the islands and shores of the Baltic, and overran and conquered the
deserted Roman world, supplied the maritime energy of Europe from the
fifth to the tenth century; and colonised northern Italy with the
element to which we must assign the rise of its great maritime
republics, including the one that was to furnish the discoverer of
America in the fifteenth century. Genoese and Spaniards could not have
made for themselves a home either in Greenland or Iceland. Had the
Northmen of the tenth century been less hardy, they would probably have
prosecuted their discoveries, and found more genial settlements, such as
have since then proved the centres of colonisation for the
Anglo-American race. But of their actual discovery of some portion of
the mainland of North America, prior to the eleventh century, there can
be no reasonable doubt. The wonder rather is that after establishing
permanent settlements both in Iceland and Greenland, their southern
explorations were prosecuted with such partial and transient results.
The indomitable Vikings were conquering fresh territories on the coasts
and islands of the North Sea, and giving a new name to the fairest
region of northern Gaul wrested by the Northmen from its Frank
conquerors. The same hardy supplanters were following up such
acquisitions by expeditions to the Mediterranean that resulted in the
establishment of their supremacy over ancient historic races there, and
training leaders for later crusading adventure.
The voyage from Greenland, or even from Iceland, to the New England
shores was not more difficult than from the native fiords of the
Northmen to the Atlantic seaboard, or to the coasts and islands of the
Mediterranean. Everywhere they left their record in graven runes. At
Maeshowe in the Orkneys, on Holy Island in the Firth of Clyde, and at
Kirk Michael, Kirk Andreas, and Kirk Braddon, on the Isle of Man; or as
the relic of a more ancient past, on the marble lion of the Piræus, now
at the arsenal of Venice: their runic records are to be seen graven in
the same characters as those which have been recovered during the
present century from their early settlements beyond the Atlantic.
Numerous similar inscriptions from the homes of the Northmen are
furnished in Professor George Stephens’ _Old Northern Runic Monuments_,
which perpetuate memorials of the love of adventure of those daring
rovers, and the pride they took in their expeditions to remote and
strange lands. Intensified at a later stage by religious fervour, the
same spirit emboldened them as leaders in the Crusades; and some of
their runic inscriptions tell of adventurous pilgrimages to the Holy
Land. An Icelandic rover is designated on his rune-stone _Rafn
Hlmrckfari_ as a successful voyager to Ireland. Norwegian and Danish
bautastein frequently preserve the epithet of _Englandsfari_ for the
leaders of expeditions to the British Isles, or more vaguely refer to
their adventures in “the western parts.” King Sigurd of Norway proudly
blazoned the title of _Jórsolafari_ as one who had achieved the
pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and the literate memorials of the Northmen of
Orkney, recovered in 1861, on the opening of the famous Maeshowe
Tumulus, include those of a band of Crusaders, or Jerusalem-farers, who,
in 1153, followed Earl Ragnvald to the Holy Land.
The inscribed rune-stones brought from the sites of the ancient Norse
colonies in Greenland, and now deposited in the Royal Museum of Northern
Antiquities, at Copenhagen, are simple personal or sepulchral
inscriptions. But they are graven in the northern runes, and as such
constitute monuments of great historical value: furnishing indisputable
evidence of the presence of European colonists beyond the Atlantic
centuries before that memorable 12th of October 1492, on which the eyes
of the wistful gazers from the deck of the “Santa Maria” were gladdened
with their first glimpse of what they believed to be the India of the
far east: the Cipango in search of which they had entered on their
adventurous voyage.
The colonies of Greenland, after being occupied, according to Norwegian
and Danish tradition, from the tenth to the fifteenth century, were
entirely forgotten. The colonists are believed to have been exterminated
by the native Eskimo. The very locality chosen for their settlements was
so completely lost sight of that, when an interest in their history
revived, and expeditions were sent out to revisit the scene of early
Norse colonisation beyond the Atlantic, much time was lost in a
fruitless search on the coast lying directly west from Iceland. Towards
the middle of the seventeenth century, an oar drifted to the Iceland
coast, a relic, as was believed, of the long-lost colony of Greenland,
bearing this inscription in runic characters: OFT VAR EK DASA DUR EK DRO
THICK—_Oft was I weary when I drew thee_; but it was not till the close
of the century that the traditions of the old Greenlanders began to
excite attention. Many a Norse legend pictured the enviable delights of
the fabled Hesperian region discovered within the Arctic circle, yet
meriting by the luxuriance of its fertile valleys its name of Greenland;
and the fancies and legendary traditions that gradually displaced the
history of the old colony, had been interwoven by the poet Montgomery
with the tale of self-sacrificing labours of Moravian Missionaries, in
the cantos of his _Greenland_ epic, long before the _Antiquitates
Americanæ_ issued from the Copenhagen press.
The narrations of ancient voyagers, and their explorations in the New
World, as brought to light in 1835 by the Copenhagen volume on
pre-Columbian America, were too truthful in their aspect to be slighted;
and too fascinating in their revelations of a long-forgotten intercourse
between the Old World and the New, to be willingly subjected to
incredulous analysis. From the genuine literary memorials of older
centuries, sufficient evidence could be gleaned to place beyond
question, not only the discovery and colonisation of Greenland by Eric
the Red,—apparently in the year 985,—but also the exploration of
southern lands, some of which must have formed part of the American
continent. The manuscripts whence those narratives are derived are of
various dates, and differ widely in value; but of the genuineness and
historical significance of the oldest of them, no doubt can be
entertained. The accounts which some of them furnish are so simple, and
devoid of anything extravagant or improbable, that the internal evidence
of truthfulness is worthy of great consideration. The exuberant fancy of
the Northmen, which revels in their mythology and songs, would have
constructed a very different tale had it been employed in the invention
of a southern continent, or earthly Paradise fashioned from the dreams
of Icelandic and Greenland rovers.
The narrative attaches itself to genuine Icelandic history; and
furnishes a coherent, and seemingly unexaggerated account of a voyage
characterised by nothing that is supernatural; and little that is even
romantic. Eric Thorvaldsson, more commonly referred to as Erikr Rauthi,
or Eric the Red, a banished Icelandic jarl, made his way to the
Greenland coast and effected a settlement at Igalikko, or Brattalid, as
it was at first called, from whence one of the runic inscriptions now in
the Copenhagen museum was taken. Before the close of the century, if not
in the very year A.D. 1000, in which St. Olaf was introducing
Christianity into Norway, Leif, or Leiv Ericson, a son of the first
coloniser of Greenland, appears to have accidentally discovered the
American mainland. The story, current in Norwegian and Icelandic
tradition, and repeated with additions and variations in successive
Sagas, most frequently ascribes to Leif an actual exploratory voyage in
quest of southern lands already reported to have been seen by Bjarni
Herjulfson. But the Sagas from whence the revived story of Vinland is
derived are of different dates, and very varying degrees of credibility.
Of those, the narrative in which the name of Bjarni Herjulfson first
appears occurs in a manuscript of the latter part of the fourteenth
century; and exhibits both amplifications and inconsistencies abundantly
justifying its rejection as an authority for depriving Leif Ericson of
the honour of the discovery of the North American continent. He was on
his way from Norway to Greenland when he was driven out of his course,
and so reached the mainland of the New World in that early century; even
as, five centuries later, the Portuguese admiral, Pedro Alvarez Cabral,
when on his way to the Cape, was driven westward to the coast of Brazil,
and so to the discovery of the southern continent. For later generations
the tale of the old Vinland explorers—whose goodly land of the vine,
and of fertile meads of grain, had faded away as a dream,—naturally
gathered around it exaggerations and legendary fable; but such terms are
wholly inapplicable to the original Saga. The story of Thorfinn’s
expedition to effect a settlement on the new-found land, within three or
four years after Leif Ericson’s reported discovery, is a simple,
consistent narrative, rendered attractive by natural and highly
suggestive incidents, but entirely free from mythical or legendary
features. This is obviously the basis of the varying and inconsistent
tales of later Sagas. The year 1003 is the date assigned to the
expedition in which Thorfinn set out, with three ships and a
considerable company of adventurers, and effected a temporary settlement
of Vinland. Voyaging southward, he first landed on a barren coast where
a great plain covered with flat stones stretched from the sea to a lofty
range of ice-clad mountains. To this he gave the name of Helluland, from
_hella_, a flat stone. The earlier editor, having the requirements of
his main theory in view, found in its characteristics evidence
sufficient to identify it with Newfoundland; but Professor Gustav Storm
assigns reasons for preferring Labrador as more probable.[5] The next
point touched presented a low shore of white sand, and beyond it a level
country covered with forest, to which the name of Markland, or woodland,
was given. This, which, so far as the description can guide us, might be
anywhere on the American coast, was assumed by the editor of the
_Antiquitates Americanæ_ to be Nova Scotia; but, according to Professor
Storm, can have been no other country than Newfoundland. The voyagers,
after two more days at sea, again saw land; and of this the
characteristic that the dew upon the grass tasted sweet, was accepted as
sufficient evidence that Nantucket, where honey-dew abounds, is the
place referred to. Their further course shoreward, and up a river into
the lake from which it flowed, has been assumed to have been up the
Pacasset River to Mount Hope Bay. There the voyagers passed the winter.
After erecting temporary booths, their leader divided them into two
parties, which alternately proceeded on exploring excursions. One of his
followers, a southerner,—_sudrmadr_, or German, as he is assumed to
have been,—having wandered, he reported on his return the discovery of
wine-trees and grapes; and hence the name of Vineland, given to the
locality.
This land of the vine, discovered by ancient voyagers on the shores of
the New World, naturally awakened the liveliest interest in the minds of
American antiquaries and historical students; nor is that interest even
now wholly a thing of the past. Is this “Vinland the Good” a reality?
Can it be located on any definite site? Montgomery’s _Greenland_ epic
was published in 1819; and the poet, with no American or Canadian pride
of locality to beguile him in his interpretation of the evidence,
observes in one of the notes to his poem: “Leif and his party wintered
there, and observed that on the shortest day the sun rose about eight
o’clock, which may correspond with the forty-ninth degree of latitude,
and denotes the situation of Newfoundland, or the River St. Lawrence.”
The reference here is to the sole data on which all subsequent attempts
to determine the geographical location of Vinland have been based; and
after upwards of sixty years of speculation and conjecture, Professor
Gustav Storm in his _Studier over Vinlandsreiserne_, arrives at a nearly
similar conclusion. Vinland cannot have lain farther north than 49°. How
far southward of this its site may be sought for is matter of
conjecture; but all probabilities are opposed to its discovery so far
south as Rhode Island.
Professor Rafn, however, arrived at very different results; and found
abundant confirmation in the sympathetic responses of the Rhode Island
antiquaries. The famous Dighton Rock was produced, with its assumed
runic inscription. The Newport Round Tower was a still more satisfactory
indication of permanent settlement by its supposed Norse builders; and
“The Skeleton in Armour,” on which Longfellow founded his ballad
romance, was accepted without hesitation as a glimpse of one of the
actual colonists of Vinland in the eleventh century. Professor Rafn
accordingly summed up the inquiry, and set forth the conclusions arrived
at, in this definite fashion. “It is the total result of the nautical,
geographical, and astronomical evidence in the original documents, which
places the situations of the countries discovered beyond all doubt. The
number of days’ sail between the several newly-found lands, the striking
description of the coasts, especially the sand-banks of Nova Scotia; and
the long beaches and downs of a peculiar appearance on Cape Cod (the
_Kialarnes_ and _Furdustrandir_ of the Northmen,) are not to be
mistaken. In addition hereto we have the astronomical remark that the
shortest day in Vinland was nine hours long, which fixes the latitude of
41° 24′ 10″, or just that of the promontories which limit the entrance
to Mount Hope Bay, where Leif’s booths were built, and in the district
around which the old Northmen had their head establishment, which was
named by them _Hóp_, or the Creek.”
The Dighton Rock runes erelong fell into woeful discredit; and as for
the Newport Round Tower, it has been identified as “The Old Stone Mill”
built there by Governor Benedict Arnold, who removed from Providence to
Newport in 1653. Though therefore no longer to be accredited to the
Northmen, it is of very respectable architectural antiquity, according
to New World reckoning. Nevertheless, in spite of such failure of all
confirmatory evidence, the general summary of results was presented by
Professor Rafn in such absolute terms, and the geographical details of
the assumed localities were so confidently accredited by the members of
the Rhode Island Historical Society, that his conclusions were accepted
as a whole without cavil. In reality, however, when we revert to the
evidence from which such definite results were derived, it proves vague,
if not illusory. The voyagers crossed over from Greenland to Helluland,
which we may assume without hesitation to have been the inhospitable
coast of Labrador. They then pursued a south-western course, in a voyage
in all of four days, subdivided into two nearly equal parts, until they
landed on a coast where wild grapes grew, and which accordingly they
named the Land of the Vine. To Icelandic or Greenland voyagers, the
vine, with its clusters of grapes, however unpalatable, could not fail
to prove an object of special note. But there is no need to prolong the
four days’ run, and land the explorers beyond Cape Cod, in order to find
the wild grape. It grows in sheltered localities in Nova Scotia; and so
in no degree conflicts with the later deductions based on the same
astronomical evidence of the length of the shortest day, which have
induced subsequent investigators to adopt conclusions much more nearly
approximating to those suggested by the poet Montgomery fully sixteen
years before the issue of Professor Rafn’s learned quarto from the
Copenhagen press.
The topographical details which have to be relied upon in any attempt to
identify the precise locality are little less vague than those of the
astronomical data from which the editor of the _Antiquitates Americanæ_
assumed to compute his assigned latitude. The voyagers, after their
first wintering, pursued their course southward; and again approaching
the shore, made their way up a river, to a lake from whence it flowed.
The land was wooded, with wild “wheat” in the low meadows, and on the
high banks grape-bearing vines. The aspect of this strange land was
tempting to voyagers from the north, so they erected booths, and
wintered there. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence southward to Rhode
Island, the coast is indented with many an estuary, up any of which the
old voyagers may have found their way into lake or expanded basin, with
overhanging forest trees, meadow flats, and other features sufficiently
corresponding to all that we learn from the old Saga of the temporary
settlement of Thorfinn and his fellow-voyagers. Fresh claimants
accordingly enter the lists to contend for the honours that pertain to
the landing-place of those first Pilgrim Fathers. New Englanders above
all not unnaturally cherish the pleasant fancy that they had for their
precursors the hardy Vikings, who, resenting the oppression of King
Harold the fair-haired, sailed into the unknown west to find a free home
for themselves. The fancy had a double claim on the gifted musician Ole
Bull. Himself a wanderer from the Scandinavian fatherland, he started
the proposition which was to give an air of indisputable reality to the
old legend; and which culminated in the erection, on Boston Common, in
1888, of a fine statue of Leif Ericson.
“South of Greenland is Helluland; next is Markland; from thence is not
far to Vinland the Good.” So reads the old Saga; and with the rearing of
the statue of its finder, it seemed incumbent on some loyal son of the
Commonwealth to demonstrate the site of the good land within the area of
Massachusetts. In the following year, accordingly, Professor Eben Norton
Horsford, of Cambridge, undertook the search, and was able to identify
to his entire satisfaction the site of Leif’s, or Karlsefne’s booths, in
his own neighbourhood on the Charles river. First appeared in 1889 _The
Problem of the Northmen_; and in the following year, in choicest
typography, and amplitude of attractive illustrations, _The Discovery of
the Ancient City of Norumbega, at Watertown on the River Charles_. There
the ephemeral booths of the old winterers in Vinland had left enduring
traces after a lapse of more than eight centuries. The discoverer,
resolved to arrest “Time’s decaying fingers,” which had thus far been
laid with such unwonted gentleness on the pioneer relics, has marked the
spot with a memorial tower, and an elaborately inscribed tablet, one
clause of which runs thus: “=River, The Charles, discovered by Leif
Erikson 1000 a.d. Explored by Thorwald, Leif’s Brother, 1003 a.d.
Colonised by Thorfinn Karlsefni 1007 a.d. First Bishop Erik Gnupson 1121
a.d.=”
The entire evidence has been readduced with minutest critical accuracy
in _The Finding of Wineland the Good: the History of the Icelandic
Discovery of America_, by the late gifted Arthur Middleton Reeves. His
verdict is thus briefly stated: “There is no suggestion in Icelandic
records of a permanent occupation of the county; and after the
exploration at the beginning of the eleventh century, it is not known
that Wineland was ever again visited by Icelanders, although it would
appear that a voyage thither was attempted in the year 1121, but with
what result is not known.”[6] In the Codex Frisianus is an apt heading
which might, better than a more lengthy inscription, have given
expression to the pleasant fancy that the footprints of Leif Ericson’s
followers had been recovered on the banks of the Charles river, “FUNDIT
VINLAND GOTHA”—Vineland the Good found! Maps old and new illustrate the
topography of the newly-assigned site; and among the rest, one which
specially aims at reproducing the most definite feature of the old
narrative is thus titled:—“River flowing through a lake into the sea;
Vinland of the Northmen; site of Leif’s houses.” To his own
satisfaction, at least, it is manifest that the author has identified
the site.
But a great deal more than Leif’s booths is involved. It is the
discovery of the ancient city of Norumbega, of which also the inscribed
tablet makes due record; including the statement, set forth more fully
in the printed text, that the name is only an Indian transmutation of
“Norbega, the ancient form of Norvega, Norway, to which Vinland was
subject!” The name, though probably unfamiliar to most modern readers,
was once as well known as that of Utopia, or El Dorado. One of Sir John
Hawkins’ fellow-voyagers claimed to have seen the city of Norumbega
still standing in 1568: a gorgeous Indian town outvying the capital of
Montezuma, and resplendent in pearls and gold. Hakluyt proposed its
recolonisation; Sir Humphrey Gilbert went in search of it; and it
figures both as a city and a country on maps familiar to older
generations than the founders of New England. Above all, Milton has
given it a place in the Tenth Book of his _Paradise Lost_. When the
Divine Creator is represented as readapting this world to a fallen
race—
Some say he bid his Angels turn askance
The poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun’s axle. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . Now from the north
Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore,
Bursting their brazen dungeon, arm’d with ice,
And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw,
Boreas . . .
which seems to imply very Icelandic and Arctic associations of the
Miltonic muse. But the gentle New England poet, Whittier, who had sung
of his Christian knight in vain quest of the marvellous city, thus
writes in sober prose to its modern discoverer: “I had supposed that the
famed city of Norumbega was on the Penobscot when I wrote my poem some
years ago; but I am glad to think of it as on the Charles, in our own
Massachusetts.” This work of rearing anew on the banks of the river
Charles the metropolis of Vinland the Good may be best entrusted to the
poets of New England.