settlers, and may even have taken over the abandoned buildings themselves.³

However, if there is no indisputable archeological material to show that the Westmen fled to Greenland, there is testimony of other kinds which demonstrates that this must have been what happened. There is, for instance, the Landnamabok story of Ari Marsson, who about 970 was storm-driven west from Iceland to a land named Irland Mikkla or Greater Ireland. Here Ari encountered a Christian community which could not have been anything else except Celtic (Irish), and was baptized.⁴

In order to dispose of Celtic claims to the discovery of Greenland, many writers have preferred to ignore the story of Ari Marsson or have chosen to label it as fiction. They have had to do this over the most serious objections, since the personal history of Ari is among the best documented of any of the early Icelandic voyagers. The Landnamabok traces Ari Marsson’s ancestry back to some of the original Norse settlers in Iceland, and it does the same for his wife, who was directly descended from Aud the Deep Minded, one of the most prominent of the early settlers. The salient fact that Ari was a real person cannot be questioned.

The author of the Landnamabok quotes two separate sources as providing the basis for his account of Ari’s voyage. One of these was Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, who was a famous historical figure. His version of Ari Marsson’s tribulations was transmitted through a man called Thorkel Gellirsson, or Gellisson. This Thorkel Gellirsson was the grandson of Ari Marsson. He was also the uncle of Ari Thorgilsson, the first Icelandic historian, whose Islendingabok is considered to be the very cornerstone of Icelandic historical sources. It is conceded by many scholars that the author of the extant recensions of the Landnamabok drew much of it from the works of this same Ari Thorgilsson; and, in fact, the original version of the Landnamabok may well have been largely written by Ari Thorgilsson himself.

Thorkel Gellirsson was a widely traveled man and he provided Ari Thorgilsson with much information about family matters—which would have included Ari Marsson’s story—as well as about early times in general, including the Islendingabok and Landnamabok accounts of the settlement of Greenland by Erik the Red. It would therefore follow that if one insists on dismissing the Ari Marsson story, one has little choice but to concede the logic of also dismissing the Islendingabok and Landnamabok accounts of Erik’s settlement in Greenland, since both accounts derived from Thorkel Gellirsson. But these have been accepted by all authorities as being unquestionably true.

The problem of locating Ari’s landfall has seldom been tackled in an unemotional way. Most authors who have dealt with Ari have boldly held to the contention that he landed on the mainland of the continent, somewhere on the New England coast. In their anxiety to shake the conventional insistence of those historians who believe that the Westmen never got beyond Iceland, Ari’s supporters have generally tended to make outrageous claims which have served only to give their opponents an excuse to consign the whole matter to limbo.

The Landnamabok tells us that:

Greater Ireland . . . lies off westward in the ocean adjacent to Vinland the Good, it is reported that one can sail thither from Ireland in six days.

That Greater Ireland could not have been on the coast of North America ought to be self-evident both from the distances involved and from the fact that the prevailing winds and currents between the British Isles and the American seaboard set so strongly to the east that an accidental drift on such a course, and for such a distance, becomes impossible.

It is 2650 nautical miles from Ireland to Cape Cod, and 1710 miles between the closest point in North America (eastern Newfoundland) and the westernmost part of Ireland. If, in the face of the Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies, a ship of the period wished to sail to America, and somehow managed to keep up a daily average of 120 nautical miles, it would have taken her fourteen days to sail from Ireland to Newfoundland, and twenty-two days from Ireland to Cape Cod. This is the theoretical minimum time needed, but the skippers of the fast and able Newfoundland schooners which made the Atlantic run for many decades used to consider themselves lucky if they could cross from Ireland to Newfoundland in twenty days.

Where then was Greater Ireland? Unless some since vanished island existed in mid-Atlantic in Norse times, it could only have been in Greenland.

It is reported to have lain six days’ sail west of Ireland. Here we are not given a specified distance as part of a set of sailing directions. Instead we are told only how far it was reputed to lie from Ireland. Nevertheless the direct out-of-sight-of-land distance, in terms of Norse sailing days or doegr (a doegr equals l20 nautical miles) between Erris Head in Ireland and Cape Farewell in Greenland is just over eight days. As for the direction, west in Norse parlance meant in the western airt, or between west-southwest and west-northwest. The course from Erris Head to Cape Farewell is west-northwest.

Considering the prevailing winds and currents in the North Atlantic it is apparent that if a vessel approaching Iceland from Ireland or southern Norway was to be caught in one of the polar northeasters which are the prevalent winds in the region north of 62 degrees, she would not only make leeway to the westward as a result of the wind, but would also be carried in that direction by the Irminger Current. The most likely landfall for her, assuming she could not sail her desired course, would then be southern Greenland, which lies adjacent to Vinland (Newfoundland) in relation either to Iceland or to Ireland.

Additional documentary evidence to help us locate Greater Ireland exists in a little known—or, it may be, largely ignored—work written by an Arab named Idrisi who lived at the court of Roger of Sicily about the middle of the twelfth century. Roger was a Norseman, and many fellow Norsemen came to visit him in Sicily and were employed by him as mercenaries. Idrisi undoubtedly obtained his information about the North Atlantic regions from these expatriates.

Among other things Idrisi gives a set of sailing distances for the northern regions:

Between the extremity of Ireland and the extremity of Scotland, two days’ sail are reckoned.

From the northern extremity of Scotland to Reslanda [Iceland] three days.

From the extremity of Reslanda to Greater Ireland, one day.

When we examine the chart we find that it is a 240-nautical-mile voyage from Malin Head, the northern point of Ireland, to Cape Wrath, the northwestern extremity of Scotland. Two days’ sail, by the Norse standard measure, was 240 nautical miles.

From Cape Wrath in Scotland to the nearest point in Iceland, Hofn (which lies under the lee of the 7000-foot Vatna Glacier) is approximately 300 nautical miles out of sight of land.⁵ Three days sail by Norse measurement is 360 miles.

From the Vatneyri Peninsula in western Iceland to the nearest point on the Greenland coast is 1 55 miles out of sight of land.

It will be noted that the route from Ireland to Greater Ireland, as outlined by Idrisi, entails only six days of open-water sailing, which suggests that the reported distance given in the Landnamabok derives from the same source used by Idrisi, and refers to the same indirect route described by the Arab chronicler.

In any event, Idrisi’s data seem to establish beyond any reasonable doubt what was already self-evident, that “Greater Ireland” was in fact a part of Greenland.

If we are to take Idrisi’s location literally, we must assume that Greater Ireland included the east coast of Greenland. The supposition that Greater Ireland extended south down the east coast from a point opposite Iceland to Cape Farewell, and some short distance up the western coast to include the pastoral lands of the Julianehaab and Ivitgut bights, is not unreasonable. The place was, after all, called Greater Ireland presumably in a direct size comparison between it and Ireland.

There are two other references to Greater Ireland in the Norse literature. One of them is in a paper copy of an old parchment which was transcribed by Bjorn Jonsson in Iceland in the seventeenth century. The original document, now lost, appears to have been a geographical description of the northern regions dating from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century:

Now there is, as stated, south of that part of Greenland which has settlements, deserts, unsettled areas and snow-mountains, then Skraelings, then Markland, then Vinland the Good. Next to it, and a little back, lies Albania, that is Hvitramannaland; thither formerly were sailings from Ireland. Irishmen and Icelanders recognized here Are [Ari], son of Mar and Kotla from Reykjaness, who had not been heard of for a long time and who had become a chieftain in the land.

This passage is the one usually quoted as proof that Greater Ireland was on the continent of North America. But by the time this geographical description was written, two or three centuries had elapsed since Greater Ireland had been supplanted by the Greenland colonies established by Erik the Red. It appears that the author’s knowledge of Ari and of Greater Ireland (by whatever name) was obtained from an early recension of the Landnamabok. We know that there were earlier and perhaps more detailed versions than those we now possess. The Landnamabok would have told him, as it still tells us, that Albania (Hvitramannaland or Irland Mikkla) lay somewhere to the west adjacent to “Vinland the Good.” It probably would not have occurred to him that it might have been located in Greenland, which, so far as he would have been able to tell from the available records, had been uninhabited before Erik’s time.⁶

His quandary was probably not so very different from those of more recent authors. Faced with the problem of where to locate Greater Ireland, the author of this passage gave it a vague position in the direction of Vinland. But the phrase “next to it, and a little back” may not mean back from Vinland as most authors have assumed, but back from (settled) Greenland. Since no inhabitable lands lay between the Greenland settlements and Iceland, this would be further proof of a failure to identify the location of Greater Ireland with the Greenland settlement area.

If the author of this geography does not help us to locate the exact whereabouts of Greater Ireland, he does give us one important piece of information which we would not otherwise possess. He states that both Irishmen and Icelanders recognized Ari Marsson there; and this is evidence not only that there was sea-borne intercourse between Ireland and Greater Ireland, but also that Norse traders had personal knowledge of the place.

The other reference is contained in the Saga of Erik the Red and has to do with an incident which took place during the homeward voyage of the Icelander, Thorfinn Karlsefni, from Newfoundland to Greenland about 1006. Somewhere on the coast of Labrador the Norse encountered some Skraelings and captured two young boys, whom they carried off.⁷ The children were taught to speak Norse.

They said too that there was a land on the other side, opposite their country, which was inhabited by people who wore white garments and who yelled loudly and carried poles before them to which cloths were attached. People believed this must have been Hvitramannaland or Ireland the Great.

These Skraelings were Dorsets, and the Dorsets once inhabited the coasts of Greenland at least as far south as Disco and Angmagssalik. They abandoned Greenland due to a dearth of seals consequent upon the warming climate, sometime after the seventh century but well before the arrival of Erik the Red in the tenth century.⁸

At first glance it seems far-fetched to suggest that a roving party of Dorsets might have encountered a Westman settlement on the southwest coast of Greenland, observed a religious celebration or procession, and have been so impressed by this fantastic (to their way of thinking) performance that the story became one of their folk-tales and was passed on from generation to generation through several centuries. However, it is a well-documented fact that primitive people who possess no written language frequently display a remarkable ability to retain a folk memory of things which occurred in the far distant past. Apart from the circumstantial stories concerning the Greenland Norse which Eskimos were still telling to white men in the twentieth century, about four hundred years after the Greenland Norse had become extinct, a particularly relevant example of the enduring folk memory of the Eskimos is to be found in the experiences of C. F. Hall.⁹

Hall was an American explorer who lived with the Eskimos of southern Baffin Island during 1861–1862. He became conversant with their language and eventually they led him to where, so they said, white men had built a house a “long time ago.” The site turned out to belong to the Frobisher expeditions which had sailed west from England in the middle of the sixteenth century. Although Europe had forgotten the location of Frobisher’s discoveries—in Hall’s time it was believed that Frobisher had landed on the southern tip of Greenland—the Eskimos had preserved a folk memory of the event which was nothing short of phenomenal. They gave Hall the most detailed and circumstantial account of what their ancestors had observed about the appearance and activities of the white men and the sailing ships which had appeared off the south Baffin Coast three hundred years earlier. These accounts were so detailed that Hall immediately realized that the people and ships described could have belonged only to the Frobisher expedition. These conclusions have since been fully authenticated.

It is a somewhat humiliating thought that Frobisher’s geographical discoveries, which had faded to an almost mythical status even in the written records of Europeans, should have been restored to their rightful place through the tenacious folk memory of a stone-age people.

When we consider this example of how retentive the Eskimoan mind can be, it no longer seems beyond the bounds of possibility that the Dorset children were speaking of an actual encounter between their ancestors and Westmen in south Greenland two centuries earlier.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to find an adequate alternative identification for the people described by the Skraelings. The Celtic clergy wore white robes; they engaged in processions during which there was much singing and chanting, which the bewildered Dorsets would doubtless have described as “yelling”; and they carried staves to which religious banners were attached. It has been suggested that the people seen by the Dorsets might have been Nauscopie or Montagnais Indians from the interior of Labrador, but anyone familiar with the ethnology of these forest people will find this explanation impossible to accept.

The location of this country, which the Norse of about 1000 themselves identified as Hvitramannaland, can hardly be anywhere other than Greenland. It lay “on the other side, opposite their country,” which surely means the other side of Davis Strait or the Labrador Sea, opposite to Labrador. A number of ancient Church documents also exist which refer to Greenland, under the names Gronland and Cronland, as having been a Christian country about A.D. 830, or approximately 130 years before the Norse colonists in Greenland accepted Christianity. If Greenland was occupied by Christians at this time, they would almost certainly have been Westmen.

Some scholars have claimed that these documents must be forgeries, on the grounds that it is an established fact that no Europeans did precede the Norse to Greenland. For those who may be interested in drawing their own conclusions we present a brief summary of the history and contents of these papers as Appendix J.

There is another documentary source, this time Norse in origin, which seems to bear on the problem of what happened to the Westmen from Iceland. It is found in Ari Thorgilsson’s Islendingabok account of the exploration of Greenland by Erik the Red in the years 981 to 984:

The Country which was called Gronland was discovered and settled from Iceland. Erik the Red was the name of the man from Breidafiord who went there and took possession of the land at the place since called Eriksfiord. He called the country Gronland, saying people would desire to go there if the country had a good name. Both east and west in the country they found human habitations, fragments of skin boats and stone implements, from which it was evident that the same kind of people had been there as inhabited Vinland and whom the Gronlanders called Skraelings.

Ari Thorgilsson’s explanation of how Greenland got its name, written about a century and a half after the event, may be correct. On the other hand it may be an interpolation made by a man who was puzzled (as we still are today) why anyone would call a country which was six-tenths glaciers, about three-tenths barren rock and mountains, and about one-tenth arctic prairie, a green land.

If Erik actually did christen the country with this name because he had the inborn instincts of a modern real-estate promoter, as Ari Thorgilsson suggests, then he must have been rather short-sighted. It is one thing to practice a flagrant piece of deception on someone you will never see again. It would have been quite something else to have duped several hundred fiery Norsemen with whom Erik was not only going to have to live in close contact, but whom he also expected to follow his leadership. The story does not seem very plausible.

Furthermore, we possess accurate information as to how Erik, or his followers on the initial exploration venture, really did describe Greenland. Late in the summer of the year when Erik’s colonization fleet departed from Iceland for Greenland, the son of one of the settlers arrived home in Iceland from a Norway voyage to find his father gone with Erik. The son, Bjarni Herjolfsson, was a trader who owned his own ship. He decided to follow his father and to this end provided himself with sailing directions—he had never been in the Greenland Sea before—and a description of the new country. This information could have originated only from Erik or from one of those who accompanied him on his exploratory voyage.

Bjarni was blown off course, and the first land he saw was an abundantly wooded country. He at once realized, and said so, that this truly green land was not what he was looking for. Two days later he raised the green forested coasts of another land. When his men asked him if this was Greenland he replied that he no more thought this to be Greenland than the former country had been, for, he said: “Very large snow [or ice] mountains are reported to be in Greenland.”

Bjarni continued his voyage, crossed the Labrador Sea to the eastward, and finally raised the five-thousand-foot coastal mountains, backed by an immense inland ice sheet, of the land he sought: When he was still a considerable distance out to sea, and could have seen nothing green at all, he remarked: “This most resembles what I was told about Greenland and so we may steer to this land.”¹⁰

By a considerable stretch of the imagination it might be possible for us to accept the name Greenland as being applicable to the relatively minuscule section of the country where the first Norse settlement was established. However, the Norse not only used the name for the whole of the island we now call Greenland. They also used it to include the opposite western coasts of Baffin Island.¹¹ Greenland is such an obvious misnomer for this vast expanse of arctic and subarctic territory (most of which Erik saw during his exploratory voyage) that Ari’s supposition as to the origin of the name becomes even more dubious.

Erik probably did not coin the name at all. He probably knew it before he left Iceland, for there were many people there, both Celtic slaves and Norsemen, whose ancestors had lived either in Ireland or on the Outer Islands for generations, and who could have known about Cronusland, or Cronland. It seems to be a remarkable coincidence that the native name which Demetrius, the Romanized Greek civil servant of the first century, thought sounded like Cronus, or Cronusland, should bear such a startling resemblance to the name Gronland. The coincidence becomes even more striking when we remember that in at least two of the early ninth-century references to Gronland in the Hanoverian church documents, the name is spelled with a C, as Cronland.

The Norse records do not tell us that Erik might have found Celtic settlements in Greenland. On the other hand, the remainder of the quoted passage from the Islendingabok comes close to fitting the pattern established by that self-same source in connection with Iceland, by admitting, in a backhanded sort of way, that the Norse were not the first discoverers.

Erik found human habitations, skin boats, and implements of stone instead of Irish books, bells and croziers.

The defenders of the generally accepted thesis that the Norse were first in Greenland have dismissed the possibility that this passage may indicate the earlier presence of Europeans, by insisting it must refer to relics left behind by natives, even as the Islendingabok specifies. It is not impossible that they are right; nevertheless the matter merits investigation.

The first thing which strikes us is that Erik found these things between 981 and 983; but no Norseman encountered a Skraeling—the name used by the Norse for all Eskimoan people—until the time of Karlsefni’s expedition to Newfoundland about 1004. It is apparent that Erik himself could not have identified the things he found as being of Skraeling origin.

Archeological studies have established that people of several Eskimoan cultures once inhabited the land we now call Greenland. The first of these were people of the Pre-Dorset culture who, according to carbon-14 dating, were in north Greenland by about 2000 B.C. The second culture is known as Dorset.¹² Sites belonging to this people, and dating from as early as 600 B.C., have been found as far south as Disco on the west coast, and Angmagssalik on the east. However, none of the known Dorset sites in Greenland appear to have been occupied later than the ninth century A.D., and the Dorsets had entirely vanished from Greenland well before the Norse arrived there late in the tenth century.

The next Eskimo people to appear were of the Thule culture, but they did not reach Greenland earlier than the twelfth century. Thus there was a hiatus of about three hundred years in the Eskimoan occupation of the area we now call Greenland.¹³ This hiatus began well before Erik the Red’s time and continued until long after his death.

Yet Erik found recognizable human habitations, and fragments of skin boats. Ruins of ancient Eskimo houses are difficult to detect, and even when detected convey very little of their original purpose to the eye of anyone who is not skilled in their identification. If Erik actually did recognize that some low, grass-grown mounds, typical of old Dorset house ruins, had once been human habitations, he was demonstrating an acumen which professional archeologists of the twentieth century will admiringly applaud. But it must be remembered that Erik presumably did not even know that Eskimos existed.

The fragments of skin boats pose another problem. Rawhide is not a durable substance when exposed to weathering; neither would the light wooden or bone framing of Dorset boats have remained recognizable as such for more than a few decades after abandonment. If the fragments found by Erik were indeed of Dorset origin it would mean that these people must have been on the coasts “both east and west” shortly before 981. And this, so archeologists say, could not have been the case.

On the other hand we know that the Westmen used skin boats—skin-covered curraghs. Any habitations that they might have built in Greenland would still have been recognizable as such when Erik arrived, and what is more they would have presented a familiar appearance to him so that he would have been in no doubt that they had been built and occupied by human beings.

At first glance the reference to “stone implements” seems to point directly to a native people. These “implements” may indeed have been of Dorset origin, but the Greenland Norse themselves made wide use of stone implements, due to a shortage of iron. Not only did they make weapon points, hammers and in some cases even axe heads of stone, but many of their pots and similar utensils were carved out of soapstone. Westmen in Greenland would have made use of the same materials for the same reason. There is also a difference of opinion among scholars as to the correct translation of the Old Norse phrase which we have rendered here as “stone implements.” It has been suggested that the phrase should be rendered as meaning something like a stone anvil; and stone anvils were used by both the Westmen and the Norse, but never by Eskimoan people.

To complicate the problem, Erik explored portions of the western region of the land the Norse called Greenland, especially the east coast of the Cumberland Peninsula. This coast is probably what is meant by the word “west” in the Islendingabok account; and on the Cumberland Peninsula he might have found relatively recent remains of Dorset culture. However, the Islendingabok specifies that he found the remains “both east and west,” which would include the present western coast of Greenland. The ultimate explanation may be that he found Dorset relics on Baffin Island, and evidence of Westmen settlements on the east coast of Davis Strait in what is now thought of as Greenland proper.

Appendix J: The Old Church Documents

Further Testimony to the Celtic Occupation of Greenland and Iceland Before the Arrival of the Norse

These records consist of a number of church documents some of which are preserved in the Hanoverian archives, others being held in the Vatican archives.

The first and most important of them is an early copy¹ of a decree issued by Lewis, or Louis, the Pious, Emperor of the New Roman Empire, at a General Diet convened at Aix-la-Chapelle in the year 834. It is concerned with the missionary activities of two Benedictine monks, Witmar and Ansgar, who for several years prior to 831 had been preaching the gospel in the northern regions. Both of these men were present at the Aix-la-Chapelle Diet to deliver a report on their work.

Lewis the Pious was so impressed by their activities that with the consent of the diet and subject to later confirmation by the pope, he appointed Ansgar to be archbishop of all the northern countries and in particular of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Faeroes, Cronland, Helsingoland, Island and Scritfinnland (Finland).

Copies of the decree were then dispatched to Rome, whither Ansgar journeyed to present himself to Pope Gregory IV. Gregory confirmed Ansgar in his appointment by the issuance of a papal bull dated 835. This bull reads in part: “We appoint our son himself, the above mentioned Ansgar, and his successors as our delegates to all the surrounding nations: to the Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Funelanders, the Gronlanders, the Helsingers, the Iselanders.”

Although the existence of these two documents has been known for at least a century, little mention of them is to be found in most of the books which have been written about the discovery and settlement of Iceland and Greenland. The deduction which must be made from them, that these two islands were known to, and probably settled by, Christian Europeans long before the arrival on the scene of the Norse, has not been accepted by the followers of the Nordic school who insist that Greenland and Iceland were not settled and were virtually unknown before their discovery by the Northmen. On the rare occasions when these two documents have been mentioned, it has usually been with the assurance that they must be forgeries, or at the least that the references to Greenland and Iceland must be later interpolations. The basic argument which is advanced to discredit the documents is that since it is “established” that Greenland and Iceland were not settled prior to the Norse arrival, the documents cannot be valid.

One of the few authors who have presented a detailed examination of these documents is P. De Root. In The History of America Before Columbus (Philadelphia, 1900) he faithfully gives all the arguments which have been advanced against acceptance of the parchments, after which he shows that there is no indication of forgery nor any credible motive why either forgeries or interpolations should have been attempted. He then produces a considerable weight of corroborative evidence testifying to the authenticity of the documents.

For these two parchments do not stand alone. In April of 846, Pope Sergius II issued a bull confirming Ansgar’s archbishopric; while in May of 858 Pope Nicholas did likewise, expressly including Greenland and Iceland. During the succeeding sixty years four other bulls or imperial diplomas were issued from Rome confirming Ansgar’s successors as archbishops of the northern regions, including Iceland and Greenland. During the next two and a half centuries a further series of bulls were issued to confirm the continuing validity of the initial bull issued by Pope Gregory IV, and in almost all of these the names of Greenland and Iceland appear; although there are some changes in spelling so that Cronland and Gronland are rendered Groenland, or Greenland.

Additional evidence supporting the authenticity of the original bull of Gregory IV is to be found in the Life of St. Rembert, who was the second metropolitan of Hamburg, which See at one time held the administration of Greenland. St. Rembert’s life was written by a contemporary of his about the end of the ninth century. In the first chapter of this biography is the statement: “Lewis, King of the Franks, established in the northern part of the Saxon province an archiepiscopal see from which the preaching of the word of God should extend to the neighboring nations of the Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Funelanders, Greenlanders, Icelanders, Scritfinns and Slavonians.”

Evidence supporting the general authenticity of these documents is also found in the writing of the Irish priest Dicuil,² who lived and worked at the court of Lewis the Pious and who, about 835 or even earlier, wrote a famous book called De Mensura Orbis Terrae (On the Measurement of the Earth). Dicuil’s book was a scientific treatise, but it includes mention of a visit to Iceland by Christian clerics late in the eighth century. These people spent some time on the island, and may have been visiting a settlement or community there, although Dicuil’s only mention of them, or interest in them, is concerned with what they could tell him about the geographical features of the place. Nevertheless, the fact that this reference exists at all should leave us with no grounds for surprise at finding Iceland referred to as a Christian country in the various documents stemming from Ansgar’s appearance at the Diet of Lewis the Pious.

To declare this whole complex of sources to be spurious, or to have been tampered with, is surely stretching scholarly suspicion beyond reasonable limits. To allow such a blanket condemnation would provide a precedent whereby anyone could arbitrarily invalidate any ancient document which was at odds with his desired conclusions.

These documents not only indicate that Christian communities already existed in both Greenland and Iceland as early as A.D. 830. They also show that the names of both islands antedate their “discovery” by the Norse and so must be presumed to have originated with the Celts or Picts. Thus we find that the predecessor of the Norse name of Greenland, or Greenland, was Cronland or Gronland, which is in accord with what Plutarch and other ancient writers tell us about Cronusland, and the Cronian Sea, as Greenland and the Greenland Sea were apparently known in Britain early in the Christian era. The name Iceland would seem to derive from the observations made of that island by men who visited it during the adverse climatic period, which roughly spanned the centuries from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, and during which, as both geologists and climatologists agree, almost all of the island except for a narrow coastal strip was covered with glaciers, of which only a few remained by the time the Norse arrived to settle a land whose climate had become at least as genial as that of central Norway.

One other document deserves mention in this connection. In the Vatican archives there is a letter from Pope Nicholas V, dated 1448, in which Nicholas refers to Greenland as having been a Christian country for about six centuries prior to that date, which brings us back to the time of the issuance of Gregory’s bull. Nicholas goes on to add that the residents of Greenland (in his time) had received their faith through the preachings “of their glorious evangelist, the blessed Saint Olaf.” This reference to Olaf as the founder of Christianity in Greenland has been used by the proponents of the Nordic school as proof that either Nicholas V made an error, or his scribes did, and wrote six instead of four centuries and a half, which was the duration of the Norse Christian occupation of Greenland prior to 1448. However, as De Root points out, it is quite logical to explain the mention of Olaf as being no more than a politic act of acknowledgment of that Nordic saint, considering that at the time Nicholas wrote his letter Greenland was in the possession of the Norse, and the original Celtic occupation of that island was no more than a tenuous memory.

Appendix K: Bjarni Herjolfsson’s Voyage to Newfoundland and Labrador

A Detailed Reconstruction of Bjarni’s Routes and Landfalls, and the Evidence Supporting It

Bjarni’s Landfall

There are two schools of thought as to where Bjarni made his landfall. One believes that it was at some point on the New England coast, preferably near Cape Cod; while the other believes that it must have been on the southeast coast of Labrador or on the east-facing shore of Newfoundland. The pattern of prevailing surface winds and ocean currents is what governs the movements of sailing ships now, and is what would have governed them in Bjarni’s time. Current patterns in the North Atlantic are believed to have remained generally unaffected by the cyclic changes in general climate over the past thousand years. The atmospheric circulation system may have undergone a southerly shift since the time of the Little Climatic Optimum, but this would not have made a significant change in wind patterns in the part of the Atlantic where Bjarni made his unpremeditated voyage.

The prevailing July and August winds in the region between Iceland and Newfoundland are mainly westerlies, although there is a sufficiently high incidence of northeasterlies to make it possible for a ship to be blown southwesterly across the intervening waters. In this section of the Atlantic the currents would also favor, rather than retard, a vessel drifting or sailing on such a course.

However, when we look at that portion of the Western Ocean lying south of Newfoundland, and generally south of latitudes 45 to 50 degrees, we find an entirely different picture. Here the prevailing winds, and particularly those of summer and early autumn, are overwhelmingly southwesterlies. Oceanic northeasters are almost unknown during these seasons, and are never of long duration. Moreover, if a ship driving down from the northeast did blow south of Newfoundland, she would then meet and be carried back to the eastward by the Gulf Stream, which pours up along the American coast toward the northeast until it meets the Labrador Current just south of Newfoundland, at which point it is deflected sharply eastward.

Throughout the history of sail in the Western Ocean it has always been a recognized fact that a vessel would have to fight her way west if she attempted to make a direct passage from northern Europe, including the British Isles, to the New England coast. Wise skippers usually chose one of two round-about routes instead. They either sailed south to the Azores region, where they crossed the Atlantic with the Northeast Trades and then coasted north; or they laid their courses into high northern waters, crossed to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, to make Cape Race, and then beat west and south to their destinations through North American coastal waters.

There are many reports of sailing vessels that were trying to sail the direct course having been delayed by head seas, head winds, and a head current for as much as two months and finally giving up the attempt. The assumption that Bjarni’s vessel, whose crew was doing all that could be done to prevent their ship from making any southwesterly progress, was blown or drifted from southeast or eastern Greenland waters to the New England coast, requires us to ignore the very nature of the North Atlantic and the conditions which prevail upon it. It is easy enough to draw a line on a map from southeast Greenland waters to Cape Cod, and a hypothetical ship can then be made to drift the necessary distance of 1700 or 1800 nautical miles along that line. In practice it is an impossibility.

To drive a final spike into the heart of the New England landfall theory, there is the unassailable fact that Bjarni could never have regained the Eastern Settlement of Greenland from any place south of Newfoundland in the time, or on the courses, which are recorded in the saga.

There are two ways by which we can locate the landfall. In the first place we can attempt to reconstruct Bjarni’s course from the area where his drift began, using the data given to us in conjunction with a detailed study of the currents and of the prevailing weather conditions which he would have been likely to encounter. Unfortunately we cannot apply this method in a properly analytical way since Bjarni himself did not know where he was at any given time and was unable to keep track of his course by dead reckoning. There is, however, a way of reconstructing the drift in a different manner, which we will come to in a moment.

The second approach to the problem involves backtracking Bjarni from his final landfall in the Eastern Settlement. Happily the saga sailing directions from the point of first landfall in North America to the final landfall in Greenland are so complete that we can reverse them with little possibility of error.

If we apply both methods, and if the backtrack gives us a landfall in the area suggested by a reconstruction of the outbound voyage, we can feel confident that we have found the place where Bjarni first saw the coast of North America.

Since it was not feasible (nor, from my point of view, desirable) for me to repeat Bjarni’s drift, I dragooned several master mariners who had spent much of their lives skippering sailing vessels in North Atlantic waters into assisting me. One of these men commanded a whaler in Greenland waters for fifteen years. Three of them skippered Newfoundland schooners employed in the transatlantic salt-cod trade. One was captain of a square-rigged ship, and another spent thirty-two years aboard sealing vessels out of St. John’s. Another was master of a deep-sea salvage tug in the North Atlantic for twenty years and knew as much about the drift as any man alive.

I asked each of these men to assume that he was in command of a sailing vessel of a knorr’s size and capabilities in the area where Bjarni’s drift began. I gave them all the details recorded in the saga as to Bjarni’s intended course and the conditions he is reported to have encountered, and asked them to predict the landfall.

All of them replied that in such a ship, rigged as she was, they would not have expected to see North America at all unless the vessel was caught in a really sustained nor’easter—a “nine day wind”—in which case they thought she might have fetched the coast of Newfoundland or Labrador somewhere between Cape Race and Spotted Island. They were emphatic and, in the case of the tugboat skipper, profane about the impossibility of ever seeing any land on this side of the Atlantic if they happened to be blown so far south that they missed Newfoundland entirely. Three of them were prepared to add that the most likely landfall, in their opinions, would have been one of the headlands of the northeastern Newfoundland coast.

Using only the data available for the outbound voyage, we can narrow down the probable area of the landfall a little more. The saga description of it—“the country lacked mountains but was wooded and had small hills”—fits (or would have fitted before most sections of the shore were denuded of forests by colonial settlers) the coast from Cape Race to Spotted Island, with some conspicuous exceptions.

The whole of the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland must be eliminated since the Long Range Mountains, which form its spine, cannot possibly be described as “small hills.” This exclusion carries with it the automatic elimination of the great bight between Fogo Island and Cape Bauld, because if Bjarni had made his landfall anywhere within this bight, he could hardly have avoided seeing the Long Range Mountains. Furthermore, it is stated that after leaving the first landfall the ship sailed for two doegr before land was again sighted. It Bjarni had made his first landfall within the bight he would have coasted the land to the northeastward as far as Cape Bauld, at which point he would have been within sight of Labrador and would have continued coasting it.

These exclusions leave two widely separated stretches of coast still to be examined: the Labrador shore from the Strait of Belle Isle to Spotted Island; and the Newfoundland coast between Cape Race and Fogo Island.

When we now apply the second method—that of backtracking Bjarni’s course—we find that the Labrador stretch must be eliminated for several reasons. The distances and times involved become too foreshortened, and the descriptions of the last two American lands which Bjarni saw cannot be made to fit the actual terrain. Furthermore, there are not enough, or large enough, coastal indentations to account for the sequence of open-water passages. A complete reconstruction of the reverse course from the Eastern Settlements leads naturally to one part of coastal Newfoundland and one only—that section lying between Fogo Island and Cape Race.

The topography and the forest cover prior to the colonial period at almost any point along this stretch of coast fit the saga description perfectly. However, it can be assumed that Bjarni’s landfall would have been on a coast with a seaward exposure, rather than deep within one of the several great bays between Cape Race and Fogo, and so we can further reduce the possibilities to the east coast of the Avalon Peninsula, or to one of the headlands of the Bay de Verde, Bonavista or Cape Freels peninsulas, or to Fogo Island itself.

If any of these seems to have a slight edge over the others it is the straight, eighty-mile length of the Avalon Coast, which runs north-northeast from Cape Race to Cape St, Francis. This is not only the most easterly portion of North America, it is so oriented as to have been the most natural landfall for Bjarni’s ship, considering her probable position at the termination of her drift, and the actions taken by her crew when the fog finally cleared.

Bjarni’s Voyage Along the Coast

Regardless of the exact point of the landfall, Bjarni’s subsequent actions would have been part of a single pattern. He would have sailed northward in order to regain his lost latitude, keeping the land in sight as long as it continued to run in the direction he desired to go.

If his landfall was Cape Ray or the east coast of the Peninsula he would then have coasted north to Cape St. Francis, from where he would have raised Baccalieu Island and the headland of the Bay de Verde Peninsula. Crossing the mouth of Conception Bay, he would have passed Baccalieu, raised the Bonavista Peninsula and sailed northward to it across the mouth of Trinity Bay. Soon after leaving Bonavista on a northerly course he would have raised the Cape Freels headlands. A course line across these four headlands runs only slightly west of north, and so far Bjarni would have been going in the desired direction.

As he approached Cape Freels he would have found an extremely low-lying coast, for the flat, barely undulating and forest-clad interior runs almost imperceptibly into the sea along the twenty-five-mile stretch of shore. Perhaps lured by the illusion of a land more distant than it really was, Bjarni may have sailed in closer than usual. If he did he would have found himself in a hideous maze of sunkers, reefs, islets and shoals. This mariner’s nightmare extends for eight miles off the Cape Freels shore and has been a great ship-killer in its time. It would have given Bjarni, that careful navigator, a case of the horrors and he would have clawed off again as fast as possible.

Even holding so far offshore that the land was barely in sight, Bjarni would have begun to realize that this new stretch of coast was trending more to the west, but before he could have become too concerned about it he would have raised the abrupt contours of Fogo Island standing to the north.

The bold shores of this island—he would not have recognized it as an island, since to an observer crossing the mouth of Hamilton Sound the opening appears to be a landlocked bay—may have tempted him to come in closer to the land once again. Consequently when he passed the northeast headland of Fogo he would have had a clear view westward and would have seen no sign of any further land in that direction. He would have had the impression that the main land mass was actually falling away to the southwest, as indeed it does into Notre Dame Bay.

If there was one thing Bjarni would not have done under any circumstances it would have been to take a course which increased his southing. He may now have concluded that the series of headlands he had been coasting belonged to a large island, and that since he had evidently reached its northern end, there was nothing for it but to set a course northward into the open sea.

Accepting the inevitable, he trimmed his sail for the new course and steered northward away from the “first” land.

They left this country to port and turned the sail towards the land. After that they sailed for two doegr before they saw another land.

I interpret this as meaning that they left Fogo and the Notre Dame Bay coast (what they could see of it) behind them over the port after quarter. The sail was trimmed so that the yard was swung to the port side of the ship with the yard pointing aft over the port quarter in the direction of the land. This would have meant that they had a wind from between east and east-southeast. Since they referred to the wind which brought them to the second land as being a fair wind, the likelihood is that it was east-southeast—a quartering breeze.

With the wind from easterly, Bjarni’s knorr would have made leeway to the westward. In addition she would have been set westward by the Labrador Current. This current sweeps southerly along the Labrador coast to the Strait of Belle Isle, where one limb turns west into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and another turns southwestward to pour down into the great northeastern bight of Newfoundland. The westerly set to which Bjarni’s knorr would have been subjected would have amounted to about twenty-four miles in two days on the course he was steering. To this we must add at least another ten miles for two days’ leeway.¹

If he had actually maintained a course due north from Fogo he would have gone sailing straight up through Davis Strait and would not have seen land again until he got to Disco, some 1200 nautical miles to the north. But we know that he did see land in two doegrs’ distance. This land could only have been some portion of the Labrador coast. However, in order to have made a landfall on the Labrador, he would have had to sail a course over-the-bottom of the order of north twelve degrees west. This twelve-degree westward set is almost exactly accounted for by the combined effects of the current and his leeway.

Every year during the century and a half which ended with the beginning of the Second World War, large fleets of Newfoundland schooners used to put out from Trinity, Conception and Bonavista bays bound for the summer cod fishery on the Labrador. Few masters of these vessels had charts or even knew how to use them. But the skippers who had compasses knew the course they had to steer from Fogo, their departure point, in order to raise a certain landmark called the Round Hills on the Labrador between Hawke Harbour and Domino (Spotted Island)—the turning point where the Labrador coast bends sharply westward into Sandwich Bay. This course had been established by purely empirical means over many generations, and it was 10 degrees east of the actual magnetic course. This was an allowance for the effect of the Labrador Current.

Bjarni, sailing north without making any allowance for the current, about whose existence he could have known nothing, would have followed an over-the-bottom track which in two doegr would have taken him to a point off the Labrador where he would have raised the Round Hills. Furthermore, he could not have raised any other land en route on such a course except, just possibly, Belle Isle. But if he saw Belle Isle at all he would have seen it from a considerable distance and would doubtless have evaluated it as a small isolated island off in the sea by itself.

A mariner approaching the Labrador coast between Hawke Harbour and Domino sees what appears to be a level and almost featureless land forming a monotonous, slowly rising plain which becomes part of the Labrador Plateau at a distance inland of twenty to thirty miles. In Bjarni’s time it was forested to the edge of the mainland shore, and most of the innumerable off-lying islands were also timbered, as is shown by the relic forests still found on their barren slopes.

The only useful landmarks on the whole of this long stretch of coast are the domes of the Round Hills which reach heights of between 600 and 800 feet. They are important landmarks only because the rest of the country is so completely featureless. The most easterly of them, on Venison Island, is 680 feet high and has a seaward visibility of about 30 nautical miles. It is the first land seen by ships approaching this coast.

They soon approached this country and saw it to be flat and widely wooded.

His people asked Bjarni if he thought this second land might be Greenland, and he replied that it was no more like Greenland than the first had been: “For,” he said, “very large snow [or ice] mountains are reported to be in Greenland.”

Having unexpectedly encountered land again, and moreover a land which bore strong resemblances to the one he had left behind him, Bjarni may have begun to doubt that the first land was an island after all. He would have remembered that up until the time he abandoned the first land he had been making his way from headland to headland across a series of increasingly large bays, but always on a steady north-by-northwest course. The possibility may now have occurred to him that instead of passing from one separate island to another, he had only crossed a particularly large bay.

As he coasted north past Domino and Spotted Island he would have seen a now familiar pattern repeating itself as the coast again began to run off to the westward.

Considering the way the coast of this new world seemed to behave, Bjarni was perhaps tempted to follow it for a short distance to see if it might veer north again. If he went only as far as Grady Island he would have been rewarded by seeing the distant land horizon curving north. If he then took a northward departure from Grady Island he would still have had the comforting presence of land to the west of him—although a long way to the west—as he crossed the mouth of the Grosswater Bay–Sandwich Bay bight.

His next close approach to shore would have been to the outer islands of the eastward-thrusting Holton Peninsula. Perhaps it was here that the “fair wind failed” and the men wished to go ashore. By “failing” the saga means that the wind fell out, leaving the vessel becalmed, perhaps near some of the islands of the Indian Harbour archipelago, where the men might have felt it was safe to risk a landing.

They may have thought so, but Bjarni disagreed. He seems to have been determined to take no avoidable risks. He kept his people on board ship, and at the first whisper of the breeze making-up he ordered the sail hoisted.

After passing through or around the White Bear Island complex off Indian Harbour, he would again have found the coast running away to the west-northwest. At this juncture Bjarni might reasonably have concluded that the entire coast consisted of many great northward-trending bays, and that if he did more or less what he had done at Fogo Island he might hope to cross the next bight and rejoin the coast again where it swung easterly at its northern termination. Such a conclusion might even have encouraged him to hope that these new lands connected with the east-facing portion of Greenland known as the Vestri Obygdir. He may therefore have decided that it would be wise to make a greater effort to keep track of the coast.

He may have deliberately chosen a course somewhat west of north in order to decrease the chances of losing touch with the land; or because of the possibility of error latent in the use of the North Star (see preceding footnote) he may have steered a somewhat westerly course by accident. We do not know what the course was, but if we assume it to have been about north-northwest, we would be close to the mark.

If we lay out such a course on the chart we get a shock. The course line crosses the Nain Bight and then runs more or less parallel to north Labrador, but about fifty miles offshore. At first glance it looks as if this would be a sufficient distance from the coast to ensure that Bjarni and his people would see nothing but salt water until they arrived at Hall Peninsula on Baffin Island, which lies 560 nautical miles from the White Bear Islands but which, considering the adverse effects of the Labrador and Canadian currents, would have taken Bjarni about seven days to reach.

However, the sea chart does not tell us everything. Before jumping to conclusions we must look at the land forms along the route Bjarni seems to have followed.

Between the White Bear Islands and the Kaumajet Peninsula far up the Labrador, the coast is indented by the immense Nain Bight. On the map this bight appears to be rather shallow; but that is only because it makes such a vast sweep from south to north. If we draw a line from the White Bear Islands to Cape Mugford on the Kaumajet, we find that the bight is of the order of fifty miles in depth. And due to the fact that the land forms behind it are generally very low, it appears to run off even farther to the westward than it actually does.

The northeasterly termination of this great bight coincides with a metamorphosis in the nature of the Labrador. Beginning at the Kiglapait Mountains just south of the Kaumajet Peninsula, the flat, mostly formless, and heavily forested topography which characterizes the southern two thirds of Labrador undergoes an abrupt transformation. Barren and immensely rugged mountains suddenly leap skyward. The coastal forests vanish. The line of demarcation between these two totally different types of country is knife sharp. The Kaumajet Peninsula marks the beginning of the subarctic Torngat Mountain range, which dominates—and in fact is—the north Labrador Peninsula.

The seaward visibility of the land south of Kiglapait is seldom greater than twenty miles. However, to the north of Kiglapait the land can be seen from seaward for an average distance of sixty miles; and the Kaumajet can be, and frequently is, seen from ninety miles to seaward.

This seaward visibility limit is the working coast for coastwise navigators. It is of far greater importance than the actual coastline, except when a ship must put in to land. Consequently in any reconstruction of a coasting voyage, this visibility coast is what we must bear foremost in our minds. In tracing Bjarni thus far we have been relying heavily on the characteristics of the visibility coast, but this is the point at which we can best illustrate its importance.

The Kaumajet is the most spectacular landmark on the eastern continental shores of North America. It is a fingerlike peninsula thirty miles in length which juts out into the sea in a southeasterly direction from the upper lip of the Nain Bight. It is a mountain range in its own right, and its highest peaks rise more than 4000 feet within half a mile of the sea. It is actually the southern bastion of the ensuing stretch of mountainous coast which runs north to the end of Labrador, and which is practically indistinguishable from the southwest Greenland coast except that it is even more barren. It has no proper glaciers as modern geographers define the word, but many of the peaks of the Torngats, which reach altitudes of 5300 feet, remain snow-covered throughout the year, even during the hottest summers. There are also numerous glacierettes, which are local accumulations of snow that have been compressed to form an approximation of glacial ice.

Bjarni’s visibility coast while he was crossing the Nain Bight would have lain far out of sight to port. By the time he had made a three-doegr passage without raising any further sign of the western lands, he may have assumed that this time he really had lost touch with them for good, perhaps through not putting enough westing in his course. No doubt he accepted this loss phlegmatically and determined to hold on to the north in the open sea until he reached the proper latitude, could turn east along it, and so eventually come to the settled area of Greenland.

He would have been startled when, at the end of the third day, or at the beginning of the fourth, the lookout at the masthead reported seeing land off the port quarter. Bjarni would then have altered course toward it, perhaps wryly cursing himself for his lack of faith in his own earlier conclusions about the nature of the coast.

He would have expected to close with the land fairly quickly, at first assuming it to be a continuation of the low and featureless coasts he had by now come to know rather well. But as the hours passed and the landfall lifted only very slowly over the horizon, he would have guessed that this was something different. Finally when mountain peaks and the white gleam of snow became unmistakably recognizable, he would have realized that he had reached a new land and he may have felt the leaping hope that it might be a southward extension of that part of Greenland lying northwest from the settlement area.

We leave the knorr closing with the mountain coast, and look back to the beginning of this passage.

The chart distance from the White Bear Islands along a north-northwest course to its intersection with the visibility coast of the Kaumajet is 230 nautical miles. However, the saga tells us that Bjarni covered three doegr, which would be about 360 nautical miles, between departure and landfall. It therefore looks as if the Kaumajet could not have been his third landfall after all. But once again appearances are deceptive.

On this leg of his voyage Bjarni would have been sailing squarely into the teeth of the south-flowing Labrador Current. Although its rate of flow varies considerably, on the average the Labrador Current runs southward between the Kaumajet and Indian Harbour at a speed of between one and one-half and two knots, at a distance off shore of between eight to thirty miles.

This represents a speed of 36 to 48 nautical miles per day. If we take the mean of 42 miles and subtract this from the distance Bjarni’s knorr would normally have run in a day, his actual distance covered over-the-bottom falls to 78 miles. Since Bjarni would have had no way of knowing about this current, he may not have realized that his three-doegr passage was foreshortened. In this case three doegr would have represented a distance of about 224 nautical miles.

We therefore conclude that the Kaumajet, whose Eskimo name means White Mountains and is derived from the fact that the peaks are usually snow covered throughout the year, was Bjarni’s third landfall. The Bishop’s Mitre peaks are frequently seen from ninety miles at sea. This is an almost fog-free coast in summer, and excellent visibility is the rule except during easterly weather, which is rare. The saga description of the land is brief but exact:

This land was high and mountainous with snow [or ice] mountains on it. The men asked if Bjarni wanted to lay the ship to shore here, but he said he would not, “because it appears to me that this is a useless country.”

As Bjarni closed with the Kaumajet he would have seen the white spine of the still higher main range of the Torngats running away into the north. Even if, in this period of a warm climatic cycle, the Kaumajets were snow free, the great peaks to the north would probably have still borne snowfields. There is a further description of this land in the Greenlanders Story, where it is attributed to Leif Eriksson’s voyage. In describing Helluland, Bjarni’s third land, it says: “Like one stony cliff was all from the snow-mountains to the sea.” It would be hard to better this description as it applies to the Torngat coast. At Kaumajet itself there is a face on the Bishop’s Mitre which falls 2000 feet sheer into the sea, and to the north the coast is one long sequence of great sea cliffs.

It was certainly a useless land. It always has been, and no doubt always will be. Its coastal waters are cold enough to inhibit plant growth ashore, but not cold enough to encourage a big sea mammal population. Not even Eskimos have ever been able to make much use of it. Its cliff-sided fiords, bare of all except the hardiest arctic vegetation; its towering coastal cliffs; and the fantastic jumble of crags and peaks in the interior all combine to give it an air of forbidding desolation which knows no relief. The coast of the Cumberland Peninsula on Baffin Island seems almost hospitable by comparison.

Some authors have claimed that Bjarni’s third land had to be either Resolution Island or the south part of Baffin Island. This suggests a lack of knowledge of these areas. There is nothing north of the Torngat coast which is even vaguely comparable to it until the Cumberland Peninsula is reached. But the Cumberland Peninsula lies more than 300 nautical miles north of the latitude of the Eastern Settlement in Greenland, and we can rest assured that Bjarni would have turned east when he reached the correct latitude as, indeed, the saga makes it plain he did.

They did not lower the sail but continued on along the land until they saw it was an island. [Then] they again set the stern toward the land and held out to sea with the same fair wind.

Whatever opinion he may finally have held about the relationships the other two lands bore to each other, Bjarni was sure that this one was a separate island. He had every reason to think so. It was totally different in appearance from the previous two lands. It would have seemed to him to have an abrupt southern beginning near the Kaumajet. He discovered for himself, as he coasted northward, that it had a very definite northern end, for he would have reached his desired latitude coincidental with the termination of this third land at Gray Strait, just north of Cape Chidley. From Bjarni’s point of view nothing short of an attempted circumnavigation of it could have given him any reason to think that the Torngat Peninsula was not in fact an island.

The balance of the saga account tells us how he took his departure from this “island” and sailed for four doegr to the eastward (he still had the fair southwesterly wind) and fetched up very close to Herjolfsness in southern Greenland. Four doegr is the correct distance for the crossing out of sight of land between Cape Chidley and Herjolfsness. The course is almost due east, between north latitudes 60 degrees 10 minutes and 60 degrees 20 minutes.

This final leg of Bjarni’s journey requires some further comment, since a number of authors have dealt harshly with the whole account of the voyage because of it. Having habituated themselves to thinking of ancient navigators as semisavages who fumbled their way around the seas in haphazard fashion, they cannot bring themselves to believe that Bjarni’s eventual recovery of Greenland could have been anything but accidental. Then they argue that the saga statement which tells us that he completed his final, four-doegr passage by making a landfall near Herjolfsness is quite incredible on any accidental basis. From this they deduce that it did not happen, but was the invention of some imaginative saga-man. Their final conclusion is that since this much was invented, the whole account of Bjarni’s voyage must be an invention too.

This leaves the way clear for Leif Eriksson to discover America, but it does as much injustice to our intelligence as it does to the seafaring abilities of Bjarni Herjolfsson. The reader who has borne with this necessarily somewhat tedious reconstruction of Bjarni’s voyage is invited to draw his own conclusions as to whether the saga account is an invention, or whether it is the simple, direct and accurate account of a very competent piece of navigation on the part of the first European of whom we have any certain knowledge to have reached the mainland of the North American continent.

Appendix L: Leif Eriksson’s Vinland Discovery

I. The Outward Voyage

The evidence supporting the assumption that Leif made a direct voyage from Southwest Greenland to Newfoundland

Next it is to be told that Bjarni Herjolfsson came to visit Jarl Erik and was well received. Bjarni told of his travels when he had seen these [new] lands and he was thought by many to have been lacking in enterprise since he had so little to tell of those lands. Because of this he was somewhat derided. Bjarni became an adherent of the Jarl’s and went out to Greenland the following summer.

“There was now [some years later] much talk [in Greenland] of landseeking voyages. Leif, son of Erik the Red of Brattalid, went to visit Bjarni Herjolfsson and bought his ship from him ...”

Thus does the Greenlanders Story open on a note of large confusion. If this version of Bjarni’s activities is to be taken at face value it would mean that he went from Greenland to Norway not earlier than the summer of 1001, at which date Jarl Erik Hakonarsson became Danish viceroy for part of the coastal regions of Norway, following upon the death of King Olaf Tryggvason in the autumn of 1000. It would also mean that Bjarni could not have returned to Greenland earlier than 1002, whereupon there was talk among the Greenlanders of seeking out those lands Bjarni had discovered in 985. Leif then became interested and bought Bjarni’s ship, and, according to this chronology, he could not have sailed for Vinland before the spring of 1003, since there would not have been time for him to outfit and to get away in what remained of the 1002 sailing season.

Apart from the fact that it is ridiculous to believe that it required a visit by Bjarni to Erik Hakonarsson in order to rouse the Greenlanders to an interest in exploring the lands Bjarni had sighted seventeen years earlier, all sources agree that Leif’s Vinland voyage took place before King Olaf’s death in the year 1000. It probably took place before Leif even visited Olaf—a visit which had to be made at some time between 995 and 1000, the duration of Olaf’s reign.

Because of its impossible chronology this paragraph from the Greenlanders Story poses an apparently insoluble problem. Nevertheless there is a simple solution to it.

The author has apparently confused two Eriks. A Jarl Erik was undoubtedly mentioned in the old source he drew upon, and he assumed that this had to be Erik Hakonarsson. Acting on this assumption he found it necessary to postulate a voyage by Bjarni to visit Erik in Norway—a voyage which could not have been made prior to 1001. The mistake made by the author was that he confused Erik Hakonarsson with Erik the Red. I conclude it was Erik the Red, not Erik Hakonarsson, whom Bjarni visited, and the visit took place soon after Bjarni’s arrival in Greenland in 985.

Such an error could readily have arisen out of the use of the title jarl in the ancient sources. At the time the Greenlanders Story was written, this word meant earl in the sense of a title bestowed by a king or inherited through aristocratic lineage. However in tenth-century usage it had a much broader meaning. In those times it was frequently an honorific title attached to the name of a prominent chieftain—and sometimes even self-bestowed. Thus the Erik who was the undisputed chieftain of the Greenland settlements would have been likely to acquire or to adopt the title jarl, and to have been so referred to by his supporters and retainers. The skald or skalds who composed the lay which later formed the basis of the Greenlanders Story may well have referred to Erik by such a title, since it was almost de rigeur for skalds to heap compliments upon the subjects of their sagas.

The probability that such a confusion did take place, combined with the unequivocal statement in the Short Saga to the effect that Bjarni never again went on distant voyages after he reached Herjolfsness in 985, adequately disposes of the problem.

Leif begged his father to be the leader of the expedition. Erik excused himself, saying he was too old and that he could not endure the hardships of the sea as before. Leif said that, with good luck, he might still be the family leader and then Erik yielded to Leif and rode from home when they were ready, and they had not far to go to the ship.

The horse which Erik rode stumbled and he fell off its back and hurt his foot. Then said Erik, “It is not fated for me to find more lands than this one where we dwell, and so we can no longer travel together.” Erik went home to Brattalid and Leif went to the ship with his followers, numbering thirty men. There was a southern man with them called Tyrker. They made the ship ready for sea and went to sea when they had finished, and found that country which Bjarni found last. They sailed to land there and cast anchor and put out the boat and went ashore and saw no grass there. Large snow-mountains [alternatively, snow fields] were seen far away, but like one stony cliff was all from the snow-mountains to the sea and it seemed to them that this land was good for nothing.

Then quoth Leif, “It has not happened to us as it did to Bjarni with this country, that we have not landed on it. Now I will give a name to the country and call it Helluland.”

Afterwards they went to the ship and then sailed on the sea and found another country. They sailed again to land and cast anchor, then put out the boat and got ashore. This land was level and wood-covered and [there were] wide white sands wherever they went and [it] was not steep at the shore.

Then said Leif, “After its quality shall this country have a name, and be called Markland.” They went after that to the ship as fast as possible.

They sailed out to sea before a northeaster and were out for 11 doegr before they saw land. They sailed to this land.

The account of Erik’s abortive participation in this voyage is an example of the transpositions of incidents with which the Greenlanders Story is replete. This particular incident has been transposed, with some modifications, from its proper place in the later voyage of Thorstein Eriksson which is described in great detail in both the Erik the Red and the Thorfinn Karlsefni sagas. In these versions nothing is said of Erik’s being inhibited from fresh adventuring by old age. Since Leif’s voyage took place (as we shall show) about 995, when Erik was probably no more than forty-five years old, the plea of old age would seem to be a literary invention. In this connection it is noteworthy that the author of the Greenlanders Story kills Erik off shortly after Leif’s voyage, but before Christianity is said to have come to Greenland; while it is established from independent sources that Erik was alive and hale as late as the year 1005, and that Leif brought Christianity to Greenland prior to the death of Olaf Tryggvason in 1000.

The account of Leif’s outward journey seems to contain elements from the records of three separate voyages: Bjarni’s, Leif’s, and the combined voyages led by Thorvald Eriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni. From the phrase went to sea when they had finished to now they sailed from thence before a northeaster the account is a mélange concocted from elements of the Bjarni voyage and from the Thorvald-Karlsefni voyage.

While the reports of the Bjarni and Karlsefni voyages, as given in the Short Saga and the Erik the Red and Karlsefni sagas, include such detailed sailing directions that the routes can be accurately followed even today, no such instructions are to be found in the initial stages of the Greenlanders Story version of Leif’s voyage. After the entertaining but spurious description of Erik’s tribulations, the author wafts Leif directly to Bjarni’s northernmost land and then describes this land in terms which are almost identical with those which appear in the Short Saga account of Bjarni’s voyage, and in the Erik the Red and Karlsefni sagas. The combined description from these three sources reads:

This land was high and mountainous with snow-mountains [alternatively: snow fields] on it ... it appeared that this was a useless country ... they [launched a boat] and explored that country. They found there many great stones [hellur] ... there were many arctic foxes there ... they gave a name to this country and called it Helluland.

The Greenlanders Story adds only that there was no grass, a fact which could easily have been inferred from, if indeed it was not actually mentioned in, the original account of Bjarni’s voyage. Apart from this the Greenlanders Story version fleshes out the tale with some braggadocio attributed to Leif, which makes it more interesting but not more plausible.

For the next leg of the exploration—to the second land—the Short Saga and the Eric the Red and Karlsefni sagas again supply specific distances and directions in accord with normal saga convention, while the Greenlanders Story is hopelessly vague. This time the actual description of the second land seems to be derived from the accounts of the Thorvald-Karlsefni voyage, but it is much briefer and far more general that in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, where Markland is described in the following terms:

From thence [Helluland] they sailed two doegr and bore away from the south toward the southeast until they reached a wooded country containing many animals. An island lay off to the southeast of this country and there they killed a bear so they called this Bjarney [ Bear Island], while they called this wooded land Markland [Forest Land].

Then they sailed southward along this land [Markland] and after two doegr they came to a cape. . . . Here was a havenless coast with a long sandy beach and dunes. They rowed to the shore in boats and found upon a headland there [a hill which resembled?] the keel of a ship from which they named that headland Kialarness [Keel Point]. They called the strands there Furdustrandir [Marvelous Shore, in the sense of amazing] because they took so long to sail past them.

Now let us look again at the account of Leif’s supposed visit to this same land:

This land was level and wood-covered and [there were] wide white sands wherever they went and [it] was not steep at the shore.

There is only one truly remarkable stretch of sand beach on the eastern seaboard of Labrador or Newfoundland. This is Porcupine Strand, lying north of Sandwich Bay, and the description of it given in connection with the Thorvald-Karlsefni voyage, including the singular feature of Kialarness (Cape Porcupine), establishes its identity beyond question. If Leif had actually seen Furdustrandir himself the account of his voyage would surely have dealt with such a spectacular piece of country and prominent landmark at considerable length. But the author of the Greenlanders Story does not mention the salient feature of Kialarness in connection with Leif’s voyage since he required the description of Kialarness to embellish a later, chronologically impossible, and supposedly independent voyage by Thorvald Eriksson.

The crux of the argument which we are developing, to the effect that Leif never did sail down the Labrador coast at all, is contained in the next phrase in the Greenlanders Story version:

They sailed out to sea before a northeaster and were out for II doegr before they saw land. They sailed to this land. . . .

In saga and sailing parlance the phrase they sailed before a northeaster means that they were running before the wind, and that their course therefore was southwesterly. But it would have been impossible for Leif to sail southwest from Markland and the vicinity of Furdustrandir unless he sailed either overland or down into Sandwich Bay, which as we show later in our text was certainly not Vinland even if it had been two doegr deep.

In order to reach Newfoundland, or any other territory south of Labrador, Leif would have been forced to sail southeasterly from Furdustrandir to Domino, then south at least as far as Belle Isle. But according to the Greenlanders Story his course was southwesterly, and moreover, he maintained it out of sight of land for a distance of II doegr.

I have already demonstrated that Bjarni’s southernmost land was the east coast of Newfoundland. If we now project Leif’s final, and only stated, course back in a northeasterly direction from that southern land for two doegr out of sight of land, we find that his point of departure would have had to be near the middle of the Labrador Sea on a line connecting eastern Newfoundland with southwestern Greenland. This is an obvious absurdity, but if we project the course backward for a total distance of five doegr we get a departure point on the Greenland coast between Cape Farewell and the Eastern Settlement.

The discrepancy between the stated and the actual distances can be resolved in one of two ways. In the first place it is possible that a change from five to two doegr was deliberately made by the Greenlanders Story’s author in order to make his text conform with the distance between Bjarni’s southern and middle lands—Vinland and Markland—which is given as two doegr in the Short Saga.

On the other hand it would have been easy enough for some previous scribe to have misread a V, often written as U, in the original account as II; in which case the author of the Greenlanders Story would only have been perpetuating the error.¹ If this is what happened, it might help explain why he routed Leif down the Labrador coast, for he would have known (whatever else he failed to realize) that II doegr was far less than the direct distance from Greenland to Vinland, and since it was exactly the distance between Bjarni’s first and second land, he might have been led to conclude that Leif must have retraced Bjarni’s route.

Assuming that he reached such an erroneous conclusion he would then have been faced with the fact that no details of such a voyage existed. This need not have been an obstacle, since he could have reconstructed the “lost” section of the voyage by using the Short Saga or the Erik the Red and Thorfinn Karlsefni sagas (or one of their ancestral recensions) to supply him with the requisite information about Helluland and Markland. Of course if he used the voyage material in this way, he would have been unable to make use of the details of the Bjarni and Thorvald-Karlsefni voyage in their proper places. This seems to be exactly what he did, since he tells us nothing about Bjarni’s voyage except that it took place, and when he deals with the Thorvald-Karlsefni voyage he says only that the ships put to sea from Greenland and came safely to Leif’s booths in Vinland.

I have noted how, in connection with Leif’s voyage, the Greenlanders Story seems to ignore the usual saga convention of giving sailing directions. But this is more an apparent failure than a real one. It does give one set of partial instructions—from Greenland to Newfoundland direct. These instructions are brief, but this is partly because they deal with a single uncomplicated course over the open ocean. Furthermore, when the Greenlanders Story finally gets Leif to Vinland it gives us a detailed and very accurate description of that country and of its approaches—a description which is fully in accord with what we would have expected if the Vinland landfall was indeed Leif’s first landfall in the New World. The contrast between this description and the perfunctory and generalized descriptions of Markland and Helluland is a telling one.

My conclusion is that the author of the Greenlanders Story had at hand a transcript of the original saga account which read approximately like this. “Now they readied their ship [in Greenland] and went to sea when they had finished. They sailed from thence on the sea before a northeaster and were out for U doegr before they saw land . . .” (followed by the account of the approach to, and description of Vinland).

Perhaps as a consequence of honest ignorance, or of a misleading error in the text, as I have already suggested; or perhaps in a deliberate effort to glorify Leif and the Greenlanders at the particular expense of Karlsefni and his Icelanders (and at the incidental expense of Bjarni Herjolfsson²) the author of the Greenlanders Story inserted a fictional prelude into his account in which he made Leif retrace Bjarni’s entire route, thereby making him the discoverer of Helluland and Markland as well as of Vinland.

There remains the question of whether it is reasonable to suppose that Leif would have attempted to reach Bjarni’s southernmost land by sailing directly to it from southern Greenland.

Leif would have had no conceivable reason for exploring Bjarni’s northern land, since as Bjarni noted it was of no use to anybody. It was the southerly lands, with their abundance of timber, which would have attracted him, and if he had been confident of being able to lay and sail a course to one of these he would hardly have been inclined to backtrack Bjarni.

Could he have felt confident in attempting a direct passage? I believe that Bjarni—from whom he bought his ships—would have been able to provide him with all the information necessary to make such a voyage, while carrying it out successfully would have called for no more than ordinary Norse seafaring ability.

Bjarni himself had been unable to sail directly to south Greenland from his original North American landfall only because the Norse had no way of determining relative longitude—the amount of westering, in this case. However, by the time he reached Herjolfsness he would have amassed enough data to enable him to estimate the approximate longitude, or westering, of his southern land. He had sailed consistently north-northwest from his first landfall until he reached the latitude of the Eastern Settlement, whereupon he had sailed due east until he reached Herjolfsness. He knew approximately the lengths (in terms of doegr) of both the north-northwestern and the eastern legs of the triangle, of which the third side was the direct course from south Greenland to what became Leif’s Vinland. Without possessing any knowledge of mathematics, Bjarni could have worked out the course for this direct passage by means of a rough sketch, drawn on the ground if necessary. The course he arrived at, by whatever empirical method he chose to use, would not have been dead accurate, but it would have served. Furthermore, he would undoubtedly have been able to provide Leif with the relative latitude of the southern land so that if Leif had found that he was unable to maintain the suggested course, or if it had proved to be inaccurate, he could still have made the correct landfall simply by sailing south to the proper latitude and then running down it to the west.

There would have been no special risk involved in such a passage. On the other hand the difficulties inherent in an attempt to retrace the whole of Bjarni’s route, with its many courses, landfalls and distances, would have been considerable; not to mention the fact that this backtrack course would have been nearly twice as long as the direct route.

A direct voyage by Leif would have had both a precedent and a closely related antecedent. It will be remembered that Erik the Red’s outbound route in 981 entailed following a dog-leg course from Iceland west to the vicinity of Angmagssalik, then a long southward coasting voyage to the south tip of Greenland. But on his homeward voyage to Iceland in 984 he must have plotted and sailed a direct course from south Greenland to Iceland—a course which Bjarni, acting on instructions which could only have come from Erik, attempted in reverse in 985. This was an open-ocean passage of about the same length as the direct passage from south Greenland to Vinland. Furthermore, it is apparent that when Leif’s brother Thorstein and their father Erik attempted to reach Vinland a year or two after Leif’s return from there, they sailed a direct course. That they were unsuccessful seems to have been due to the fact that they did not possess as much relevant information as was available to Leif when he set sail from Greenland.³

One point remains to be mentioned. When Leif left Vinland for home, the Greenlanders Story tells us that “Now they sailed to sea and got a fair wind until they saw the mountains under the glaciers of Greenland. . . .” This is a straightforward description of a direct passage, and while it is not conclusive evidence in itself, it shows us that there could have been no serious impediment to the passage having been direct both ways.

The Erik the Red and the Thorfinn Karlsefni Sagas offer an entirely different account of Leif’s Vinland voyage and one which flatly contradicts the Greenlanders Story version.

This account is preceded by a very full chronicling of Leif’s voyage from Greenland to Norway, during which he spent some time on the Hebrides, where he fathered a bastard child. His subsequent arrival in Norway and his dealings with King Olaf Tryggvason, who baptized Leif and persuaded him to become his agent in Greenland, is recorded in considerable detail. However, the account of the return voyage to Greenland is truncated, and in the middle of it there appears a remarkably brief—considering the importance of the matter—notice which purports to tell the story of the discovery of Vinland.

Leif put to sea [from Norway] when his ship was ready. For a long time he was tossed about on the ocean and came upon lands of which he had no previous knowledge. Self-sown wheatfields and vines were growing there. There were also those trees which are called masur⁴ and of all these they took samples. Some of the timber was big enough to use for building purposes. Leif found men on a wreck [as he neared the Greenland coast] and took them with him and procured quarters for them [in Greenland] that winter ... he was well received by everyone and he soon proclaimed Christianity throughout the land. . . .

According to this notice (it is hardly more than that), Leif discovered Vinland by accident when he was blown to the coast of North America while homeward bound from Norway to Greenland. He is supposed to have lingered in the new land only briefly and to have hastened on to Greenland that same season. Most authors have agreed that the divergencies between this account and the Greenlanders Story version cannot be reconciled. They have therefore usually tried to resolve the conflict by accepting one of the two versions and rejecting the other. Those who have chosen the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas version have tried to give it greater force by quoting some nine additional—and even briefer—references to the accidental-discovery story culled from a number of Icelandic sagas and related sources. The three which we quote are fully representative of all the rest.

Leif the Lucky found Vinland and then found merchants in distress at sea and by God’s mercy saved their lives, and he introduced Christianity into Greenland. [From AM 194, a fourteenth-century manuscript]

King Olaf Tryggvason . . . sent Leif Eriksson to Greenland to proclaim the faith there. Then Leif found Vinland the Good. He also found men on a wreck at sea, wherefore he was called Leif The Lucky. [From a thirteenth-century recension of the Kristni-Saga]

Olaf sent Leif to Greenland ... and he departed at once. He found men on a shipwreck in the sea and saved them. Then he found Vinland the Good. [From the thirteenth-century Heimskringla recension of the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason]

An examination of these brief notices, all of which date from several hundred years after Leif’s time, with their disordered references to the three salient events in Leif’s life, makes it obvious that they were originally derived either from the quoted passage in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas or from a source common to them all. They are thus no more than repetitions of the original notice, and as such they do nothing to confirm the authenticity of the initial statement.

If we are to accept this version we must not only abandon the Greenlanders Story version in toto but we must also discard the story of Bjarni Herjolfsson, which is perhaps the most convincing of all the accounts of the Western voyages. Having done this we are in effect left with nothing to show that Leif ever made a Vinland voyage at all except for the one brief notice. It is apparent that this notice does not provide sufficient evidence upon which to base a secure claim that Leif discovered anything.

I contend that either through accident or design this notice is in error and is an interpolation in the original saga account of Leif’s journey to and from Norway. A careful reading of the account of the return voyage certainly gives the impression that the notice is an interjection, and one which has the effect of stuffing an already dramatic story to the bursting point by the addition of an event of great magnitude about which we are given totally inadequate information.

The insertion of this notice may have been brought about in one of two ways. The clerks who transcribed one of the ancestral versions of the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas may have worked from a partial copy of an older recension from which the account of Leif’s Vinland voyage and of Bjarni’s earlier voyage were missing. However, a full account of the Norway voyage survived, and since the copyists would have been aware that Leif had made a Vinland voyage—a fact which would have endured in no matter how imperfect a form as part of the general historical background of the Icelanders—it would have been natural for them to insert a notice of it in what seemed to be the most logical place in the existing saga. As for Bjarni Herjolfsson’s voyage, the copyists might never have heard of it at all, or if they did have some vague knowledge of it, they may have been at a loss to know how to relate it to the story of Leif and so either ignored it or else blended it into the account of Leif’s discovery of Vinland.

Some echo of Barni’s voyage does seem to have survived in the Erik the Red-Karlsefni notice, which opens with the sentence:

For a long time he was tossed about on the ocean and came upon lands of which he had no previous knowledge.

This sounds suspiciously like a condensed description of Bjarni’s voyage to North America. The possibility that the section of the Old Erik Saga which dealt with Bjarni’s and Leif’s New World voyages may have been lost before the Erik the Red and Karlsefni recensions were made is strengthened by an examination of the Short Saga. This fragment is from the same original source as the other two, and up to a certain point it is very similar to them. However, the Short Saga includes a full and detailed story of Bjarni Herjolfsson’s voyage, beginning at a point in the narrative where there is a notable gap in the chronology as it is recorded in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas.

The alternative explanation is that the original accounts of Bjarni’s and Leif’s voyages, as they were preserved in the Old Erik Saga, were deliberately suppressed by the copyists of the Erik the Red-Karlsefni recensions. Since these two recensions were prepared in Iceland by Icelanders it is possible that the feud with which I deal at length in the body of the text and in Appendix M, between the Greenlandic and Icelandic explorers in the west may have been perpetuated here. It is perhaps significant that the Karlsefni Saga, which antedates its sister version, the Erik the Red Saga, is believed to have been prepared by, or at the order of, Hauk Erlendsson, who was a direct descendant of Thorfinn Karlsefni.

But no matter how partisan Erlendsson may have been, neither he nor any other Icelandic scribe of the period could have entirely ignored Leif’s voyage, since, as I have noted, knowledge that it had taken place must have been wide-spread. But an account of the exploit could have been and actually was reduced to a single brusque reference placed out of its correct context, and the importance of the voyage was downgraded to that of a mere accident.

I conclude that Leif made two separate and distinct voyages of major importance. One of these—and it would most logically have been the earlier—was a direct voyage from Greenland to Vinland following up the original discovery of the new lands by Bjarni Herjolfsson.

The second major voyage, which probably took place some years later, was to Norway, where Leif became a Christian and the chief tool of King Olaf Tryggvason in his attempt to gain control over the distant Greenland settlements.

Either deliberately or unwittingly the copyists responsible for the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas combined these two voyages into one.

II: The Location Of Vinland

They made their ship ready for sea and when all was ready they sailed out to sea before a northeaster and were out for II [U] doegr before they sighted land.

They sailed to land, reaching an island which lay to the northward of the country, and they went up there and looked about them in fine weather. There was dew on the grass and they touched the dew with their hands and brought it to their mouths, and they thought they had never known anything to taste so sweet.⁵

After that they returned to their ship and sailed through the sound which lay between the island and that cape which projected northward from the land itself. They sailed westward around the cape.

There were extensive shoals there [at the place they eventually reached after rounding the cape] at ebb tide and their ship went aground. It was a long look from the ship to get sight of the sea.

They were so curious to go ashore that they could not wait until high water floated their ship, but hurried to the land, where a river flowed from a lake into the sea.

As soon as the tide rose under their ship they rowed back to her in their boat and took her up the river and so into the lake where they anchored.

Ensuing Norse expeditions made extensive but fruitless searches for Leif’s Vinland along the southern and eastern coasts of Labrador and along the east and west coasts of the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland.⁶ The failure of these expeditions to locate Vinland confirms the statement in the Greenlanders Story to the effect that Leif’s Vinland was in Bjarni’s southern land.

For reasons which I have detailed in connection with the story of Bjarni’s voyage, as well as for others which will appear later, the hypothesis that Leif landed anywhere to the south of Newfoundland is untenable. The first set of data with which we have to deal if we are to pinpoint the location of the landfall are the sailing directions from Greenland to Vinland. We do this by scaling off the arc composed of courses in the southwest airt originating from the Eastern Settlement region of Greenland. These courses limit us to a landfall between Cape St. John and Cape St. Francis, at an average distance of five doegr out of sight of land from Herjolfsness. Since we know that Leif approached the land from the northeast and in good weather, which implies conditions of good visibility, our next step is to determine the configuration of this section of coast as it appears from seaward. When we have done this we see that Leif’s first sight of land would have had to be one of the six major headlands beginning with Cape St. John and including Fogo Island, Cape Freels, Cape Bonavista, Bay de Verde Peninsula, and Cape St. Francis.

After this first sighting, they sailed to land, according to the Greenlanders Story, which is to be understood as meaning the nearest part of the land, reaching an island which lay to the northward of the country, and they went up there.

This island must have been fairly high, for the implication is that they climbed it, which is what we would expect them to do in order to see what the surrounding country looked like and to get their bearings of it.

They then returned to their ship and sailed through the sound which lay between the island and that cape which projected northward from the land itself.

From the tenor of this statement we understand that by the land itself the narrator was referring to the main body of the country which therefore would have lain southward both of the island and of the cape. It is particularly important to realize that we are not told that the island lay north of the cape. This is a misconception which many authors have embraced.

What we have here is a description of an amorphous body of land lying to the southward of the approaching ship. There is an island lying to the north of the landmass, separated from a northward-projecting cape by a sound or strait.

When we apply this description to each of the possible landfalls on the “visibility coast” we find that Cape Freels, Cape St. Francis and Cape Bonavista can be summarily eliminated from further consideration, since none of them offer appropriate islands or sounds.

The remaining three candidates for the initial landfall can all be made to fit this part of the description.

A vessel sailing on a southwesterly course into the East Newfoundland Bight could raise Cape St. John, which has a seaward visibility of 30 nautical miles, as her first landfall. As she closed with it she would raise the Horse or St. Barbe Islands lying off to the west and north of the mainland. If she then sailed to these islands she would raise Partridge Point, the eastern cape of White Bay which can be said to project northward from the land itself. The fifteen-mile-wide stretch of water between the Horse Islands and the Partridge Point-Cape St. John landmass might be thought of as a sound or strait. If the ship then sailed westward through this sound she would enter White Bay.

Fogo, the second possibility, is of a somewhat different character. Even as it served as a logical point of departure for Bjarni when he left his first land, it would and does provide a good landfall for vessels approaching the central part of Newfoundland’s northeastern seaboard. It is a big island, fifteen miles long, with a seaward visibility of 24 nautical miles. Lying between it and the mainland to the south is a large inlet called Hamilton Sound. But in this case “island” and “sound” bear little relationship to the island and sound of the saga description. Unless one circumnavigates Fogo Island it appears to be a part of the mainland—an eastward-projecting peninsula—while Hamilton Sound itself appears to be a dead-end bay. Fogo cannot be ruled out of the running on the basis of the evidence we have so far examined, but it is not a good candidate.

The third possibility is the Bay de Verde Peninsula, which is a fifty-mile-long, slightly crooked finger of land running north-northeast from its roots in the Avalon Peninsula, and separating the two great fiords of Conception and Trinity bays. Its outer tip has a seaward visibility range of 28 nautical miles.

Separated from the tip of the peninsula by Baccalieu Tickle, which is two to four miles wide and about four miles long, lies Baccalieu Island. Baccalieu lies eastward of the extreme northern tip of the peninsula, but it lies due north of the looming mass of Cape St. Francis and the main body of the Avalon Peninsula. If a vessel enters the southeastern end of Baccalieu Tickle and sails through it to the westward, she will round Grates Point, the most northerly point of the peninsula, and then have Trinity Bay open ahead of her to the southwest.

Baccalieu is a small but impressive island. It has an average height of 400 feet and is largely surrounded by sheer cliffs where seabirds nest in myriads. There are several boat landings along its seaward side from any one of which it is relatively easy to gain the high grassy crest; from where in clear weather one can see to the foot of Conception Bay, while the Cape St. Francis Peninsula to the southward is seen to broaden out into one great landmass which dominates the entire scene. Twenty-five miles away to the northwest the Horse Chops coast of the Bonavista Peninsula shows as a dark wash on the horizon, suggesting that the intervening stretch of water must be the mouth of a fiord of even greater size than Conception Bay itself.

The Bay de Verde-Baccalieu-Cape St. Francis area fits the saga requirements better than any other locality on the North American coast, but there is still another set of criteria to apply before it, or any other place, can be accorded even tentative acceptance as the site of Leif’s landfall.

The saga tells us that after Leif sailed westward through the sound he came to a haven where he secured his ship for the winter. This haven is described in such detail, and the Old Norse words used in the description are so specific, that we can identify it with certainty as being of a special type known as a hop (pronounced hope).

A hop was a body of salt water barred off from the open sea by a natural breakwater, and connected by a channel which had the character of a river entrance. The French call such harbors barachoix, and in English we usually refer to them as lagoons, although in Newfoundland they are known as barasways. They are invariably tidal and usually shallow. Extensive shoals, sand bars and tidal flats often extend seaward for a considerable distance from their outlets. They are almost always found at the foot of a coastal indentation where low lands abut upon the sea, thereby making it possible for wave and current action to build up an offshore bar which eventually comes to stand above high-tide level and so cuts off a portion of the sea behind it, which then becomes a harbor. When such bars form at the bottom of bays into which large streams or rivers empty, and they often do, the opening through the breakwater becomes a true river mouth.

There are a few hops in Greenland, a number in Iceland, and a great many on those parts of the mainland European coast which came within the sphere of Viking activity. They were highly valued as ship harbors by the Norse, and as a consequence many of the European ones still bear a local language variant of the name hop. Thus of the more than one hundred of these havens which are to be found on the shores of Great Britain, the majority still bear the suffix “hop.”

Because most of them are very shallow, hops are of little use to modern vessels; but they were peculiarly well suited to Norse ships, which were shallow-draft and had flat keels running their full length so that, when they were dried out by a falling tide, they rested almost upright and without any great strain being brought to bear on the structure of the vessel. Rather than leave their ships moored off at anchor when they were not in use, the Norse preferred to bring them into shoal water, where they could either be hauled out or laid-up afloat. A hop was the perfect place either for hauling out or for laying-up afloat, since it usually had a gently sloping sand or shingle shore and was protected from both surge and heavy seas.

Here is what the saga has to say about Leif’s haven: They came to a place where it was so shoal that their ship went aground some distance from shore at low tide. At this place they were a long way from the open sea, or to put it another way, they were near the foot of a deep fiord or bay. At the place where they went ashore they found a “river” draining into the sea from a “lake.” When the tide refloated their ship they brought her into the lake, where they anchored her for the time being while they explored the place.

Philological studies of the Old Norse language indicate that the Norse words used at this point in the manuscript of the Greenlanders Story should not be rendered in translation as “river” and “lake” in their accepted modern sense. These words evidently had a much more specific meaning in tenth- and eleventh-century usage, and it is suggested that they should be more properly translated as “channel” and “lagoon”; or, in other words, as the description of a hop.

The saga goes on to add that both “river” and “lake” were full of salmon, and that grasslands providing natural cattle pastures surrounded the “lake.” Extensive grassy flats are one of the usual characteristics of hops. It is apparent that both the “river” and the “lake” were tidal, and that the ship could have been brought into the “lake” only at high tide.

Most authors have insisted on applying the modern meaning to the original words of the saga, and such a translation has its advantages. It enables the commentator to transport Leif up any navigable river as far as is desired, even if this involves tens or hundreds of miles before the lake of the commentator’s choice is reached. The inherent improbability of such an interpretation is obvious. No master of a Norse ship on the coasts of an unknown land would have deliberately hazarded her at any greater distance from the open sea—his escape route—than was absolutely necessary to provide her with a protected harbor. There would have been no conceivable advantage to Leif in ascending a river into the interior, while the risks, both real and imagined, he would have courted in doing so would have been unacceptable to any prudent man.

That Leif found and occupied a haven of the hop type is convincingly established by the saga itself. If further proof of the correctness of this conclusion is needed, it is to be found in the story of Thorfinn Karlsefni. Karlsefni made a voyage in search of Vinland some years after Leif, and although he never succeeded in locating Leif’s Vinland he did attempt to plant a colony at a site whose description is nearly identical with that of Leif’s haven. The Karlsefni Saga specifies that this place was a hop and calls it by that name. The same words which have been translated as “river” and “lake” from the Greenlanders Story, are used in the Karlsefni Saga to describe a channel through a bar, and a lagoon behind the bar comprising the main features of Karlsefni’s Hop.

We conclude that a hop-type haven must have existed in the vicinity of Leif’s landfall, and our next step is to search for one.

If Cape St. John and the Horse Islands had been Leif’s landfall he would then have sailed west past Partridge Point and into White Bay. The shores of White Bay are almost uniformly precipitous, rising in many places to 800 or 1000 feet and there is no place along its coasts which can be made to fit the description of Leif’s haven, except for the mouth of the Hampden River at the very head of the bay.

There is no barachois at the mouth of the Hampden now, but according to Admiralty surveys of the late nineteenth century a small and marshy lagoon once existed there. It later disappeared as a result of changes brought about by large-scale pulpwood operations on the Hampden. It consisted of a widening in the channel of the river, fronted by the sandbars and mudbanks of the open estuary. The contours of the land are such that it could not have been much larger than a hundred yards in diameter. Nevertheless it could be identified with Leif’s haven on the basis of the data we have so far examined. However, there are a number of other factors still to be mentioned in connection with Vinland which rule out the possibility that Leif’s hop was in fact situated at the mouth of the Hampden. Furthermore, the Hampden was later visited by Karlsefni without being identified by him as Leif’s Vinland, for which he was searching.

Hamilton Sound and the general vicinity of Fogo Island do not offer anything resembling a hop-type haven, nor do they even offer an alternative site which would be compatible with the modern usage of the words “river” and “lake.”

Hops are not uncommon in Newfoundland. About fifty barachoix of sufficient size to admit and shelter a vessel of a knorr’s dimensions are shown on the charts, but most of these are concentrated on the south and west coasts of the island. There are only five suitable ones on the northeastern coast. Three of these are found at the head of Trinity Bay, and it is in Trinity Bay that we must look for Leif’s haven if the Baccalieu-Bay de Verde area was where he made his initial landfall.

Assuming for the moment that Baccalieu is the island of the saga description, Leif would have sailed through Baccalieu Tickle westward around Grates Point until he opened Trinity Bay to the southward. At this juncture there is an evident lacuna in the saga account, for the next thing we are told is that the knorr ran aground somewhere a long distance from the open sea. We must conclude that she had coasted deep into some bay or fiord after rounding the cape which projected northward from the land.

From Grates Point, Leif’s logical course would have been to sail southward into Trinity Bay, coasting the eastern shore. If he did this he would have found no sheltered harbors of any sort until he reached Rants Head, at which point the bay constricts to a width of about twelve miles. All along this high shore Leif would have found the forests running down to the highwater mark and he would have noticed that the farther he went into what he would by then have recognized as a great fiord, the higher the trees grew and the greater was their variety.

Beyond Rants Head he would have begun to find coves and sheltered anchorages, including the excellent harbors of New Perlican, Hearts Content, Hearts Desire and Hearts Delight. However, these are all deep-water harbors with steep-to shores which in Leif’s time would have been heavily forested. There would have been few places where a knorr could have been hauled out for the winter, and no clear stretches of land where the Norse could have established themselves free of the danger of being surprised by whatever denizens, human or bestial, might have inhabited these somber forests.

After passing Long Point, below Hearts Desire, the Norse would have begun to see indications that they were nearing the bottom of the fiord. Far off to the west-southwest they would have raised the 400-foot spine of Tickle Cove Peninsula. Leif may have altered course toward it, but on the other hand he may have held on down the east coast until he reached the head of east Trinity Bay, where it divides into Dildo Arm, Spread Eagle Bay, Chapel Arm and Collier Bay.

The bottoms of all these arms would have seemed singularly attractive to the Norse, for here the forests were at their most luxuriant and the conifers which had dominated the seaward portions of the coast gave way to great stands of massive white and yellow birches intermingled with alders, maples and other broad-leaved trees. The richness of these forests would have been only one of the attractions, for at the bottom of several of these arms Leif would have found small hops. These hops would have tantalized Leif, since they were all either very small or, as is the case with the Spread Eagle barasway, there was no break in the gravel breakwater so that the lagoon was landlocked and inaccessible to any kind of boat.

But the summer was still young and Leif would have had time on hand for explorations, since unlike later expeditions he had no cattle with him and therefore had no need to worry about setting up his base ashore in time to procure a winter’s supply of forage. Perhaps lured on by the discovery that there were hops in the vicinity, and by the possibility of finding a more suitable one, he would have sailed out around the Tickle Cove Peninsula.

He could not have done much more than clear that bold headland before he would have begun to think that the gods were with him. Four or five miles away to the south he would have seen a grass-green line barring off the end of a broad bay, and he would soon have been able to recognize this as a sand and gravel bar topped with grass and about two miles in length, behind which lay the gleam of quiet waters extending a long way back into the land along a gently sloping and thickly wooded valley.

Guided by a lookout at the masthead, Leif would have steered his ship toward the bar with growing hopes that this might prove to be just such a haven as he was seeking. Before long the lookout would have been able to distinguish a break in the barrier near its eastern extremity—an opening which was actually the mouth of a narrow channel leading into a big lagoon fringed by gravel and sand beaches and surrounded by wide expanses of open grasslands.

If the tide was low the knorr, drawing between four and five feet, could not have sailed much closer than half a mile to that channel entrance before she took the ground; but her people would not have cared. Tumbling into the afterboat, or leaping over the side and wading through the shallows, they would have made their way to shore to find themselves standing on the barrier breakwater of as fine a hop as any Norse mariner could ever have expected to find.

The entrance to Tickle Cove Pond is protected by an off-lying shoal of mud and gravel which extends seaward for about half a mile. At low tide the shoal area dries out completely except for a narrow, winding channel carrying less than a fathom of water. The summer tidal range varies between three and four feet here, so that if Leif’s ship grounded on the edge of this shoal with a falling tide, she might have dried out sufficiently to allow her people to go ashore almost dryshod. One translation of the saga, which says that they “ran” ashore from the ship, suggests that this may have been exactly what they did.

As they crossed the wide tide flats they would have noted the channel and taken sights on shore “marks” so they could find and follow it when the tide came full.

The ship grounded at a point from which it was a long way to look to the sea, or to see from the sea. This passage has been translated in a score of different ways, never with quite the same meaning. It was probably a colloquial expression, and therefore not susceptible to a verbatim translation. Assuming that “the sea” refers to the open sea beyond the mouth of Trinity Bay, the description is an understatement, for the distance is about fifty-five miles. If “the sea” referred to is the open water beyond Tickle Cove Head, the distance is about four miles, or about as far as one can see from deck level.

When the tide refloated the knorr the Norse took her up the “river” and into the “lake.” At Tickle Cove this would have meant rowing or towing her through the intricate offshore channel to the opening in the natural breakwater. She could have been brought through this gap only at slack water or on a rising tide—not because there would not have been enough water to float her but because of the current. With a falling tide the waters of the Broad pour out through the gap at rates of up to seven knots. On a rising tide the current flows in through the gap at rates of up to six knots. Leif’s men would have had only to keep steerage way on their vessel with the sweeps, or by means of the afterboat towing from ahead, and the rising tide would have done the rest

Inside the gap lies the basin of Tickle Cove itself, but the channel continues through this basin and westward through a narrows until it loses itself in the main body of the Broad. The total length of this reversing tidal stream is just under one and one-half miles. It is known locally as the Brook. No matter which interpretation we may choose to put on the Norse word for “river” in the saga, this channel, run or brook still fills the bill.

At high tide vessels drawing a fathom to a fathom and a half can pass all the way along the Brook and find anchorage on sand and mud in the Broad with a maximum depth of four fathoms. Tickle Cove basin offers anchorage in up to three fathoms. At low tide there is a wide strip of exposed sand and mud flats around the whole circumference of Tickle Cove and the Broad, and a vessel of a knorr’s draft can be dried out or hauled up almost anywhere. Both sections of the haven are protected from all except northerly winds, and they are completely protected against surge or seas.

Tickle Cove Pond and its environs fulfill the saga requirements for Leif’s haven with an exactness which cannot be approached by any other locality on any of the coasts where Leif might conceivably have made his Vinland landfall. Since we have already established that one of the most likely spots, if not the most likely one, for the initial landfall was the Baccalieu–Bay de Verde–Cape St. Francis region, I conclude that Tickle Cove was Leif’s Vinland.

Appendix M: Sources Dealing with the Karlsefni Expedition

Correlation of the Various Conflicting Saga Accounts of the Post–Leif Eriksson Voyages to America

The difficulties in coordinating the two main sources which recount the history of the far western voyages become particularly complex in relation to those voyages which took place after Leif’s discovery of Vinland.

The Erik the Red and the Thorfinn Karlsefni versions of the lost Old Erik Saga record only two further voyages after Leif’s: (1) the unsuccessful voyage of Thorstein Eriksson, and (2) a combined expedition consisting of a Greenland contingent led by Thorvald Eriksson—and including Freydis Eriksdottir—and an Icelandic contingent led by Thorfinn Karlsefni.

However, the Greenlanders Story records four separate voyages, spanning at least a decade: (1) a Vinland expedition of two years’ duration by Thorvald Eriksson; (2) the unsuccessful voyage of Thorstein Eriksson; (3) an expedition of two years’ duration to Vinland by Thorfinn Karlsefni; and (4) a Vinland voyage by Freydis Eriksdottir and the Icelandic brothers Helge and Finnboggi.

Obviously both versions cannot be right, and the first part of the problem is to decide which of the two is to be considered substantially correct.

We can simplify things somewhat by noting that as far as the Thorstein Eriksson voyage is concerned, both versions agree in general substance. With regard to the three remaining voyages listed in the Greenlanders Story, I conclude that they actually represent three aspects of the single expedition described in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas. My reasons are as follows:

Unlike the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, which give a meticulous account of the outbound voyage, the Greenlanders Story gives no sailing directions, descriptions of routes followed, or accounts of the actual voyages in connection with any of these purportedly independent expeditions. This omission is significant because it was the custom for travel sagas to include at least some sailing instructions and some details about the conditions encountered en route, these things being of paramount interest to a seafaring people. Even in the accounts of voyages over well-known sea routes, such as those between Iceland and Europe, there is usually some descriptive detail concerning the actual passage.

It might be argued that the author of the Greenlanders Story had no need to mention such matters since it was to be assumed that all three voyages followed the route established by Leif Eriksson. However, the author himself never offers this explanation, nor does he imply that it might be valid. On the contrary, he seems to realize that the absence of details about the voyages may be considered somewhat odd, and when he speaks of Thorvald Eriksson’s voyage we can almost detect a note of apology: They put out to sea [from Greenland] and nothing is said of their voyage before they came to Vinland, to Leif’s booths. The other two voyages are dealt with in equally summary fashion. Karlsefni’s voyage: They put out to sea [from Greenland] and came to Leif’s booths whole and sound. Freydis’s voyage: They put out to sea [from Greenland] and had agreed to keep together, but the two brothers got there first and carried their baggage up to Leif’s booths.

To suggest that three such voyages to Vinland should have been so totally uneventful and lacking in interest to a saga audience that all account of them could have been dispensed with, or lost during the transmissions of the story sources, stretches credulity beyond reasonable limits. The most likely explanation for the omission of all sailing instructions and voyage details is that only a single set of data existed in the first place, that which is recorded in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas for the combined Vinland voyage of the Icelanders and Greenlanders. Since the author of the Greenlanders Story had already mistakenly appropriated the highlights of this account in order to explain how Leif Eriksson reached Vinland,¹ he was left with no further voyage material upon which to draw.

If, as I believe was the case, the author of the Greenlanders Story dissected a single voyage into three parts, we would expect to find a number of inconsistencies in the finished product. There are many of these. In the single brief paragraph with which the author attempts to establish the fact that Thorvald made an independent voyage, we are told that he came to Vinland, to Leif’s booths. However, in the ensuing passages, which are abstracted from a bonafide account of the combined Karlsefni-Thorvald voyage, the Greenlanders Story version naively makes it clear that Thorvald never did find either the booths or Vinland, although he spent two years searching for them.

The account of Thorvald’s meeting with the Skraelings reveals another discrepancy. The Greenlanders Story would have us believe that this was the first contact between Norse and Skraelings and that Thorvald immediately launched an unprovoked attack upon these unknown people and slaughtered eight of them. Yet surely not even a Viking berserker would have been so feckless as to gratuitously open hostilities upon first contact with the inhabitants and presumed masters of a remote and alien land. Thorvald’s action is intelligible only on the assumption that he had prior reason to hate the Skraelings, which would necessarily mean that there had been an earlier contact between the two races. In fact the Erik the Red and Karlsefni sagas make it clear that Thorvald’s fatal encounter with the natives took place shortly after a battle had been fought between Karlsefni’s Icelanders and a party of Skraelings at Hop, during which two Norsemen were killed.

The Greenlanders Story goes on to tell us that when Karlsefni made his reputedly independent voyage to Vinland after Thorvald, his first contact with the Skraelings was perfectly amicable. Karlsefni and his people, who would have known about Thorvald’s feud with, and death at the hands of, the Skraelings if this had taken place before they arrived in the land, showed no awareness that they considered the Skraelings to be dangerous and displayed no animosity toward them, which they would surely have done if the natives had murdered Thorvald.

These initially friendly relations between Karlsefni’s people and the Skraelings eventually broke down. Thereafter, but not until this point was reached, the Norse slaughtered almost every Skraeling they could lay hands on.

Among the other miscellaneous confusions in the Greenlanders Story is the statement that Thorvald’s voyage was undertaken after Christianity had been introduced into Greenland, but that Erik the Red had died prior to its introduction. Since independent sources establish the fact that Erik was still hale and hearty as late as 1005, and that Christianity was introduced into Greenland no later than 1001 and probably as early as 998, this statement makes nonsense of the chronology which the author of the Greenlanders Story tells us is the correct one.

The author of the Greenlanders Story has sometimes attempted to cover up the inconsistencies in his reconstruction by inventions. One of these concerns the voyages of Thorstein Eriksson. According to the Greenlanders Story, Thorstein made his voyage to Vinland to bring back the body of his brother Thorvald, who had been killed by the Skraelings. But the practice of carrying home the bodies of men who died or were killed in distant places was not followed in Scandinavian countries until late in the fourteenth century.² In the beginning of the eleventh century, when Thorvald was killed, it was the Norse custom to bury or cremate a warrior where he fell. If it had been customary to bring home the bodies of the dead for burial, Thorvald’s own men would surely have carried home the corpse of their leader.

In chronicling the reputedly independent Freydis voyage, the author of the Greenlanders Story tells us that it took place after Karlsefni had returned to Greenland from Vinland, yet he refers to an agreement between Freydis and Karlsefni to the effect that each should carry no more than thirty men, and women besides, in their various ships during the projected Vinland voyage.

The Story version of the Freydis voyage has other revealing weaknesses. The author says that Freydis set out for Vinland the year after Karlsefni returned from there, but that she came back from Vinland in time to find Karlsefni preparing to sail from Greenland to Norway; although Karlsefni remained in Greenland only over the winter. It appears that what really happened in this case, was that Karlsefni took leave of the Greenlandic portion of the joint expedition during the third summer and returned to Greenland, en route home to Iceland, while Freydis and her people remained behind in the new lands for another winter. Thus when Freydis reached Greenland the following spring she found Karlsefni preparing to depart for Iceland or Norway with his cargo of New World produce.

A number of other reasons can be advanced to show why the number, chronology and composition of the various expeditions listed in the Greenlanders Story cannot be accepted; but no valid arguments can be presented against acceptance of these elements of the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni versions.

Nevertheless it would be folly to condemn arbitrarily the whole of the Greenlanders Story, as some have done. The Erik the Red and Karlsefni versions also have their failings, not least of these being their habit of omitting details about the Greenlanders’ participation in the joint expedition—details which are preserved in the Greenlanders Story.

It may not be accident alone which has resulted in the rearrangement of the chronology and composition of the voyages in the Greenlanders Story, and in the suppression of details about the Greenlanders in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas. What we seem to be faced with here is an example of a situation which has often occurred in connection with voyages of exploration. The Vinland expedition evidently became divided into two hostile factions, and out of the mutual recriminations, disagreements and perhaps outright hostilities between these two, and their homeland supporters and descendants, two variant versions of the expedition eventually emerged. Succeeding generations of copyists appear to have preserved these differences, and may even have enlarged upon them. The sagamen and copyists did not pretend to impartiality, as do modern scholars. They were frankly and honestly partisan, and they tended to celebrate the deeds of the group with which they were in personal sympathy.

Thus the common ancestor of the Erik the Red and the Thorfinn Karlsefni sagas may well have evolved into a form which was concerned with honoring the deeds of the Icelanders in general and of Karlsefni in particular; and we have not far to seek to understand how, and why, this might have happened. Karlsefni’s Icelandic descendants embraced several illustrious members of the Roman Church, including three bishops in the three generations after his death. Acting either on instructions from their superiors or because of a sycophantic desire to please, the priestly clerks who copied the manuscripts and passed them on from one generation to the next doubtless did their best to strengthen the role played by their superiors’ ancestor and the Icelanders—at the expense of the Greenlanders where necessary.

The denigration of one faction by the other would hardly have been a one-sided affair. In Greenland the saga version which evolved through the centuries would have tended to sing the praises of the Greenlanders at the expense of the Icelanders. It is not impossible that one of the sources used by the author of the Greenlanders Story may have included a saga composed on behalf of Leif Eriksson, perhaps at the order of one of his immediate descendants if not of himself. If this did happen the virtual elimination of Erik the Red from a real role in the Greenlanders Story account of the Vinland voyages would have followed as a natural consequence of the conflict between Erik and his eldest son, and as a result of the fact that Erik favored the Icelanders and did all he could to further their hopes and plans. Furthermore, the appearance of an active interest (amounting almost to direction) by Leif in the Vinland voyages which followed his own voyage, would be explained.

At some stage in the evolution of the sources of the Greenlanders Story, a Greenland partisan may also have devised a very effective means of downgrading the part played by Karlsefni and the Icelanders, by dividing the joint expedition into three parts, two of which then became entirely Greenlandic in planning and execution while the third, dealing with Karlsefni, was condensed and isolated in a narrow compass. Karlsefni’s voyage may even have been eliminated in the Greenland version. The author of the Greenlanders Story, an Icelander working in Iceland after the Greenland settlements had begun to decay, implies that he obtained the portion dealing with the Karlsefni story from a descendant of Karlsefni’s.

The pro-Icelandic saga versions use a somewhat more direct technique to disparage the contributions of the Greenlanders. By accident or design they reduce Leif’s part in the sequence of voyages to miniscule proportions. Bjarni Herjolfsson’s voyage, which is essential to an understanding of Leif’s venture, is completely eliminated, leaving the story of the original discovery of the western lands in a kind of limbo. This treatment of Leif may reflect a strong degree of animosity which existed between him and the Icelanders and which was perhaps based on Leif’s refusal to be of assistance to later Vinland voyagers, including his own father and brothers. It will be noted that Erik plays a respectable role in the pro-Icelandic versions and that he was himself in opposition to Leif.

When the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas (and doubtless at least their immediate common ancestor) dealt with the combined expedition they undercut the Greenlanders either by omitting to detail their exploits or by assigning to the Icelanders the credit due for them. Only one Greenlandic member of the expedition receives a reasonable degree of attention in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, and the picture presented of this man—Thorhall the Hunter—is largely derogatory. He is depicted as an uncouth, evil-tongued and barbaric pagan. It is almost as if he was deliberately selected for a detailed and unsavory portrayal as representative of the Greenlandic contingent.

Thorvald Eriksson, the leader of the Greenlanders, receives almost as short shrift as does his brother Leif. He is mentioned only twice, once when the expedition sailed, and again when he was killed at Lake Melville. No notice is taken of his westward exploration, and the credit for his exploration of Lake Melville is shorn from him and attached to Karlsefni, a matter with which we deal at length in the last part of this appendix.

Freydis Eriksdottir is also largely ignored. In the only incident in which she appears she is portrayed (perhaps with some truth) as a species of savage Amazon whose sanity seems questionable. Nothing is said of the fact that she was the leader of those Greenlanders who remained behind at Straumfiord during the third and final winter. The Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas abrogate even this small triumph of endurance to the credit of Karlsefni and the Icelanders.

Helge and Finnboggi, the two Icelandic traders whose ship Freydis used, are not mentioned at all. This total omission is to be explained by the fact that although they and their men were Icelanders they deliberately allied themselves with the Greenland faction.

After considering all aspects of the matter we arrive at a simple and logical solution to the problem posed at the beginning of this appendix. As far as the sequence, composition and number of the Vinland voyages is concerned, we can safely follow the Erik the Red and Karlsefni sagas; but the details of the events which occurred once the joint expedition reached the new lands must be drawn from both sources. In general when we are dealing with a phase of the story which is primarily concerned with the Greenlanders we can rely upon the Greenlanders Story for the bulk of our information, supplementing it when possible from the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas. In the case of events in which the Icelanders played the leading role we must reverse the procedure. In this way we are able to reconstruct a detailed account of the expeditions which includes all the available information, and which avoids the draconian alternative whereby one version is arbitrarily chosen as being the only valid source, while the other is brusquely consigned to oblivion.

There remains one other problem in coordinating the sources. This involves an error in the interpretation of the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas which has misled many authors into concluding that the return from Hop of Karlsefni’s expedition was followed by only one more exploration voyage, one led by Thorfinn Karlsefni that sailed north from Straumfiord in search of Thorhall the Hunter.

In fact two separate expeditions were mounted after the return from Hop. One, led by Thorvald Eriksson, sailed north from Straumfiord to Lake Melville. The other, led by Thorfinn Karlsefni, sailed south from Straumfiord into White Bay.

The Greenlanders Story deals with Thorvald Eriksson’s voyage to the north as a purely Greenlandic venture and makes no mention of Karlsefni. The sailing directions, the internal sequence of events and the geographical descriptions in this account are straightforward and unexceptionable, even though the voyage itself is placed out of context in the overall chronology of the western voyages.

On the other hand the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas state that the northern expedition was conducted by Karlsefni, and the only mention made of the Greenlanders in connection with it is a brief notice dealing with the death of Thorvald.

But when we examine the sailing directions and geographical descriptions in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, we find that they consist of two distinct sets, which are mutually contradictory. We are told that Karlsefni set off north from Straumfiord, rounded Kialarness, and sailed into what can only be Lake Melville—and thus far the description of the route is identical with that found in the Greenlanders Story account of Thorvald’s voyage. But after the fight with the natives when Thorvald was killed, the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni versions tell us that the expedition sailed north in order to regain Straumfiord. They also tell us that the place where Thorvald was killed was directly opposite to Hop and equidistant with it from Straumfiord; and that the mountains thereabouts formed one and the same chain with those at Hop.

It is obvious that the sailing directions for the return to Straumfiord, together with the geographical description of the place where the battle with the natives took place, are nonsensical when applied to Lake Melville. But they make sense when they are applied to the foot of White Bay. One sails north from there in order to reach Straumfiord. Hop—St. Paul’s Bay, on the west coast of Newfoundland—and the foot of White Bay lie directly opposite to one another. They are separated by the Long Range Mountains, which bound Hop on the east and the foot of White Bay on the west. These two places are equidistant from Straumfiord. The discrepancies in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni accounts make it plain that we are dealing with elements of two voyages rolled into one, and there is a direct confirmation of a second, southern, voyage in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas.

Some men report that Bjarni Grimolfsson and Freydis remained behind here [at Straumfiord, after the return from Hop] with a hundred people, and went no farther, while Karlsefni and Snorri proceeded to the southward with forty men, returning again that same summer after tarrying at a hop [there] for barely two months.

The Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas then go on to say that Karlsefni sailed north that same summer in search of Thorhall.³ While we are able to find a reasonable explanation as to why Karlsefni and Snorri should have made a voyage into White Bay (see Chapter 24) we find much more difficulty in explaining why Karlsefni should have concerned himself in a search for Thorhall the Hunter. On the other hand Thorvald Eriksson, as leader of the Greenland contingent, would have been under a heavy obligation to search for his father’s factor and the nine other Greenlanders who were missing with him.

The account of the battle between the Norse and the natives during the northern trip, as told in the Greenlanders Story, is totally different from the version recounted in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas. In the Greenlanders Story, the Greenlanders surprised and massacred a band of Skraelings and were then attacked by a large number of Skraelings in skin boats, with the result that Thorvald Eriksson was killed. But according to the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, Karlsefni encountered a single Einfoetingr—not a Skraeling, be it noted, but a man of quite another race—who unprovoked shot one arrow at them and killed Thorvald. As we show in Appendix O, the people Karlsefni encountered were Beothuk or proto-Beothuk Indians whom he could not have met to the north of Straumfiord; but Thorvald was killed by Skraelings, which is to say Dorsets, who are known to have inhabited the shores of Lake Melville.

When all the factors have been taken into account it becomes apparent that at some point in the transmission of the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, the credit for Thorvald’s northern voyage descended on Karlsefni, with the dual consequence that Karlsefni’s own second southern voyage lost its identity and Thorvald and the Greenlanders were all but eliminated from any real role in their own expedition.

The Location of Hop

When Karlsefni made his first voyage south from Straumfiord Camp, two routes were open to him. He could have led his little flotilla eastward around Cape Bauld, then south along the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula into White Bay; or he could have continued southwestward through the Strait of Belle Isle—Straumfiord—and then coasted down the west coast of the peninsula.

If, as we have suggested in Chapter 20, the Icelanders confused the mouth of the strait with the mouth of the great fiord (Trinity Bay) which led to Leif’s Vinland, Karlsefni’s logical decision would have been to follow the southerly shore of Straumfiord into the southwest, as Leif must have done with his fiord.

In any event this is what Karlsefni chose to do, and the essence of the proof of this rests on two salient facts. In the first place, there is no harbor on the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula (or anywhere else in White Bay) which can be equated with the description of the Hop where the first southern expedition wintered.⁴ In the second place, and as we have already pointed out in this appendix, Karlsefni made a second southern voyage, down the east coast, the year after he discovered Hop. Since we know from the saga descriptions of the lands and peoples that this was not a repetition of his first southern voyage, we must conclude that his first southern voyage was down the west coast of the Great Northern Peninsula. Additional confirmation of this conclusion appears in Chapters 20 to 24.

In order to identify the actual location of Hop we must make a detailed examination of the west coast of the peninsula.

From Cape Norman south to Anchor Point the west coast of Newfoundland is bald, bleak and baleful and is backed by wind-swept spruce muskegs and barren limestone ridges. There are few harbors or coves of any sort, and none that by any stretch of the imagination can be made to tally with the saga description of Hop.

From Anchor Point to Castor River the shore is low and broken, with many offshore reefs and islets offering some shelter here and there, but not much else. There are few if any natural grassy areas; instead there is a morass of spruce muskeg. The long, low Ferolle Peninsula is also covered with scrub barrens and muskeg.

From Castor River south to Eddies Cove West the shore is almost dead straight without a harbor of any sort. Then from Eddies Cove to a point five miles south of Portland Creek the land sinks into wet and desolate muskeg (the Bateau Barrens) which supports only occasional clumps of stunted spruce, and which has no harbors on its coast except an exposed one at Port au Choix and a deep-water one encompassed to the high-tide mark by coniferous forests at Hawke Bay.

Hop, as the saga describes it, cannot be anywhere on this stretch of coast.

South from Portland Creek there is a thirty-mile strip of low coast fringed with meadows and backed by vast areas of natural bog pasture. This relatively short stretch has two excellent, almost classic, barachoix harbors or hops.⁵ To the south again, the Long Range Mountains crowd right out to the sea to form such a bold coast that apart from the steep-sided and mountainous deep-water fiords of Bonne Bay and Bay of Islands, there are no real harbors until after the Port au Port Peninsula is passed. Hop cannot be on this stretch of coast; nor can it be in Bonne Bay or Bay of Islands.

The saga account of Karlsefni’s voyage down the other coast of the peninsula during the third summer helps to pinpoint the location of Hop. Karlsefni sailed south down the east coast until he reached a point opposite Hop, equidistant with it from Straumfiord camp, and separated from Hop by a range of mountains which must have been the Long Range. Since he could go only as far south as the foot of White Bay in the east, this provides conclusive evidence that Hop was not south of Bonne Bay in the west.

From the foregoing it is clear that Hop must have been located at one of the two barachoix harbors between Portland Creek and Bonne Bay—Parsons Pond or St. Paul’s Bay. Either one of these harbors adequately meets all the saga conditions for Hop, and making a choice between them would be almost impossible, were it not for one thing.

At the present time there is a channel through the bar into Parsons Pond—a passage which will admit a small schooner at high tide and which would admit a vessel of a knorr’s draft on almost any stage of the tide. This channel leads into a broad estuary which offers perfect shelter and which connects, through a narrow and fast-flowing strait, to a fresh-water lake six miles long whose inner end is lost in a valley of the encroaching mountains.

But the channel through the bar is not quite a century old. From the time the first colonial settlers reached this coast (they were French, and they arrived in the middle of the seventeenth century), Parsons Pond drained into the sea through a mile-long, twisting little brook which only a canoe could have navigated. The “estuary” was not tidal but was a freshwater lake. From the time of the first settlement until 1879 Parsons Pond was useless to the fishermen of the coast, who could not even get their skiffs into it. Then, in the spring of that year, there was a torrential downpour in the Long Range Mountains. The brook draining Parsons Pond swelled to river size but was unable to carry away the run-off fast enough. A potato patch on the inner part of the bar began to flood and the owner took his shovel and dug a shallow trench to the seaward side in order to drain it. When he came back again after his lunch he was stunned to find no potato patch, and in its place a fifty-yard-wide gut cut clean across the bar, through which the pent-up waters roared directly into the sea. Within a few days Parsons Pond dropped four feet below its old level, became tidal and turned into an estuary. Within a year the tidal flow had so deepened the gut that it had become navigable for small ships, and remains so to this day.

The question is: Was there a gap in the bar in Karlsefni’s time? Several wells have been dug in the remaining portion of the bar and they have gone down through strata which show that at various times in the past there must have been gaps in the bar; but these appear to date from a time when the land was much lower than it is at present, and so these gaps apparently predate the Karlsefni expedition.

Although the evidence does not finally rule out Parsons Pond, it does make St. Paul’s Bay a more likely choice. The detailed evaluation of St. Paul’s as Hop is given in Chapter 21.

Appendix N: The Epaves Bay Site {L’Anse au Meadows}

An Evaluation of the Settlement Excavated at Epayes Bay in Northern Newfoundland

This site, which is now being acclaimed as the first authentic find of a Norse settlement ruin in North America, lies at the foot of a shallow bay near the extreme northern tip of Newfoundland, facing northwest onto the Strait of Belle Isle.

Although the site is actually located on Epaves (Wreck) Bay, itself an arm of Sacred Bay, the Ingstad expedition, which has done the archeological work, prefers to call it the L’Anse au Meadows site (locally: Laney Meadows). In published reports Mr. Ingstad has drawn the assumption that the name is an indication of the excellence of the area from the point of view of Norse pastoralists. The assumption is in error. The French word for meadows is prairie. L’Anse au Meadows is an English corruption of L’Anse au Méduse, meaning Jellyfish Bay, a name derived from the fact that great shoals of jellyfish drive into it during the summer months. Old charts correctly give the name as Méduse Bay.

The story of the discovery of the ruins at Epaves Bay begins in the years before the First World War, when Mr. W. A. Munn of St. John’s, Newfoundland, became interested in reconstructing the western voyages of the Norse. Munn devoted many years to the project and published his conclusions in 1929 (Wineland Voyages. Location of Helluland, Markland and Vinland. St. John’s). He believed that one or more Norse expeditions must have camped either in Pistolet Bay or Sacred Bay at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. Although he thought Pistolet Bay might be the best place to look, he did not overlook Sacred Bay, and in correspondence as well as on the map accompanying his published study, he specifically indicated the Epaves Bay area.

Influenced to a degree by Munn’s conclusions, the Finnish geographer Dr. V. Tanner, who worked in Labrador and Newfoundland from 1937 to 1939, suggested that the Karlsefni expedition had probably built its Straumfiord base in this region.

In the early 1950’s an amateur enthusiast named A. H. Mallery took up these suggestions and made a fruitless search of Pistolet Bay. However, no proper investigation was attempted until 1959, when the Danish archeologist Jorgen Meldgaard visited the area and, assisted by a local man, made an extensive search. Meldgaard satisfied himself that there were no Norse sites in Pistolet Bay, but by that time the season was too far advanced to allow him to explore Sacred Bay, and he returned to Denmark. Before leaving he instructed his assistant to spread the word of what he was looking for among the local residents, and to inform him if anything turned up.

The following summer Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian author who had been looking for Vinland on the New England coasts, visited the area. He too wished to search Pistolet Bay but was informed by Meldgaard’s companion of the previous year that there was nothing there. However, during the winter the assistant had asked many local people if they knew of any old ruins, and his brother-in-law, George Decker of L’Anse au Meadows, had said he believed he knew where an “old Viking place” might be located.

When I talked to George Decker in 1963 he told me that the interest shown by Meldgaard had prompted him to take a closer look at some faintly outlined house ruins on one of his fields at Epaves Bay. It struck him that this “might be what the Danish fellow was after.” When Decker was approached by Ingstad, whom he at first took to be a Dane and an associate of Meldgaard’s, he willingly guided him to the spot.

There was not a great deal to see. According to Decker there were a number of slightly raised rectangular outlines in the thin sod of the sandy field, which suggested the remains of turf-walled “tilts” or houses of a type which both French and English liveyers had built and lived in until almost as late as the beginning of the twentieth century. Up to the time of Meldgaard’s visit, it had been assumed locally that the ruins at Epaves Bay had in fact belonged to early colonial settlers.¹

In 1961 Ingstad began excavations at Epaves Bay which were concluded in the summer of 1963. The results disclosed the floor outlines of nine structures which had evidently once been turf-walled buildings of various sizes. They were all sited within a few hundred feet of the coast on an ancient marine terrace and at heights of from eight to fifteen feet above sea level. Most of the structures were small one-roomed affairs, but two of these single-room ruins were of larger size than the rest, one measuring about thirty feet in length, and the other nearly thirty-five feet by twenty feet. One small ruin on the bank of Black Duck Brook was evidently a smithy. There was also a huge structure measuring approximately seventy by fifty-five and containing five or perhaps six “rooms.”

Due to the rotting down of the turf walls and of whatever roof covering had been used—probably turf on pole rafters—nothing is now visible of any of these buildings except for the shallow excavations left by the Ingstad expedition. The location of the old walls was traced by following the differing thicknesses of the sod layer. Occasional heaps of stones on the exposed, sandy floor areas probably indicated the positions of the fireplaces, ember pits and perhaps storage pits.

Mr. Ingstad has reported surprisingly few artifacts. A Dorset lamp was found in the debris of the smithy. Fragments of a pot of unspecified material and origin were described to me by Ingstad as having been found in the very large building. During “clean-up operations” in 1964, Ingstad’s wife, Anne Stinne, found a soapstone spinning whorl which is similar in size and shape to those used by Norse women in Iceland and Greenland. Fragments of iron nails from the large house, a tiny piece of bronze, and some pieces of iron together with slag from the smithy complete the list of announced finds. Published reports (not by the Ingstad expedition) of the finding of buried wooden sills around the outer walls of the large house and of the small “shed” near to it during excavations made by contractors who were erecting a protective shed at the orders of the Newfoundland Government have not been confirmed by the Ingstad expedition.

The most convincing evidence of Norse occupation lies in a series of carbon-14 dates obtained from charcoal fragments which came from the smithy, a nearby charcoal pit and some of the house structures. These dates show a range of from A.D. 680 plus or minus ninety years, to A.D. 1060 plus or minus seventy years, with a number of dates grouped around A.D. 1000.

The smithy is of particular interest. It contains what was apparently a large stone anvil, and it is clear that iron was worked at this site. However, since no trace of any sort of furnace has been discovered (or, at least, announced), it seems unlikely that iron was actually smelted here. The carbon dates seem to confirm that the smithy was used in the times of the Norse voyages.

With the exception of the largest structure and the small shed adjacent to it, the building ruins are in keeping with what might be expected from the Greenland Norse of circa 1000. Taken together they seem to form a rather typical homestead complex of small huts grouped around one or two large living halls. However, the largest structure is not comparable with anything known from either Greenland or Iceland of this period. It offers no diagnostic features which would indicate that it is Norse of the early eleventh century. It is sited some distance away from the rest of the complex and closer to the sea. Between it and the sea there is a large pit filled with “burned and fire-cracked” stones and pebbles, which has no parallel in Greenland of circa A.D. 1000. However, this pit closely resembles the tryworks fire pits used at early Basque, French, Dutch and English shore-whaling stations in northern regions. One large “wing” of the structure is fitted with a complex floor drainage system and does not show convincing evidence that it was ever a walled room at all. It could, however, have been a blubber-cutting platform.

The Ingstad expedition claims that this great building is part of the Norse complex, but it more likely postdates Norse occupancy of Epaves Bay and may have been part of a shore-whaling establishment dating from very early colonial times. The wooden sills, which we have already mentioned, were reported from this part of the site, but the Norse did not use buried sill construction around A.D. 1000. The Ingstad expedition itself found iron nails here. Chemical analysis of the soil shows it to be highly acid, and metallurgists say that iron nails and other small agglomerations of that metal would almost certainly not have survived since A.D. 1000, but would have been completely oxidized. Buried wooden objects would have disintegrated.

Historical records show that shore-whaling establishments existed on this section of the coast at a very early date. Until recently the Strait of Belle Isle was one of the better whaling grounds in the North Atlantic region, funneling huge numbers of whales of several species through its narrow waters during their migrations to and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Active whaling actually survived in the strait until 1951.

We do not know with certainty when whaling began in the strait, but European fishing and whaling ships, primarily Basque, were operating in the Labrador Sea off southwestern Greenland by 1400–1420 and had evidently reached Newfoundland waters by 1436, which is the date of the earliest copy of the Andrea Del Bianca Map. This map shows the Isla de Stokafixa (stockfish: cod) far to the westward of Iceland with a given latitude and longitude which could only have belonged to Newfoundland. Newfoundland continued to be called by this name on other maps made as late as 1500, particularly by the Portuguese and Basques.

In 1534, when Jacques Cartier passed through the strait, it had long been a famous fishing and whaling ground. He sheltered briefly at Quirpon, which he spelled Karpont. This excellent harbor, five miles west of Epaves Bay, was and evidently had been for some time much frequented by whalers. Its name is derived from the Spanish Basque, Cap Arpón or Harpoon Cape. That it had long been in use is suggested by Cartier’s failure to recognize a name which had been in existence long enough to have suffered considerable corruption. The etymology of the name can be traced from the Basque aroi through the Spanish arpón and the French harpon to the English harpoon. The present pronunciation of Quirpon is karpoon despite the many changes in spelling which the name has undergone over the centuries.

Cartier also found that the Grande Bay, as the strait was then known, was the regular haunt of many fishing ships. And at this point we note that in this period, and for at least three hundred years afterwards, whales were thought to be fishes and the word fishery included not only the pursuit of true fishes but of whales as well.

In 1580 an Englishman, Richard Whitbourne, reported the existence of a whaling fishery in the strait shared by Basque, French and a few English ships.² Spanish records quoted by Proust in his History of Newfoundland state that by far the largest fleet in Newfoundland waters between 1504 and 1580 was of French origin, and H. Horwood (The French in Newfoundland, St. John’s, 1962) analyzed these records and demonstrated that most of these ships were Basque from the French Basque Provinces. In Les Pêcheries de Terreneuve (Records of the Colonial Institute) it is stated that the Basques were sending 6000 men in 200 ships to Newfoundland by 1550.

These Basque ships were almost all engaged in a dual fishery for whales and cod. It was their practice to set up shore-whaling stations when they arrived in Newfoundland in the spring. These were sited by preference at places where whales were abundant in restricted waters, as they were in the Strait of Belle Isle. Whaling was carried on by boats operating from the shore station. The tryworks were always built ashore (ship tryworks were not introduced until the end of the sixteenth century), preferably just back from gently sloping and fairly smooth beaches close to the grounds. The whales were towed in at high tide by the boats and allowed to strand as the tide fell, when the carcasses were stripped of their blubber. At the next high tide the carcasses were towed off and turned adrift so as not to foul the area, with the result that there are seldom any significant accumulations of whalebone at the sites of such stations.

The strips of blubber were hauled ashore to wooden platforms underneath which drains had been dug to carry off spilled oil, blood and gurry. Here the blubber was chopped into small pieces and then fed into the trypots. These pots were slung over deep firepits filled with small stones and pebbles, which were fired with pieces of boiled-out blubber. The purpose of the stones and pebbles, which grew very hot when the fire was burning, was to provide a species of sponge or wick which would absorb and then vaporize the waste oil, allowing the gases to burn off slowly and steadily from the surface and providing a controlled heat under the pot.

After manning and refurbishing their shore stations in the spring, the Basque ships would sail off to the cod banks and spend the balance of the season fishing and making dry cod. In late summer or early autumn they returned to their shore stations, took aboard the oil and the shoremen, closed up their establishments for the winter and sailed for home.

Epaves Bay is one of the best sites on either the Newfoundland or Labrador coasts for a shore-whaling station of this type. Old occupation sites which have not yet been excavated, but which bear a striking resemblance to sections of the Epaves Bay site, have been found on Quirpon Island and at nearbye Griquet Harbour. Casual finds of fishing irons and harpoons of Basque type suggest that these too were shore-whaling stations.

No final decisions can be made about the origins of all the structures at Epaves Bay until the Ingstad expedition releases the full results of its work. At the moment there seems to be no good reason to deny the likelihood that some of the structures were built and inhabited by Norsemen of circa A.D. 1000; but it seems obvious that the large house was actually a shore-whaling establishment of the early colonial period.

Although it has not been stated as a fact, the leaders of the Ingstad expedition have strongly intimated that the Epaves Bay site was the location of Leif Eriksson’s Vinland. This deduction is not consistent with the facts as I understand them and as I have set them out in this book. If we are to accept Epaves Bay as Leif’s Vinland we must discard, or seriously distort, the description of Vinland given in the Greenlanders Story—and this is the only description of Vinland that we possess.

It is my belief that Epaves Bay was the site of a temporary Norse settlement established there by the combined Icelandic-Greenlandic expedition led by Thorfinn Karlsefni and Thorvald Eriksson.

Appendix O: Karlsefni and the Beothuk Indians

An Analysis of the Conflicts Between the Norse and the Native People of Newfoundland, and the Identification of One Group of Natives as Beothuks

The combination of the accounts of two voyages (Karlsefni’s second southern voyage and Thorvald Eriksson’s northern voyage in search of Thorhall) into one produced a blend of oil and water which, as we have seen in Appendix M, separates naturally into its component parts as soon as it is given the chance to do so. This raises the possibility that further details of the “lost” southern voyage may be recoverable from other portions of the saga sources, and in particular from the conflicting accounts of Karlsefni’s encounter with the Skraelings as this is recorded in the Greenlanders Story and in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas.

The two versions agree in some respects, but differ radically in others. The conflict between them is usually explained as being due to corruptions or additions to the original account. But the differences can be explained more rationally on the assumption that we are dealing with the combined accounts of two somewhat similar, but separate, encounters between Karlsefni’s party and the natives of Newfoundland—encounters which took place during the course of two different expeditions.

When we examine the saga versions, the first thing we notice is that they describe a battle set in two locales. The Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas specify that the site was Hop, where in every instance the natives of the area arrived from and departed to seaward in skin boats. The Greenlanders Story claims that the action took place at Leif’s Vinland, and it makes no mention of the use of boats by the natives. On the contrary it specifies that the natives arrived out of the woods from the landward side of Karlsefni’s camp, and departed in the same direction.

The accounts of the trading which preceded the battle differ materially. The Greenlanders Story tells us that the Norse traded red cloth, and mentions no other trade goods. The Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas do not make any mention of red cloth but instead describe how the natives were given milk products in exchange for skins. Also, some key individuals appear in one version and not in the other. Thus we have the Freydis incident in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas, but no mention of Gudrid. On the other hand Gudrid looms large in the Greenlanders Story, while Freydis is not mentioned. Since we are told that although Freydis accompanied the Hop expedition, she did not go on the second southern expedition, we do not find her absence from the Greenlanders Story so surprising.

Even some of the incidents which appear in both versions suggest that there were two separate encounters. The account of the natives finding the Norse axe appears in both, but in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas it looks like an intrusion and is at variance with the sequence of events of the battle. The appearance of the bull is also recorded in both; but while this event seems to fit the Hop encounter, it does not ring true in the Greenlanders Story version. According to the latter, both the natives and the bull which caused such panic among them all came out of the woods, where one would suppose that the natives would have encountered the cattle, or have seen, smelled or heard evidence of them during their approach to the camp, and so have been forewarned of the presence of these unfamiliar beasts.

However the most telling indications of there having been two encounters are to be found in the evidence that the Norse battled people of two distinct races.

The natives described in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas versions of this battle are uniformly and unmistakably Eskimoan. Not only is their physical description Eskimoan, but so are the descriptions of their clothes, boats and other artifacts.

On the other hand all of the natives described in the Greenlanders Story version are distinctly un-Eskimoan. The woman who came to the door of Gudrid’s hut was said to have had large, light-colored eyes and chestnut-colored hair, and to have worn something which resembled a black Norse kirtle. Eskimoan peoples have dark, almost black eyes which are not notably large (rather the reverse), and invariably have black hair if they are of pure stock.

The only authentic portraits of Beothuk Indians which we possess are of two women, Mary March (Demasduit) and Shanawdithit, who were captured and brought to St. John’s in the early part of the nineteenth century. By far the most salient feature of both women according to their portraits, which were drawn from life, is their remarkably large, wide eyes. John Guy, a seventeenth-century colonizer in Newfoundland, also noted that the Beothuks were “full eyed”; while Captain Robinson, in describing Mary March, wrote that “her eyes were larger [than those of an Eskimo].” Other first-hand descriptions of Beothuks refer to the fact that some of them had light-brown or hazel-colored eyes. As for the chestnut-colored hair, it was normal practice for the Beothuks to dress their hair with powdered red ochre mixed with oil or fat, which imparted a lustrous reddish-brown sheen to it.

The kirtle is also indicative of Beothuks. The eleventh-century Norse kirtle was a gownlike garment usually worn belted at the waist. The Beothuks wore something quite similar: a garment made from two caribou hides with the fur still on or, sometimes, from a number of otter pelts.¹ This was, in effect, a sleeveless fur gown and was worn belted at the waist. On the other hand there is no record of Eskimoan peoples ever having worn anything but tailored garments consisting, in essence, of a parka-like jacket and trousers of varying length. This applied to both sexes. The Norse themselves made specific note of the difference in the garb of the two peoples when they reported that the Skraelings encountered on the coast near Hop were wearing “skin doublets.” Newfoundland caribou hides, incidentally, range from brown to almost black in color, while natural otter is also very dark, almost black, in appearance.

The description of a second native in the Greenland Story version is tantalizingly brief. However, this man, whom Karlsefni thought was the leader of the natives, was described as being “fair,” which is an adjective that can hardly be considered applicable to an Eskimoan people. He was also referred to as being “tall.” It was a historical fact that the Beothuk men were tall and well formed. The last chieftain of the race, who was murdered by white hunters on Red Indian Lake in 1819, was stretched out on the ice by his killers and measured. They reported that he was more than six feet tall.² There is also testimony to indicate that the Beothuks deliberately chose the tallest men among them to be their elected leaders.

Many Beothuks were light-complexioned, or at least appeared so to European observers. The chronicler Fabian, who saw a group of captive Beothuks at the English Court in 1498, whither they had been brought by John Cabot, noted that when they were dressed in European clothes they were indistinguishable from Englishmen. A few years later Gaspar Cortereal concluded that the Beothuks would make excellent slaves, not only because of their remarkable physique but because they were the whitest-skinned “savages” known at that time. Many later diarists and travelers also commented on the Beothuks in the same vein.

We must also consider the odd incident when Freydis is reported to have displayed her naked breasts to a band of attackers who, in this case were Dorsets. This was a defense which (as we have noted in Chapter 21) was practiced by Beothuk women when they were threatened by an enemy. Since such a strange defense is not recorded as having been used by Norse women, or by any Eskimoan peoples, the suspicion arises that a demonstration of this startling gesture may have taken place during an encounter with Beothuks, and that the description of it might have been attached to the Freydis incident in order to give her actions an enhanced dramatic effect, which—no one can deny—it certainly does.

Yet another significant point is the fact that one group of natives encountered by the Norse was so passionately anxious to obtain red cloth that they gladly exchanged their possessions for tiny fragments of the material. The name Red Indian was first coined to describe the Beothuks, and only later was it applied, with considerably less validity, to all North American Indians. It came into being because the Beothuks used red ochre lavishly, not only on their clothing and the whole of their bodies including the hair, but also on their artifacts, on their skin tents and even on corpses. Red had an intense religious significance, and the Beothuk fondness for it amounted to a fixation. Red ochre pigment, as the Beothuks used it, mixed with animal oil or fat, is not bright red, being closer to the somber color of recently dried blood, as is evidenced by its appearance as a home-made paint in Newfoundland outports, where the pigment, from the same pits used by the Beothuks, is mixed with cod-liver oil. The red cloth which the Norse traded to the natives would have been singularly desirable to the Beothuks.

Another aspect of Beothuk culture may have some bearing on what the sagas tell us about the possession of furs by the natives. Eskimoan peoples use furs to keep themselves warm, and seldom use them for decorative purposes. Moreover, they tend to use such utilitarian furs as caribou and seal, both of which the Norse would have been able to get for themselves in quantity in Greenland. The Beothuks, on the other hand, made extensive use of such luxuriant furs as marten, beaver and otter. It is very unlikely that the Norse would have been able to obtain valuable furs from the Dorsets, since even latter-day Eskimos have to be extensively indoctrinated by white traders before they can be persuaded to hunt fur-bearer. However, the Norse might very well have been able to trade with the Beothuks for furs which would have been of considerable value by European standards. We are specifically told that sable was one of the furs they did obtain from the natives. Sable is another name for marten, which the Beothuks used as trimming for their clothing. Furthermore, the marten is a forest animal and is found only in the heavily wooded interior regions of Newfoundland, where the Beothuks used to winter but which were not, so far as we know, inhabited by the Dorsets.

The existence of two distinct sets of racial and cultural characteristics in the saga descriptions of the natives has been noted by most commentators. All of them, however, have chosen to resolve the paradox by insisting that the natives had to be either Eskimos or Indians. It seems far more reasonable to conclude that the Norse met both races, since the sagas adequately identify an Eskimoan (Dorset) and an Indian (Beothuk) culture.

This leaves us with the problem of discovering where the Norse could have encountered Beothuks. It seems certain that the Beothuks did not occupy the west coast of the Great Northern Peninsula north of Bonne Bay at the period when the Norse visited it, since the sagas make it clear that this coast was still occupied by Dorsets. The northern tip of the peninsula, in the vicinity of Straumfiord, appears (both from archeological evidence and from the negative evidence of the sage accounts) to have been free of all natives. The Indians who were then living in Labrador seem to have been Athapascan peoples belonging to what became the Montagnais and Nauscopie tribes, and who differed markedly from the Beothuks. Moreover, they seem at this period to have been restricted to the interior, while the coastal regions were still under Dorset occupation. This leaves us with White Bay as the nearest point to Straumfiord at which Beothuks might have been met. Although this area has not been properly investigated as yet, there is archeological data to show that the Dorset occupation of the east coast of the peninsula ended well before the arrival of the Norse, due evidently to the retreat of the pelagic harp seals under the influence of the Little Climatic Optimum. At or near all the Dorset sites so far examined on this coast, artifacts have been found which belong to a late phase of Boreal Archaic culture, whose final flowering was in the Beothuks. Moreover, many of these artifacts overlie the Dorset cultural layers.

The farther south one goes in White Bay the scarcer Dorset remains become, and the more abundant are the finds of Boreal Archaic and of true Beothuk artifacts.

The Beothuks wintered in the interior of Newfoundland, living mainly on caribou and stored food during the frozen months. In the late spring or early summer they migrated to the coasts, where they lived by sealing (the resident harbor seal was the prime target), fishing and bird’s-egging. One of their major wintering areas included the country around Red Indian Lake, Deer Lake, Grand Lake and Sandy Lake. The last two of these connect by means of a short portage with the Hampden River, which drains into the foot of White Bay.

Considering the abundance of Beothuk and proto-Beothuk artifacts recovered in the vicinity of Hampden and at nearby Sops Arm, as well as at other White Bay coastal sites, it is apparent that considerable numbers of Indians used to travel to the sea at the foot of White Bay, from which point they spread northward up both coasts. There are also numerous records from colonial times detailing encounters between English fishermen and Beothuks in White Bay.³

It is almost a certainty that a Norse expedition into White Bay in summer would have encountered Beothuks. The geographical data given in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas (which is discussed in the text and in Appendix M) demonstrates that Karlsefni’s ship did penetrate deeply into White Bay, and probably reached its foot. Somewhere in the bay the Norse met a strange people who were not Skraelings. This is attested to by the encounter with the One-Footer and by the subsequent reference to the country thereabouts as One-Footer Land (Einfoetingrland).

The saga seems to say that after a brief encounter the Norse immediately hurried back to Straumfiord, being unwilling to risk their men’s lives any longer. Yet this meeting with a single stranger, whom they chased and who fled helter-skelter from them, does not seem like a sufficient reason for them to have departed in such haste and in such obvious fear of their lives. It is more reasonable to believe that the recorded meeting with the One-Footer was only the prelude to further meetings with others of his race (we remember that the expedition spent nearly two months in White Bay). Such meetings would doubtless have opened amicably (the Beothuks were an unwarlike race) with barter taking place between the two peoples. Eventually—as I envisage the probable course of events⁴—the Norse committed an act of outright hostility as a result of which they felt forced to flee from the prospect of reprisals; as Karlsefni fled earlier from Hop, and as Thorvald Eriksson’s expedition fled from Lake Melville.

One minor problem remains to be discussed: the question of what the Norse meant by the name One-Footer. The name did not mean Unipeds, as many writers have insisted. The word may have had a special connotation in Norse usage of the period, or it may have been a figurative expression intended to express mockery or derogation of some peculiarity of the White Bay natives. We, for instance, do not mean it literally when we say someone is lead-footed, although perhaps some scholar of a thousand years hence may translate this, in all seriousness, as meaning a man with a foot made of lead. On the other hand the original One-Footer may have been simply that—a man who had lost a foot, or who was crippled in one leg, but who remained so remarkably agile (as he certainly was) despite his handicap that the Norse were intrigued or even admiring enough to include a reference to the fact in their name for him and his people.

In any event it is certain that the Norse were not indulging in superstitious nonsense. A fragment of verse is included in the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni sagas in which the One-Footer is specifically called a man, albeit a strange one. Scholars are agreed that this snatch of verse is probably a surviving fragment of the original oral saga, and its presence underlines an important fact: that the One-Footers were not only men, but were recognized by the Norse as being of a different race from the people they called Skraelings.

On the basis of the foregoing analysis I have seen fit to dissect the Greenlanders Story version and the Erik the Red and the Karlsefni version of Karlsefni’s battles with the Newfoundland natives and to reconstruct them as descriptions of two separate battles with two different native peoples. In doing so I have added nothing to, nor taken anything away from, the variant versions, but have only rearranged them in what I believe to be an approximation of the form in which they existed in the original saga.

Appendix P: The Norse in Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay

New Light on Explorations by the Greenland Norse into the Canadian Sub-Arctic Regions

Over the years a considerable amount of material has been discovered, both archeological and in the written records, to indicate that the Greenland Norse explored (if they did not actually occupy as hunting grounds or for other purposes) a large area of the eastern Canadian arctic regions. As we have shown elsewhere in this book, Greenlanders visited the southeastern coasts of Baffin Island at an early date. At a later stage in their history, when a deteriorating climate had led to the re-forming of the Baffin Bay ice pack and so closed Davis Strait and the southern portion of Baffin Bay to routine Norse navigation, the Greenlanders appear to have turned northward and to have circumnavigated the foot of Baffin Bay. The Annals of Bjorn Jonsson tell us of a ship expedition which was made to these regions in 1266, and the route is reported in sufficient detail to enable us to trace the explorers to the region of Devon or Bylot islands, and to the vicinity of the mouths of Jones and Lancaster sounds. During the past seventy years polar expeditions to this region have discovered a number of cairns and other structures, particularly in Jones Sound, which are apparently not of Eskimo origin and some of which (specifically a series of eider duck nesting shelters) appear to be Scandinavian. A conical stone tower which was found on Cornwallis Island,¹ and which bears much closer resemblances to a Norse structure than to anything known to have been built by Eskimos, suggests that the Greenland Norse may have penetrated some distance into Lancaster Sound.

To the southward there may be new archeological evidence, substantiated by ancient documentary material, to show that the Greenlanders entered Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay. Since this evidence has not previously been presented or evaluated, I deal with it here at some length.

The first knowledge the Norse had of the existence of Hudson Strait may have been gained on Bjarni Herjolfsson’s involuntary voyage of exploration up the Labrador Coast to Cape Chidley. Bjarni appears to have reached the mouth of the strait, but he probably thought it was open sea which swept west and south and so made an island out of northern Labrador, or Helluland as it came to be called.

The next Greenlanders to see the strait were the members of the Thorvald Eriksson-Thorfinn Karlsefni expedition. They crossed its mouth from south Baffin Island to the vicinity of Cape Chidley, and while there is no record of what they thought about the stretch of open water running off to the west of them, they would have suspected that it was either a strait or else an exceedingly large fiord.

The next documentary indications that the Norse continued to visit the area, and in fact came to know it rather well, are contained in a series of sagas, some of which have the character of fictionalized traditions set against an actual physical background. The first of these is the Saga of Arrow-Odd, the existing recension of which was committed to parchment in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, but which evidently is of considerably greater antiquity.

The story, in brief, describes the attempts of Arrow-Odd and his son Vignor to track down an enemy named Ogmund. I quote the relevant sections, with my own comments in brackets:

“I will tell you where Ogmund has gone. He has gone into that fiord which is called Skuggi. It is in Helluland’s Obygdir [uninhabited regions] ... he has gone there because he wishes to escape you. But now you may track him to his house if you wish, and see what comes of it.”

Odd decided that this is what they would do. Thereupon he [and his son Vignor, in separate ships] sailed until they came into the Greenland Sea [which lay between Iceland and Greenland] when they turned south [probably at Hvarf, the turning place on the east Greenland coast] and sailed around the land [Cape Farewell] and to the West. . . . They sailed then until they came to Helluland [North Labrador, perhaps Cape Chidley] and laid their course into Skuggifiord [Hudson Strait-Ungava Bay]. . . . [After entering Skuggifiord] they saw two rocks rising out of the sea. Odd was very curious about this and they sailed between the two rocks. Toward evening they saw a large island. Odd brought his ship to its shore. Vignor asked why he did so, but Odd ordered five of his men to go ashore to look for water. Vignor said this was not necessary and did not allow any of the men from his ship to accompany the others.

Not long after Odd’s men had gone ashore on the island it sank and they were all drowned. This island was covered with vegetation [some translators say heather, others say weeds, and the meaning may be synonymous with kelp or heavy sea vegetation, which is notable on the tidal islands and rocks of Ungava Bay]. They did not see it come up again. The rocks had all disappeared when they looked in that direction. . . .

When they reached the land [which they were seeking, in Skuggifiord] father and son went ashore and walked there until they saw a fortified structure, and it seemed very strongly built. . . .

The course which Odd and his son followed is the correct course from Iceland or Norway to north Labrador, or Helluland—and we are specifically told that the two men made a Helluland landfall. The events which follow, although they sound fabulous and probably appeared wonderful enough to the Norse in Odd’s expedition, are not improbable.

The tidal ranges in Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay are among the greatest in the world. At the entrance to the strait, near the Button Islands, the range is of the order of 25 feet. However, inside the mouths of the strait and of Ungava Bay, the range is 40 feet, while an extreme of 52 feet has been reported from coastal points on the southwest shore of Ungava Bay. Islands of very considerable extent—some of them embracing several hundreds of acres—are periodically drowned and then exposed again by these phenomenally large tides. If Odd and his companions entered the strait during spring² tides they would have been startled and bewildered to see islands, which looked as if they should always be high and dry, rapidly disappearing beneath the fast-rising waters, which in some parts of the strait flow at speeds of as much as 7 knots. While we do not need to believe that Odd’s five men actually drowned on one of these disappearing islands (the saga-teller must be allowed some poetic license), it need not strain our credulity to believe that men landed to explore one of these strange, kelp-covered islands, and were forced to beat a hurried retreat to their ships when it became obvious that the whole of the island was about to disappear beneath the sea.

It should be noted that there is no other place on the east coast of North America which has such a great tidal range, with the exception of the Bay of Fundy. Furthermore, tidal ranges on the Greenland and Iceland coasts are of a very much lower order, often averaging less than three feet. It is not hard to see how men who were used to such small tides would be mightily impressed by thirty- or forty-foot ones, and might in fact find it hard to believe that what they were witnessing was normal tidal action rather than some cataclysmic submergence.³

Skuggifiord is mentioned by name in one other source, the Germanic saga known as Gunnars Saga Keldugnupsfifils. Helluland is not mentioned, but the context of the story makes it clear that Skuggifiord had the same location in this saga as was assigned to it in Arrow-Odd’s saga.

In three other sagas which are all related to one another and which also bear a relationship to the Arrow-Odd Story, Skuggifiord is not mentioned by name, but Helluland is. One of these is the Saga of Bard the Snow-fell-God, and it includes the following passages (the notes in brackets are again mine):

There was a king named Dum [literally, Fog] who ruled over those gulfs which extend north [in the northern airt] around Helluland and which are now called the Fog Seas. [King Dum was neither a person nor an entity. In typically allusive style, the saga poet is telling us that fog was king in those waters lying northward of Helluland, that is, in Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay.⁴ Somewhat further on the saga narrator refers to another “king” who, this time, is a person.]

“I have never seen him, but I have been told by my relatives that this ‘king’ was called Ragnor and, from their account, I believe I recognize him. He at one time ruled over Helluland and many other countries and after he had ruled these lands a long time he caused himself to be buried alive together with five hundred men at Raknslodi. . . . It seems to me to be probable, from the reports of other people, that his burial place is in Helluland’s obygdir. . . .

[A man named Gest goes in quest of this burial mound. He sails to the obygdir of Greenland—which would be south Baffin Island—where, having spent three days traversing a “lava-field” on foot he at length discovers the burial mound on an island near the sea coast.]

Some men say [adds the saga narrator] that this mound was situated to the north of Helluland....

[To this we add a fragment from the Saga of Halfdan Eysteinsson.]

Ragnor brought Helluland’s obygdir under his sway and destroyed all the giants there.

In these fragments we are clearly dealing with a story of great antiquity which had become somewhat mythical in its nature, but which evidently had an original basis in geographic fact at least. It is apparent that the two Ragnors of the Saga of Bard the Snow-fell-God and the saga of Halfdan Eysteinsson must be one and the same man.

At this juncture I pose the hypothesis that Ragnor was a Norseman who came out to Helluland’s northern regions, perhaps as an outlaw, like Erik the Red before him, and there established himself. He did not succeed in doing so without a struggle with the natives of the area, who are significantly referred to as giants. This is the same term used in various other sources, notably the Saga of Thorgisl Orrabeinsfostri, in reference to an arctic people who were almost certainly Dorsets, rather than the smaller Thule Eskimos who themselves referred to the Dorsets as giants.

If Ragnor and his supporters settled anywhere in the Helluland region it would presumably not have been on the east coast of the north Labrador peninsula, since this area is, and we may believe always has been, a nearly “worthless land” even as it was stigmatized by the first Norse who visited it. On the other hand parts of Ungava Bay, and the west coast in particular, are still noted for their excellent sea and land hunting. Throughout the historic period a large Eskimo population has existed on the west coast of Ungava Bay and archeology has demonstrated that this area was once inhabited by a sizable population of Dorsets, whereas the northeastern Labrador coast has so far produced little evidence of Dorset occupation.

Carrying the hypothesis a step further, I suggest that the fortified building which Arrow-Odd found might be identified with Ragnar’s house, or possibly even with his grave mound. The grave of Ragnor became a celebrated thing, and there seems to have been a great deal of speculation about it and several later attempts to discover it.

From the evidence of the saga sources alone it looks as if the Norse had a working knowledge of the Hudson Strait-Ungava Bay region. This assumption is supported by the independent testimony of the Stefansson Map (see Appendix G), which clearly shows Ungava Bay in its correct relative latitude. Moreover, references in some of the ancient Icelandic geographies quoted in Appendix D show that Hudson Strait was known as ginungagap, a mighty stream which was believed to connect the Western Ocean (the North Atlantic) with Mare Oceanum.

But if Ungava Bay was the Skuggifiord of the sagas, did the Norse leave any archeological evidence of their presence there? This is a question which cannot yet be categorically answered. All that I can do is describe a recent find which may prove to be of great importance in extending our knowledge of the penetration of the Canadian Arctic by the Greenland Norse.

In July 1957 an archeological field party from the National Museum of Canada under the leadership of Dr. William Taylor was taken by Eskimo guide to Pamiok Island in Payne Bay⁵ on the west coast of Ungava Bay. The scientists wished to see some strange ruins which the Eskimos had reported.

The site (now named Imaha, meaning “maybe”) turned out to be a few hundred feet inland from a small harbor on the southwest part of the island. It consisted of two burial vaults, a number of collapsed Eskimoan food caches, and building ruins of two kinds. The first of these were all roughly circular tent rings of typical Eskimoan type. But the second ruin consisted of a huge rectangular stone structure measuring 85 feet long by 31 feet wide, enclosing a floor area about 75 by 18 feet, slightly depressed below ground level. An area of about 15 feet in width at each end of the enclosed space appeared to have been raised slightly above the general floor level. The walls, which were much collapsed and covered with moss, were of stones. Many massive boulders, which evidently came from the collapsed walls, had rolled into the inner floor area. The side walls were not straight in plan, but were slightly convex.

Dr. Taylor had no time to do any excavating on this extraordinary ruin. He was looking for Dorset material and in the few hours at his disposal he concentrated on one of the burial vaults. In this he found skeletal remains which he identifies as Dorset, while test excavations of some of the tent-ring houses showed them to be definitely Eskimoan and probably Dorset.

To date no archeologist has returned to this site, nor have two other sites in the vicinity which were reported to Dr. Taylor by local Eskimos been examined. One of these, consisting of “a large old rectangular house ruin with inner partitions,” was said to be located on an island about six miles south-southwest of Cape Hopes Advance Station. Another, which included “two very large old rectangular house ruins,” was located on a small island about three miles north of the Imaha site.⁶

Dr. Taylor, who had previously found Dorset caribou hunting camps in the relatively well-wooded interior on the Payne River, speculated that the big house might originally have been roofed with timber that had drifted, or been brought, down the Payne. He found that this general area provided excellent hunting of sea and land animals, and had evidently done so when the Dorsets still occupied the area, which they may have done as late as the eleventh century.

No archeologist has so far cared to speculate in public on the possible origin of the great ruin at Imaha. Nothing comparable to it is known from any aboriginal culture so far discovered in the Canadian Arctic. Both in shape, size and apparent structure (including the convex wall plan) this ruin bears a close resemblance to a singularly massive Norse longhouse of the tenth or eleventh centuries. It is not too much to say that had it been found in Greenland, Iceland or in the north of Scotland or Ireland it would have been ascribed to the early Norse—at least on the basis of what can be determined of it without excavation. It should be also noted that the structure itself is only a short distance away from a small, perfectly protected harbor which is of a depth and general nature to have made it ideal for ships of the knorr type.

No conclusions about the origin of this ruin can be made until it has been properly excavated. It is to be hoped that there will not be too great a delay in carrying this out, although up until now there seems to have been some hesitation about tackling this problem. But in the meantime, and having regard to all the evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Norse were familiar with the eastern portion of Hudson Strait, and with Ungava Bay, which seems to have been known to them as Skuggifiord.

If we accept the hypothesis that they were indeed familiar with this area, the question arises as to how far west they may have penetrated into Hudson Strait. I have noted in the Epilogue that it is not farfetched to suppose that the Paul Knutsson expedition of circa 1360 passed through Hudson Strait and descended into Hudson Bay, even though this is pure speculation with no direct proof to support it. However, about a century after Knutsson there appears to have been another Scandinavian voyage into Hudson Bay. This was an expedition sent out by King Christian I of Denmark about 1476, under the leadership of Pining and Pothorst (both of whom were familiar with Greenland waters) and piloted by a Dane named Johannes Scolvuss.

Our information about this voyage is scanty and mostly indirect. Baron de Lahontan, Lord Lieutenant of Newfoundland and Acadia in the late seventeenth century, tells us that Labrador (by which he means northern Labrador) was discovered by the Danes and that Henry Hudson made his famous voyage into Hudson Bay as a direct result of his having seen a “memoir” of a Danish voyage into that bay.⁷ According to Lahontan, who does not give his sources, Frederik Anschild or Anskoeld entered Hudson Strait, followed it to Hudson Bay, and wintered in the bay, where “savages” furnished him with food and skins. Lahontan seems to have thought this voyage took place about 1570–1580, but in this he is in error.

G. M. Asher, the chief authority on Henry Hudson,⁸ is convinced that Lahontan’s Anskoeld was actually Johannes Scolvuss of the 1476 Danish expedition, and this identification has been accepted by most scholars.

Adding to the weight of evidence suggesting that Hudson was forestalled is a comment by John Oldmixon in his The British Empire in America (London, 1708): “We know ’tis pretended [claimed, in the usage of the day] that a Dane made the discovery of this Streight [Hudson Strait] and that he called it Christiana, from the King of Denmark ...”

Assuming that both Oldmixon and Lahontan were referring to the same Dane, and that he was Johannes Scolvuss, we are then left with the problem of determining where Scolvuss went. There is no documentary record of the voyage; but the Gemma Frisius Globe, engraved by Mercator around 1536, shows a polar continent to the westward of Greenland which bears this inscription: Quij; the people to whom the Dane Johannes Scolvuss penetrated about the year 1476.

So it begins to look as if Scolvuss and his companions passed through Hudson Strait, entered, explored and wintered in Hudson Bay about 1476. This was well before the disappearance of the Greenland Norse. And just as Hudson seems to have picked up news of the strait from some now lost account of the Scolvuss voyage, so we can reasonably assume that Scolvuss and Pining and Pothorst most likely heard about the great ginungagap, or sound, leading to the west, from Greenlanders who were familiar with it as Skuggifiord.