as that which establishes beyond question the presence of the Northmen
on the sites of their long-settled colonies in Greenland. Their visits
to the Canadian seaboard were transitory; and any attempt at settlement
there failed. Yet without the definite memorials of the old Norse
colonists recovered in the present century on the sites of their
Greenland settlements, it would probably have proved vain to identify
them now. The coast of Nova Scotia is indented with inlets, and
estuaries of creeks and rivers, suggesting some vague resemblance to the
Hóp, or creek of the old Sagas. Whether any one of them presents
adequate features for identification with the descriptions furnished in
their accounts has yet to be ascertained. But there is every motive to
stimulate us to a careful survey of the coast in search of any probable
site of the Vinland of the old Northmen. Slight as are the details
available for such a purpose, they are not without some specific
definiteness, which the Rhode Island antiquaries turned to account, not
without a warning to us in their too confident assumption of results.
Dr. E. B. Tylor, in his address to the section of anthropology at the
Montreal meeting of the British Association, after referring to the
Icelandic records of the explorations of the hardy sea-rovers from
Greenland, as too consistent to be refused belief as to the main facts,
thus proceeded: “They sailed some way down the American coast. But where
are we to look for the most southerly points which the Sagas mention as
reached in Vineland? Where was Keel-ness where Thorvald’s ship ran
aground, and Cross-ness where he was buried when he died by the
Skræling’s arrow? Rafn, in the _Antiquitates Americanæ_, confidently
maps out these places about the promontory of Cape Cod, in
Massachusetts, and this has been repeated since from book to book. I
must plead guilty to having cited Rafn’s map before now, but when with
reference to the present meeting I consulted our learned editor of
Scandinavian records at Oxford, Mr. Gudbrand Vigfusson, and afterwards
went through the original passages in the Sagas with Mr. York Powell, I
am bound to say that the voyages of the Northmen ought to be reduced to
more moderate limits. It appears that they crossed from Greenland to
Labrador (Helluland), and thence sailing more or less south and west, in
two stretches of two days each, they came to a place near where wild
grapes grew, whence they called the country Vineland. This would,
therefore, seem to have been somewhere about the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
and it would be an interesting object for a yachting cruise to try down
from the east coast of Labrador a fair four days’ sail of a Viking ship,
and identify, if possible, the sound between the island and the ness,
the river running out of the lake into the sea, the long stretches of
sand, and the other local features mentioned in the Sagas.” A fresh
stimulus is thus furnished to Canadian yachtsmen to combine historical
exploration with a summer’s coasting trip, and go in search of the lost
Vinland. The description of the locality that furnished the data from
which the members of the Rhode Island Historical Society satisfied
themselves as to the identity of their more southern site on the
Pacasset river, has to be kept in view in any renewed inquiry. At the
same time it must not be overlooked that the oldest and most trustworthy
narrative, in the Saga of Eric the Red, with the credited, and probably
genuine story of the voyage of Karlsefne, are expanded, in the
Grænlendingathàttr, into five voyages, with their incidents recast with
modifications and additions. The expedition of Leif Ericson, and his
accidental discovery of Vinland, and the subsequent attempt at
colonisation of Karlsefne, in company with Thorvald and Freydisa, are
the only adventures accredited by the oldest tradition. In the latter
narrative it is stated that “they sailed for a long time, until they
came at last to a river which flowed down from the land into a lake, and
so into the sea. There were great bars at the mouth of the river, so
that it could only be entered at the height of the flood tide. Karlsefn
and his men sailed into the mouth of the river, and called it Hóp,”
_i.e._ a land-locked bay. “They found self-sown wheat fields wherever
there were hollows, and where there was hilly ground there were vines.”
Subsequent descriptions are obviously based on this account. But to
whatever extent the description of the locality where Thorvald, the
brother of Leif Ericson, was killed by a Skræling may have been
suggested by that narrative, the localities are different. It was
apparently in the spring of A.D. 1004 that Karlsefne set out on his
colonising expedition. The voyagers sailed along Furdustrandir, a long,
low sandy coast, till they came to where the land was indented with
creeks and inlets. There they steered into the Straumsfjord, to a spot
where Karlsefne and his companions spent the winter of A.D. 1005; and
where, therefore, we may assume the observations to have been made that
determined the length of the day in Vinland at the winter solstice. The
narrative of noteworthy incidents is accompanied with topographical
details that have to be kept in view in any attempt at recovering traces
of the locality. There, if it could be identified, we have to look for a
promontory answering to the Krossanes, or promontory of the crosses: the
spot where Thorvald was buried; and as would seem to be implied, where a
cross was set up at the grave mound. The style of such a sepulchral
memorial of the Northmen at a little later date is very familiar to us.
The discovery on some hitherto unheeded spot of the Nova-Scotian coast
of a bautastein, graven like those recovered on the sites of the old
Greenland colony, would be an invaluable historical record. It might be
expected to read somewhat in this fashion: _Leif sunr Erikr rautha
raisti krus thana eftir Thorvald brothur sina_. But there is slight
ground for imagining that the transient visitors from Greenland to the
Canadian shores left any more lasting memorial of the tragic event that
reappears in successive versions of the narrative of their presence
there, than a wooden grave-post, or uninscribed headstone.
One other element in the characteristic features of the strange land
visited by the Greenland explorers is the native population, and this
has a specific interest in other respects, in addition to its bearing on
the determination of a Nova-Scotian site for “Vineland the Good.” They
are designated Skrælings (Skrælingjar), and as in this the Greenland
voyagers applied the same name to the natives of Vinland as to the
Greenland Eskimo, it has been assumed that both were of the same race.
But the term “skræling” is still used in Norway to express the idea of
decrepitude, or physical inferiority; and probably was used with no more
definite significance than our own word “savage.” The account given in
the Saga of the approach of the Skrælings would sufficiently accord with
that of a Micmac flotilla of canoes. Their first appearance is thus
described: “While looking about one morning, they observed a great
number of canoes. On exhibiting friendly signals the canoes approached
nearer to them, and the natives in them looked with astonishment at
those they met there. These people were sallow-coloured and ill-looking,
had ugly heads of hair, large eyes and broad cheeks.” The term
_skræling_ has usually been interpreted “dwarf,” and so seemed to
confirm the idea of the natives having been Eskimo; but, as already
stated, the word, as still used in Norway, might mean no more than the
inferiority of any savage race. As to the description of their features
and complexion, that would apply equally well to the red Indian or the
Eskimo, and so far as the eyes are spoken of, rather to the former than
the latter. More importance may be attached to the term _hudhkeipr_
applied to their canoes, which is more applicable to the kayak, or
skin-boat, than to the birch-bark canoe of the Indian; but the word was
probably loosely used as applicable to any savage substitute for a keel,
or built boat.
This question of the identification of the Skrælings, or natives,
whether of Nova Scotia or New England, is one of considerable
ethnographic significance. The speculations relative to the possible
relationship of the Eskimo to the post-glacial cave-dwellers of the
Dordogne valley, and their consequent direct descent from palæolithic
European man, confer a value on any definite evidence bearing on their
movements in intermediate centuries. On the other hand, the approximate
correspondence of the Huron-Iroquois of Canada and the state of New York
to the Eskimo in the dolichocephalic type of skull common to both, gives
an interest to any evidence of the early presence of the latter to the
south of the St. Lawrence. In their western migrations the Eskimo
attract the attention of the ethnographer as the one definite ethnic
link between America and Asia. They are met with, as detached and
wandering tribes, across the whole continent, from Greenland to Behring
Strait. Nevertheless, they appear to be the occupants of a diminishing
rather than an expanding area. This would accord with the idea of their
area extending over the Canadian maritime provinces, and along the New
England coast, in the eleventh century; and possibly as indicating the
early home, from which they were being driven northward by the
Huron-Iroquois or other assailants, rather than implying an overflow
from their Arctic habitat. Seal hunting on the coast of Newfoundland,
and fishing on its banks and along the shores of Nova Scotia, would even
now involve no radical change in the habits of the Eskimo. It was with
this hyperborean race that the Scandinavian colonists of Greenland came
in contact 800 years ago, and by them that they were exterminated at a
later date. If it could be proved that the Skrælings of the eleventh
century, found by the Northmen on the American mainland, were Eskimo, it
would furnish the most conclusive evidence that the red Indians—whether
Micmac, Millicet, or Hurons,—are recent intruders there.
In any process of aggression of the native American race on the older
area of the Eskimo, some intermixture of blood would naturally follow.
The slaughter of the males in battle, and the capture of women and
children, everywhere leads to a like result; and this seems the simplest
solution of the problem of the southern brachycephalic, and the northern
dolichocephalic type of head among native American races. When the sites
of the ancient colonies of Greenland were rediscovered and visited by
the Danes, they imagined they could recognise in the physiognomy of some
of the Eskimo who still people the shores of Davis Straits, traces of
admixture between the old native and the Scandinavian or Icelandic
blood. Of the Greenland colonies the Eskimo had perpetuated many
traditions, referring to the colonists under the native name of
_Kablunet_. But of the language that had been spoken among them for
centuries, the fact is highly significant that the word _Kona_, used by
them as a synonym for woman, is the only clearly recognised trace. This
is worthy of note, in considering the distinctive character of the
Eskimo language, and its comparison with the Indian languages of the
North American continent. It has the feature common to nearly all the
native languages of the continent north of the Mexican Gulf in the
composite character of its words; so that an Eskimo verb may furnish the
equivalent to a whole sentence in other tongues. But what is specially
noteworthy is that, while the Huron-Iroquois, the Algonkin, and other
Indian families of languages have multiplied widely dissimilar dialects,
Dr. Henry Rink has shown that the Eskimo dialects of Greenland or
Labrador differ slightly from those of Behring Strait; and the congeners
of the American Eskimo, who have overflowed into the Aleutian Islands,
and taken possession of the north-eastern region of Asia, perpetuate
there nearly allied dialects of the parent tongue.[8] The Alaskan and
the Tshugazzi peninsulas are in part peopled by Eskimo; the Konegan of
Kudjak Island belong to the same stock; and all the dialects spoken in
the Aleutian Islands, the supposed highway from Asia to America, betray
in like manner the closest affinities to the Arctic Mongolidæ of the New
World. They thus appear not only to be contributions from the New World
to the Old, but to be of recent introduction there. If the cave-dwellers
of Europe’s palæolithic era found their way as has been suggested, in
some vastly remote age, either by an eastern or a western route to the
later home of the Arctic Eskimo, it is in comparatively modern centuries
that the tide of migration has set westward across the Behring Strait,
and by the Aleutian Islands, into Asia.
The reference to the Skrælings in the first friendly intercourse of
Thorfinn Karlsefne and his companions with the natives, and their
subsequent hostile attitude, ending in the death of Thorvald Ericson,
has given occasion to this digression. But the question thus suggested
is one of no secondary interest. If we could certainly determine their
ethnical character the fact would be of great significance; and coupled
with any well-grounded determination of the locality where the fatal
incident occurred, would have important bearings on American ethnology.
The description of the sallow, or more correctly, swarthy coloured,
natives with large eyes, broad cheek-bones, shaggy hair, and forbidding
countenances is furnished in the Saga, and then the narrative thus
proceeds: “After the Skrælings had gazed at them for a while, they rowed
away again to the south-west past the cape. Karlsefne and his company
had erected their dwelling-houses a little above the bay, and there they
spent the winter. No snow fell, and the cattle found their food in the
open field. One morning early, in the beginning of 1008, they descried a
number of canoes coming from the south-west past the cape. Karlsefne
having held up the white shield as a friendly signal, they drew nigh and
immediately commenced bartering. These people chose in preference red
cloth, and gave furs and squirrel skins in exchange. They would fain
also have bought swords and spears, but these Karlsefne and Snorre
prohibited their people from selling to them. In exchange for a skin
entirely gray the Skrælings took a piece of cloth of a span in breadth,
and bound it round their heads. Their barter was carried on in this way
for some time. The Northmen then found that their cloth was beginning to
grow scarce, whereupon they cut it up in smaller pieces, not broader
than a finger’s breadth, yet the Skrælings gave as much for these
smaller pieces as they had formerly given for the larger ones, or even
more. Karlsefne also caused the women to bear out milk soup, and the
Skrælings relishing the taste of it, they desired to buy it in
preference to everything else, so they wound up their traffic by
carrying away their bargains in their bellies. Whilst this traffic was
going on it happened that a bull, which Karlsefne had brought along with
him, came out of the wood and bellowed loudly. At this the Skrælings got
terrified and rushed to their canoes, and rowed away southwards. About
this time Gudrida, Karlsefne’s wife, gave birth to a son, who received
the name of Snorre. In the beginning of the following winter the
Skrælings came again in much greater numbers; they showed symptoms of
hostility, setting up loud yells. Karlsefne caused the red shield to be
borne against them, whereupon they advanced against each other, and a
battle commenced. There was a galling discharge of missiles. The
Skrælings had a sort of war sling. They elevated on a pole a
tremendously large ball, almost the size of a sheep’s stomach, and of a
bluish colour; this they swung from the pole over Karlsefne’s people,
and it descended with a fearful crash. This struck terror into the
Northmen, and they fled along the river.”
It was thus apparent that in spite of the attractions of the forest-clad
land, with its tempting vines, there was little prospect of peaceful
possession. The experience of these first colonisers differed in no
degree from that of the later pioneers of Nova Scotia or New England.
Freydisa, the natural daughter of Eric, whom Thorvald had wedded, is
described as taunting the men for their cowardice in giving way before
such miserable caitiffs as the Skrælings or savage natives, and vowing,
if she had only a weapon, she would show better fight. “She accordingly
followed them into the wood. There she encountered a dead body. It was
Thorbrand Snorrason. A flat stone was sticking fast in his head. His
naked sword lay by his side. This she took up, and prepared to defend
herself. She uncovered her breasts and dashed them against the naked
sword. At this sight the Skrælings became terrified, and ran off to
their canoes. Karlsefne and the rest now came up to her and praised her
courage. But Karlsefne and his people became aware that, although the
country held out many advantages, still the life that they would have to
lead here would be one of constant alarm from the hostile attacks of the
natives. They therefore made preparations for departure with the
resolution of returning to their own country.” To us the attractions of
a Nova-Scotian settlement might seem worth encountering a good many such
assaults rather than retreat to the ice-bound shores of Greenland. But
it was “their own country”; their relatives were there. Nor to the hardy
Northmen did its climate, or that of Iceland, present the forbidding
aspect which it would to us. So they returned to Brattalid, carrying
back with them an evil report of the land; and, as it seems, also
bringing with them specimens of its natives. For, on their homeward
voyage, they proceeded round Kialarnes, and then were driven to the
nort-west. “The land lay to larboard of them. There were thick forests
in all directions as far as they could see, with scarcely any open
space. They considered the hills at Hope and those which they now saw as
forming part of one continuous range. They spent the third winter at
Streamfirth. Karlsefne’s son Snorre was now three years of age. When
they sailed from Vinland they had southerly wind, and came to Markland,
where they met with five Skrælings. They caught two of them (two boys),
whom they carried away along with them, and taught them the Norse
language, and baptized them; these children said that their mother was
called Vethilldi and their father Uvaege. They said that the Skrælings
were ruled by chieftains (kings), one of whom was called Avalldamon, and
the other Valdidida; that there were no houses in the country, but that
the people dwelled in holes and caverns.”
Thus ended the abortive enterprise of Thorfinn and his company to found,
in the eleventh century, a colony of Northmen on the American mainland.
The account the survivors brought back told indeed of umbrageous
woodland and the tempting vine. But the forest was haunted by the fierce
Skrælings, and its coasts open to assault from their canoes. To the race
that wrested Normandy from the Carlovingian Frank, and established its
jarldoms in Orkney, Caithness, and Northumbria, such a foe might well be
deemed contemptible. But the degenerate Franks, and the Angles of
Northumbria, tempted the Norse marauder with costly spoils; and only
after repeated successful expeditions awakened the desire to settle in
the land and make there new homes. Alike to explorers seeking for
themselves a home, and to adventurers coveting the victors’ spoils, the
Vinland of the Northmen offered no adequate temptation, and so its
traditions faded out of memory, or were recalled only as the legend of a
fabulous age. At the meeting of the British Association at Montreal in
1884 Mr. R. G. Halliburton read a paper entitled “A Search in British
North America for lost Colonies of Northmen and Portuguese.” Documents
were quoted by him showing that from A.D. 1500 to 1570 commissions were
regularly issued to the Corte Reals and their successors. Cape Breton
was colonised by them in 1521; and when Portugal became annexed to Spain
in 1680, and Terra Nova passed with it to her rule, she sent colonists
to settle there. The site which they occupied, Mr. Halliburton traced to
Spanish Harbour (Sydney), Cape Breton, and this he claimed to be the
earliest European settlement in North America. For, as for the
Northmen’s reputed explorations and attempt at settlement, his verdict
is thus briefly summed up: “When we can discover Greenland’s verdant
mountains we can also hope to find the vine-clad hills of Vineland the
Good.” That, however, is too summary a dismissal of evidence which, if
vague, is to every appearance based on authorities as seemingly
authentic and trustworthy as those on which many details of the history
of early centuries rest. It would manifestly be unwise to discountenance
further inquiry by any such sweeping scepticism, or to discourage the
hope that local research may yet be rewarded by evidence confirmatory of
the reputed visit of Thorfinn and his fellow-explorers to some
recognisable point on the Nova-Scotian coast.
The diligent research of scholars familiar with the Old Norse, in which
the Sagas are written, is now clearing this inquiry into reputed
pre-Columbian discovery and colonisation of much misapprehension. The
extravagant assumptions alike of earlier Danish and New England
antiquaries in dealing with the question were provocative of an undue
bias of critical scepticism. The American historian Bancroft gave form
to this tendency when he affirmed that “the story of the colonisation of
America by Northmen rests on narratives mythological in form and obscure
in meaning; ancient, yet not contemporary.” If the historian had adduced
in evidence of this the story of the Eyrbyggja Saga, and the later
amplifications of reputed voyages to “White Man’s Land,” and to
“Newland,” his language would have been pardonable. Of the later
fictitious Sagas are the Landvætta-sögur; Stories of the
guardian-spirits of the land; and the Saga of Halfdan Eysteinsson, from
which we learn that “Raknar brought the deserts of Heluland under his
rule, and destroyed all the giants there”; or again we have the Saga of
“Barthar Snæfellsass,” or the Snow-fell God, and the King Dumbr of
Dumbshaf. But all such mythical Sagas belong to later Icelandic and
Norwegian literature, and have no claim to historical value.
The genuine documentary evidence of Vinland is recoverable from
manuscripts of earlier date, and a widely different character. Had
Bancroft been familiar with the early Icelandic Sagas he could never
have spoken of them as mythological. They are, on the contrary,
distinguished by their presentation of events in an extremely simple and
literal manner; equally free from rhetorical embellishment and the
extravagances of the romancer. But the occupation of the new-found land
was brief; and as the tale of its explorers faded from the memory of
younger generations, fancy toyed with the legend of a sunny land of the
Vine, with its self-sown fields of ripened grain. At a later date
Greenland itself vanished from the ken of living men; and romance
sported with the fancies suggested by its name as a fertile oasis of
green pastures walled in by the ice and snows of its Arctic zone.
The first authentic reference, now recoverable, to Vinland the Good has
already been referred to. It occurs in a passage in the _Iselandinga
Vók_, by Ari Thorgilsson, the oldest Icelandic historiographer. Ari,
surnamed froði, or the learned, was born A.D. 1067, and survived till
1148. The earliest manuscript of the Saga of Eric the Red dates as late
as A.D. 1330. It is contained in the Arna Magnæan Codex, commonly known
as _Hauks Vók_. Hauk Erlendsson, to whom the preservation of this copy
of the original Saga is due, and by whom part of it appears to have been
written, has appended to the manuscript a genealogy, in which he traces
his descent from the son of Karlsefne, born in Vinland. Two versions of
the narrative have been preserved, differing only in slight details; and
of those Reeves says: “They afford the most graphic and succinct
exposition of the discovery; and, supported as they are throughout by
contemporary history, appear in every respect most worthy of
credence.”[9] The simple, unadorned narrative bears out the idea that it
is a manuscript of information derived from the statements of the actual
explorers. The later story of Barni Herjulfson,—an obvious
amplification of the original narrative, with a change of names, and
many spurious additions,—occurs in the Flatey Book, a manuscript
written before the close of the fourteenth century, when the Northmen of
the Scandinavian fatherland were reawakening to an interest in the
memories or traditions of early voyages to strange lands beyond the
Atlantic Ocean, and fashioning them into legend and romance.
The poet, William Morris, represents the Vikings of the fourteenth
century following the old leadings of Leif Ericson in search of the
earthly paradise:—
That desired gate
To immortality and blessed rest
Within the landless waters of the West.
The time chosen is that of England’s Edward III., and, still more, of
England’s Chaucer. But in reality all memory of the land which lay
beyond the waters of the Atlantic had faded as utterly from the minds of
Europe’s mariners, in that fourteenth century, as in the older days when
Plato restored a lost Atlantis to give local habitation to his ideal
Republic. When the idea revived in the closing years of the fifteenth
century, not as a philosophic dream, but as a legitimate induction of
science, the reception which it met with from the embodied wisdom of
that age, curiously illustrates the common experience of the pioneers in
every path of novel discovery.