although one cannot resist wondering if the milk was spirituous.
Experienced Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had gained his fortune in other
parts of the world as a seafaring trader, may well have been the first
white man to practice this ancient trick of the trade on the naïve
native Americans.
Very soon after this first successful barter the aborigines came back
in much greater number than before with bundles of pelts and stood
outside the palisades which the Norsemen had been foresighted enough to
erect around their house in the meantime. Karlsefni, sensing the making
of another good bargain, instructed the women to offer more milk. The
Skraelings took it thirstily, pitching their bundles of furs over the
palisades. But then one of them tried to steal a Norse weapon and a
battle ensued during which many of the Skraelings were slain.
Evidently Karlsefni thought it was too dangerous at Vinland. It would
appear that he moved his colony the second year to a site probably on
the Hudson River. In the meantime according to some students he had
explored the country from its northernmost parts, where he mentioned
seeing “many artic foxes,” to the Chesapeake Bay, no doubt entering
many rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, possibly the
James, and identifying correctly the extent of the Appalachian mountain
range. There is reason to believe that he built shelters and maintained
a separate camp somewhere in the Chesapeake tidewater.
It may have been there, as the Norsemen told it, that swarthy,
ill-looking men with broad cheeks and ugly hair on their heads, came
in canoes and stared at them in amazement. Later, these same men came
back with “fur-skins and all-grey skins” wanting swords and spears in
trade. Evidently there was no milk in this camp, wherever it was, but
fortunately the natives finally agreed to take red cloth in exchange
for their pelts.
“In return for unblemished skins, the savages would accept a span
length of red cloth and bind it around their heads. Thus the trading
continued. When Karlsefni’s people began to run short of cloth, they
ripped it into pieces so narrow that none was broader than a finger,
but the savages even then gave as much for it as before, or more.”
And, so the trading continued, according to a version of the saga in
_Hauk’s Book_, until it ended in a battle as usual. Once more many of
the natives were killed. So were two of the Norsemen.
After three years Karlsefni abandoned the idea of a permanent
settlement. The Skraelings were too hostile. The Norse, with their
superior boats and shields, could cope with them on water. But on
land the red men were too numerous and had the advantage of surprise.
They couldn’t be held at bay--the Norsemen didn’t have the terrifying
firearms available to later colonists coming to America.
All of which may reasonably account for the dearth of Viking artifacts
on the eastern seaboard of America. The Norsemen kept close to the
shore-line, whether on the seacoast or on a tidewater river, building
their huts near the safety of their shielded dragon ships. Today, the
sites of those early camps may well be under water as the level of the
sea has risen at least five or six feet in the intervening time due to
glacial meltings.
A translation of the _Flatey Book_ saga relates that when Karlsefni’s
people returned to Greenland they “carried away with them much booty in
vines and grapes and peltries,” and that after this “there was much new
talk in Greenland about voyaging to Vinland, for this enterprise was
now considered both profitable and honorable.”
Not to be outdone in the matter of profit Freydis, the illegitimate
daughter of Eric the Red and with a heart as murderous as that of her
father, led an expedition to Vinland a few years later. Honor appears
to have had no part in her plans.
Freydis had a husband, but she made the plans. Before leaving
Greenland, she arranged with Leif for the loan of his house in Vinland
and induced two unsuspecting brothers of another family who had a
particularly fine ship to become her partners in the venture. These two
men were pledged to take only thirty warriors and their women. Freydis
had agreed to take a like number, but somehow she contrived to conceal
five extra men in her smaller ship.
After they arrived in Vinland, Freydis managed to keep the two groups
apart by fomenting antagonism. The brothers were forced to build a
separate house for their men and women. This house, together with too
much wine and heavy sleep, proved to be the means of their undoing--all
according to the Viking lady’s plan it appears. And what a red-handed
proceeding it was!
Freydis, with her husband’s grudging cooperation, succeeded in
murdering the two brothers in their house one night after shackling
their company. She had all of their men put to death and personally
wielded the axe that killed their five women when no one else would do
it. Then, taking her deceased partners’ fine trading ship, she returned
to Greenland with a rich cargo of furs, wine and lumber.
One shudders to think how she went about extracting the furs from the
Skraelings!
For two or three hundred years the Greenland republic maintained an
active trade between America and Norway, and with other countries, in
walrus hides, seal and fur skins, dried fish and whale fat. Norwegian
port records, as well as the sagas, testify to trade with “Markland,”
the name which had been given to Nova Scotia by Leif Ericson. There are
old church records which show that quantities of the pelts of animals
not indigenous to Greenland were exported from that country to Norway,
pelts that could have come only from the mainland of America. The bills
of lading listing church taxes which had been collected _in natura_
include elk, black bear, beaver, otter, ermine, sable, lynx, glutton
and wolf.
But, in 1261, the Greenland parliament renounced its independence and
swore allegiance to Norway. Independent traffic with other countries
was promptly curtailed. Subsequently the dominance of the Hanseatic
League through its monopolistic factory at Bergen, which took no
interest in Greenland, brought about a withering of all commerce
between Greenland and the continent.
Deterioration of the Greenlanders themselves came about through
malnutrition and intermarriage with the Eskimos who descended on their
settlements. Some who voyaged to America probably remained there and
were eventually absorbed by the natives. There is evidence that as late
as 1362 an expedition of Swedes and Norwegians, exploring westward in
the Hudson Bay, left their ship at the mouth of the Nelson River and in
their afterboats penetrated through Lake Winnipeg up the Red River into
Minnesota. An inscription on a rhune-stone, ostensibly left by them as
a marker, says they were being cut off by the savages at the time. But,
whether authentic or not, the storied voyage appears to be of little
commercial significance; the era of Viking trade in America was ended.
Among most scholars during the dark ages little notice had been taken
of the Norse discoveries, if indeed very much was known about them.
True, the chronicler Adam of Bremen had recorded the discovery of a
large island in the western sea, called “Vinland,” but then everyone
knew there were “islands” in the sea. Knowledge of any far-western
lands, even of Greenland itself, faded with the withering of trade.
Then Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, plowed the ocean straight
west in 1492 and returned to assert that as he had predicted the east
coast of Asia was six thousand miles nearer to Europe than most of the
world’s best geographers had estimated it to be.
A new, short route west to Asia! The news was electrifying to a now
thoroughly trade-conscious world. Spain, England, Portugal, France--all
took to the western sea.
III
_Codfish Land Spawns a Fur Frontier_
Christopher Columbus probably thought that “the western lands of the
world” explored by the Norsemen were island-like masses, similar to
Greenland, off the northern coast of Asia. From what he was able to
learn, especially on his visit to Iceland, he no doubt concluded that
these lands stretched far away to the southeast. He had a mariner’s
instinct for such things. Certainly he calculated his landfall in 1492
with amazing accuracy.
Columbus came among islands that he confidently took to be the Moluccas
off Asia. The continent lay just beyond.
But it was the wrong continent!
Although Christopher Columbus made four voyages, reaching the mainland
of South America in 1498, he never knew that he hadn’t really come upon
Asia--that the natives he encountered were not wild, borderland East
Indians.
In the meantime, a Genoese-born Venetian navigator sailing for an
English king landed on the North American coast in 1497 and claimed
the country for England. John Cabot was his English name. Cabot made
the North Atlantic crossing in a small bark called the _Matthew_ with
eighteen men, following the route of the Vikings, and landed first
somewhere near Cape Breton. After sailing northern coasts for a week he
decided the country was Siberia. Like Christopher Columbus, he returned
quickly to report that he had discovered a route to Asia.
Like Columbus too, John Cabot was given a fleet of trading ships and
was sent back the next year by an excited monarch and hopeful Bristol
merchants to collect the spoils of his discovery. His ships were
“fraught with sleight and grosse merchandizes, as course cloth, Caps,
laces, points, and other trifles.”
This time Cabot cruised the coast south, possibly as far as Cape
Fear, for signs of Cathay or India before he returned to England. He
carried back a few mangy furs taken in trade with the Indians--for the
surprised Indians could think of nothing much to give the white god
other than the clothes off their backs--but no gold, pearls, silks or
spices.
It was hard to believe that this was the Asia about which Marco Polo
had written.
It took another decade for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine astronomer
who had gone along on several Spanish and Portuguese voyages to the
western lands, to declare that they were in reality a new world. A
German savant named Waldseemuller who greatly admired Vespucci revised
the map of the earth. He drew in a new continental land mass between
Europe and Asia, and he honored Vespucci by calling it Amerigo’s
Land--in Latin, Terra America.
Meanwhile, Spain’s only world rival had not been neglecting the west.
Portuguese caravels reached Brazil as early as 1500 and explorers from
Portugal visited Labrador and Newfoundland in 1501. Within a few years
after John Cabot’s crewmen first told Bristol fishermen that the waters
off Newfoundland boiled with codfish, Portuguese fishing boats led the
way to those American waters.
Armed and battling, rival fishing fleets of the other European
countries followed them across the North Atlantic. Soon, almost a
hundred sail yearly were frequenting the fabulous Newfoundland banks
where fish could literally be hauled in by basket.
These fishermen, Normans, Bretons, Basques, Bristolmen, fell to
bartering with the natives when they went ashore to dry their catches.
In sailorly tradition they no doubt had a handy reserve of appealing
gew-gaws for any chance meetings with the opposite sex. One thing
leading to another, it was not long before looking-glasses, beads,
tin bells and other trinkets were being exchanged for the fur skins
that the natives wore. And the aborigines in turn were then lured into
trapping and curing prime skins for this trade.
So, along with their nets, the fishermen from Europe brought over more
substantial trade goods, such as knives, axes, fishhooks, combs and
colored cloth. Codfish Land, as they called it, began yielding up tidy
extra profits from a trade in sealskins, red and blue fox, otter,
beaver and marten. The bulk was small on the return trip; the merchants
at home paid well.
The first pelts of the American pine marten taken by the sailors
caused much excitement. They were mistaken for sable. At the time
Siberian sable was the most expensive of all furs traded in the great
international fur center at Leipzig. In Russia it was reserved for the
use of royalty only; in England noble women eagerly sought the precious
pelts as neckpieces. A sack, as the Russian traders called a robe of
Siberian sable, was worth more thousands of rubles than most western
royalty could afford.
But, although the pine marten did eventually become known as American
sable, the pelt of this little animal was never so precious as that of
his glistening, thick-coated Siberian cousin. For one thing the guard
hairs of his fur did not have the beautiful silver tips.
However, there was another marten, otter-like in its aquatic habits,
that turned out to have a much finer coat than its European and Asian
cousins. This one the fishermen learned to call mink. It was the name
already given in Finland to this scrappy little member of the weasel
family, for whose fur there was a premium market in western European
countries. The American wild mink with its thicker, silkier under fur
and its glossier guard hair was definitely more desirable, bringing a
better price.
Although Portuguese sailors had led the way to Codfish Land, Portugal
followed up her early advantages in America only half-heartedly. She
agreed to a Papal-sponsored division of the earth that left the new
world pretty much to Spain. The Portuguese suspected there was no short
route west to Asia. Anyway, they were doing very well in their own
sphere with their route to the east around Africa.
In the end the Pope’s line of demarcation was all right with the
Spaniards, too. By the time they were sure there was no centrally
located strait through America, they had turned up enough gold, silver
and other rich loot to keep them well occupied.
With medieval single-mindedness they were plundering, enslaving and
killing. It was the only way the criminal conquistadors knew to reward
themselves. Because the natives were accounted to be bloodthirsty
cannibals their enslavement or liquidation was looked upon with favor
by Spanish authorities. It also greatly simplified the acquisition of
aboriginal treasures and mines. Cruelties, so artfully practiced at
home, became sheer brutality when transferred to a frontier where the
number of victims seemed inexhaustible. Roasting alive, tearing by
hounds, dismembering, were all part of the customary Spanish pattern at
the time; it was just that these atrocities were committed with higher
frequency in America. Wholesale annihilation was the order of the day.
Spain was not so absorbed however that she did not make threatening
gestures against those who would intrude on her new possessions.
England, following up Cabot’s discoveries, made a prideful attempt to
launch a colonizing venture. But it died in birth. The Spaniards warned
against any encroachments in their American sphere and the English
admiralty was in no position to contest the point.
Not so, the French!
* * * * *
Loot from the Aztec Empire proved too tempting to French captains of
swift, handy ships which had been commissioned as privateers. Armed
with official “letters of mark” to challenge Spanish depredations on
the high seas they found clever ways to exceed their authority when
they overhauled cumbersome, treasure-laden galleons from America.
It wasn’t too long before it was difficult to distinguish between a
French privateer and a plain pirate. And Francis I, winking broadly,
said he knew of no clause in Father Adam’s will which left all the new
world and its riches to his cousin Charles of Spain. Whereupon the
French monarch went further. He sent out a capable Florentine pilot,
Giovanni da Verrazano, to discover and claim lands in America, and if
possible to locate a passage to the Indian Ocean.
Verrazano, with a crew of fifty Normans in _La Dauphine_, made his
landfall in 1524 just above Spanish Florida. He coasted northward past
the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. It appears that he glimpsed the bay and
identified it as the great ocean of the East reaching to China; then he
sailed on to the Hudson River.
The natives encountered by the Frenchmen along the way were gentle and
playful. It was spring and Verrazano’s mariners succumbed to the beauty
of the Indian women who braided their hair and modestly covered their
loins with soft furs. Otherwise they were quite naked. The sailors gave
the aborigines toy bells, bits of paper and colored beads, and found
them in turn “very liberal, for they give away what they have.”
_La Dauphine_ left the Hudson River and continued on north, beyond
Cape Cod, to lands where the natives were found to wear Arctic bear
and seal skins. They were rude and truculent too, possibly as a result
of having encountered white men before. These wild men exchanged their
furs warily. They wanted only fishhooks, metal cutting tools and other
valuable trade goods.
When Verrazano returned home all he could show, of any tangible value,
were the furs he had taken in trade along the coast of America. But no
one in France was more than passingly interested in pelts; there was
the more immediate prospect of finding gold or reaching China.
While the French were preparing to follow up Verrazano’s coastal
discoveries with an inland venture the Spaniards looked on with a
jealous eye. They themselves explored northward in Verrazano’s track
to make sure there was no gold or a northwest passage to Cathay there.
They took furs and Indian slaves from the St. Lawrence Gulf. And they
actually tried a gigantic colonizing venture in the Chesapeake Bay
area. There was the chance that another Aztec Empire lay deep in the
interior of those parts!
This country to the north of Tierra Florida, the Spaniards called
Tierra D’Ayllon. For it was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a justice of Santo
Domingo, who had reconnoitered it and traded there for bison hides,
beaver, otter and muskrat.
In 1526 Ayllon made a settlement of several hundred men, women and
children at San Miquel, possibly on the James River, in the Bay of
Santa Maria as the Spaniards called the Chesapeake. He brought priests,
armored soldiers, black slaves and the usual instruments of torture to
the Chesapeake. But probably he didn’t erect protecting palisades about
his town. San Miquel was abandoned after the first winter, its captain
having perished. The benighted natives had not taken well to killings.
These were of a prouder race than the West Indian savages, and those
colonists who did not die at their hands or from disease were happy to
get back to sunny Santo Domingo.
There seemed to be no hope of finding gold or silver in Tierra D’Ayllon
anyway. From this time all the closely guarded, secret maps of the
Spaniards said so. Except for some further trade in the Potomac for
bison hides and pelts, and a fatal missionary effort on the peninsula
between the James and York Rivers by a band of brave Jesuit priests,
the Spaniards ceased active interest in the Chesapeake area for many
years. They were being kept much too busy in Florida and South America.
Newly discovered mines, interlopers in the Caribbean, and especially
French corsairs lying in wait along their rich trade routes--all
demanded attention.
The Frenchmen, however annoying their “privateers” were to the
Spaniards, were really only biding their time.
Francis I, as always, had a great many problems. But the most pressing
one was his need for gold--much more than his privateers and pirates
could safely plunder from Spanish galleons. He had his mind on America
itself as a solution.
Jacques Cartier, a stout Breton mariner of St. Malo who knew the
fishermen’s route to Codfish Land, was sent out by the French king in
1534, and again in 1535, to explore inland in America. He was to find
gold, or the elusive passage to the treasures of Cathay at least. Maybe
in the northwest, beyond Spanish claims, the new-found land was joined
to Tartary as some of the geographers said. By striking inland Cartier
might reach it.
On his first voyage of discovery Cartier explored the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and claimed the country, calling it New France. He found the
first Indians he met anxious to trade. They followed the French ships,
in their birch-bark canoes and along the shores, dancing and singing to
prove their friendliness, and holding up pelts on sticks. But the pelts
turned out to be “such skinnes as they cloth themselves withall, which
are of small value,” Cartier remarked.
However, he gave the aborigines ironware and other things, while they
danced about him, rubbed his chest and arms, and cast sea water over
their heads in ceremonies of joy. “They gave us whatsoever they had,
not keeping anything, so that they were constrained to go backe againe
naked, and made us signes that the next day they would come againe, and
bring more skinnes with them.”
Along the shores of the gulf wherever he went Cartier made friends with
the natives, giving to the women and children, little tin bells and
beads--to the men: hatchets, knives, frying pans. But he found no gold;
he located no passage to Cathay. When he embarked for his return to
France he took two wild men of “Canada” with him, inveigling them into
making the voyage by clothing them in shirts, colored coats and red
caps, and putting a copper chain about each of their necks.
These two, in France, assured the French king that far up the deep
river of Canada (the St. Lawrence) and beyond, there were walled
cities where people lived in houses--Hochelaga, and even more distant
Saguenay. Frontier towns of Tartary! They could be. When Captain
Cartier left with three ships in 1535 on his second voyage of discovery
he was instructed to “go west as far as possible.”
With the two Indians as guides, Cartier’s ships anchored finally in
the quiet waters below present-day Quebec. Close by was the village of
Donnacona, Indian “Lord of Canada,” who welcomed the white men even
more than the safe return of his two subjects. He wanted to trade.
But the French captain wasn’t much interested in Donnacona’s personal
wardrobe or any other pelts.
He made only a brief note of the great store of fur-bearing animals
in Canada--the martens, foxes, otters, beavers, weasels and badgers.
Then he pushed on. His was a more glittering objective. Up the swift,
narrowing river he toiled with a small party, part way in a little
pinnace and then in two long boats, until at length he reached
Hochelaga.
The walled city turned out to be a well-palisaded Indian village,
near the present site of Montreal, where some of the highly organized
Iroquois lived in their traditional long houses. That was all--except
that the Indians, noting the silver chain of Cartier’s whistle and a
French dagger handle of yellowish copper gilt, said that such metals
came from Saguenay. It was much farther inland, several moons travel.
But there were difficult rapids and the French captain couldn’t make
it. He was already a thousand miles inland. Winter was coming on. In
the end he returned downstream to the safety of his ships and the fort
his men had built on the river in Canada.
Plagued by scurvy and freezing with cold that winter, Jacques Cartier
had another failure on his hands. It was going to be difficult to
explain things at home. He treated with Donnacona for food and
medicine, for furs with which to protect his men from the cold, and for
information about the country to the west. The “Lord of Canada” was
anxious to please the white men, that is, in return for their skillets
and axes and their bright colored clothes. He provided the things they
wanted--and he talked too much.
Donnacona boasted that he had been to Saguenay. Truly, he swore, he had
seen there many of the things the Frenchmen valued so much--red rubies,
gold, silver--and the people were white men who went about clothed in
woolen cloths. Cartier brightened in the face of his troubles. Here, he
perceived, was eye-witness testimony on a royal level to the existence
of Saguenay and its treasures. When spring came he captured Donnacona
by a stratagem and “persuaded” the Indian king to go with him to France
for a visit.