Medieval Europeans in America

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Medieval Europeans in America: Latest FindingsAuthor(s): Marshall SmelserReviewed work(s):Source: The History Teacher, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Nov., 1967), pp. 7-15Published by: Society for History EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3054305 .

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THE HISTORY TEACHERVOLUME I, NUMBER 1 NOVEMBER 1967

Medieval EuropeansinAmerica:Latest FindingsWhat we have conjectured for so longabout the Vikings is now becoming fact.The first in a series bringing your text-bookup-to-date with the latest findings.

BY MARSHALLMELSER

hen Columbus began thedevelopment of Americaby founding Santo Do-mingo in 1496, it is quite likelythat several thousand healthy butharassed Europeans were alreadyliving in a five-hundred-year-oldcommunity 2400 miles to the north,in Greenland. While we probablywill never be able to write a con-ventional narrative of Greenlandhistory, we are now able, thanksThe author is Professor of History atthe University of Notre Dame. He isalso the author of American History ata Glance (Barnes & Noble), CongressFounds a Navy (University of NotreDame Press, 1959), and other works onAmerican Colonial History.

to recent literary, arch,eologicaland anthropological research, topiece together much of the life ofmedieval Europeans in America.Great sailors that they were, theNorse helped the cause of modern

research by scattering authenticremains along the northeasterncoastal lands, between fifty andeighty degrees North Latitude. Inthe new world they seemed tohave coasted Hudson Bay, HudsonStrait, Baffin Bay, Davis Strait,and the Atlantic as far south asRhode Island, in leaky ships whichranged up to 166 feet long andwhich could not sail against thewind. These ships were moved by

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oars and the wind, and their crewsof fifty to a hundred must havespent much of their time prayinglike saints and bailing like thethe devil. Like ancient Greeks andmodern Yankees, the Norse weredriven to sea by poverty and am-bition. They have a reputation forferocity as described by church-men whose ecclesiastical vesselsand lands were the objects ofmany raids, but even Norse folkliterature records their fears andapprehensions. They navigated byguess and by God until the lateMiddle Ages when they acquiredthe astrolabe and a manually oper-ated gadget which sighted truenorth at noon.

iiDiggers in Greenland have so

far found at least 278 farmsteads,seventeen churches or chapels ofease, and two monastic centers.The remains are those of a peoplewho hunted, fished, bred animals,smelted iron, and traded with Eu-rope. Ruins of churches and farm-steads have yielded well-clad skel-etons, tools, crucifixes, crosiers,combs, chessmen, and toys. Care-ful estimates of population, basedon the numbers needed to operatethe farmsteads, put it at four orfive thousand, although new pop-ulation centers are still being dis-covered. The master Vikings heldmembers of another race in slav-ery: the Irish, probably kidnappedby sea rovers. There is no evi-dence that Greenland was un-healthy. The scarcity of group

burials shows that it was healthierthan Iceland which was ravagedby fifteen serious epidemics in theyears 1284-1404.

Paleobotanists doubt that theclimate of Greenland has changedmuch since 1000 A.D. The coastwhere the colonists lived has amean July temperature just belowfifty, a maximum near seventy.The minimum temperature isabout ten degrees below zero. Theimportant point about Greenland'sclimate is that the whole islandlies north of the wild tree line, andGreenlanders needed wood forboats and for smelting iron. Woodcould have come from Labrador,which could be reached by onlytwo hundred miles of open watersailing. The farmstead,excavationsshow that sheep and ponies win-tered outdoors, that only cowsneeded shelter. The grasslandareas occasionally have mild, al-most snowless, winters, but theylie considerably north of wheregrapes will grow.

Greenlanders produced rootcrops, apples, meat, fish, and dairyproducts. They also found edibleberries. The only cereal was sand-wort, a wild wheat, forty pony-loads of which will make a barrelof flour.Bread-making implementshave been found. It has beendoubted they had alcohol, but Vi-kings with apples and berrieswould have alcoholic drinks. Theirhouses were large, low, ramblingstructurfs with thick stone walls,caulked and roofed with turf, with

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driftwood or Labrador log rafters.They exported narwhal tusks,works of walrus ivory, walrus-hide rope, and white gerfalconsfor hawking which were muchprized by nobles and ecclesiasticsin Europe. It is certain they ex-ploited the ship-building lumberand the fur supply of mainlandNorth America and of Baffin andEllesmere Islands.Greenland was the Diocese ofGardar. The clergy had wild-wheat bread for hosts but what

they did for grape wine is a mat-ter for speculation. The Cathedralof St. Nicholas, near present Iga-liko, was cruciform, ninety byfifty-three feet, heated by fires,well decorated with carved soap-stone, and uniquely fitted withglazed windows. It was probablybuilt in the fourteenth century onthe foundations of a twelfth cen-tury church. Studies of scatteredfragments of its bell indicate itweighed 1100 pounds and wasprobably cast in England. Its metalhas been partly melted, suggestingthat the cathedral burned. Exca-vations have unearthed a tall manclad in chasuble and alb whoprobably died of gangrene follow-ing frostbite. He may have beenBishop Armason who built thecathedral. The buildings of twosmall Benedictine communitieshave also been found: the Con-vent of St. Olaf and the Monas-tery of SS. Olaf and Augustine.They were parish centers but de-rived their support from their ag-

riculture. Intervals between Bish-ops were sometimes long, perhapsfor lack of candidates for such aremote place. (An unsubstantiatedlegend relates that Greenlandersonce swapped a polar bear to theKing of Norway in exchange fora Bishop.) After 1406, at the lat-est, there were no more Bishops,but graves much later were cer-tainly Christian burials.

The Greenlanders were inde-pendent until they voluntarily sub-mitted to Norway in the mid-thirteenth century. Thus the firstEuropean-American settlementbegan independent and declareddependence later. Perhaps theywished a legal relationship withtheir business allies, the merchantsof Bergen. There is no evidencethat Greenlanders ever neededprotection from Eskimos, nor thatNorway could have provided it ifneeded.iii

A Vinland has been found.Literary students have tried for

generations to match North Amer-ican sites with topographical de-scriptions in sagas in order to lo-cate a western extension of theGreenland community called Vin-land the Good. Folklore geog-raphy has been a good game, pro-ducing entertaining rival and con-tradictory conclusions, but whatthe hunt needed was coastwisereconnaissance by seamen andback-straining digging by arch-aeologists.

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Helluland,Markland and Vinland.Dotted line shows Vikings' route to Newfoundland.(Reproduced by permission of the publisher, St. Martin's Press, fromLand Under the Pole Star, by Helge Instad.)

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Before getting to that, two ob-servations are needed.Almost all non-Scandinavians,but no Scandinavians, have trans-lated Vinland as Vine Land, oreven Wine Land, because one

saga said a German found wildgrapes. This saga was first reducedto writing in Germany. It is morelikely that a vinlknd would havebeen a grazing land which couldsupport domestic animals. Vin isa prefix indicating grass fields, stillused that way in Norway.

As for the search for a solitaryVinland, in five hundred yearsmany such stations might havebeen set up in North America, atleast temporarily. We know theyhad wood, and the closest timberwas in Labrador. A documentaryconfirmation of the frequency ofvoyages west from Greenland isthis: At Bergen "Greenland goods"were taxed under that category.Two independent lists of suchgoods include the names of fursof animals plentiful in NorthAmerica but unknown in Green-land. Furthermore, excavations ina Greenland house have broughtup a lump of anthracite coal anda shaped Indian arrowhead. Thenearest deposit of anthracite is inRhode Island. The arrowhead isof a type unknown in Norse orEskimo cultures.

Following the clues in the sagas,and the evidence above, HelgeIngstad went to sea and steereda logical course from Greenlandwestward and southward. He

found Norse remains on the north-ern promontory of Newfoundland,at L'Anse au Meadow on SacredBay. The excavations extendedthrough the summers of 1961-1964under the direction of his arch-aeologist wife, Anna Stine Ing-stad. An international team ofscholars found eight sites, laid outand built upon like a typicalGreenland farmstead. They un-covered a smelter-smithy with astone anvil and pounds of iron,slag, and bog-ore, which effective-ly rules out Indians. No Indiansthereabouts ever worked iron.They also found a Norse spindle-whorl, suggesting a feminine pres-ence. Carbon-14 tests dated thesite at about 1000 A.D., the tradi-tional date of Lief Ericson's Vin-land.Similar remains may yet befound in other places on the coastlines from Hudson Bay to LongIsland Sound, but it is an unhappyreflection that the kind of siteswithin the present United Stateswhich would have attractedGreenland builders attracteddense seaport populations later.Modern cities probably obliter-ated all useful clues to Green-lander sites.

ivThe Greenland community haddisappeared by 1720 when a Scan-dinavian missionary tried to findit. The Greenlanders were certain-

ly in place as late as 1417, by Ice-landic commercial records. Some-time between 1417 and 1720 it

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disappeared. Pope Alexander VIwrote a letter to his Diocese ofGardar in 1494, but the text is sofull of anomalies that it onlyproves that Rome, while neglect-ful, had not forgotten the remoteChristian settlement. Relativelyrecent excavations have foundGreenlanders buried as Christiansand clad in the fashion of earlysixteenth century Europe. Thestyle could hardly have been ar-rived at by coincidence. Hence itis safe to say the community lasteduntil shortly after 1500, overlap-ping Columbus's settlement andenduring longer than British NorthAmerica after the settling of James-town. What happened to theGreenlanders? We can only spec-ulate.

A frequently advanced hypothe-sis is that the climate changeddrastically, making the land unin-habitable and driving away themost desirable fish. But paleobot-anists, still at work on the ancientpollens, tentatively conjecture thatthe summer temperatures havechanged little since 986, exceptthat the fifteenth century was drierthan most. As for fish, the Green-landers never depended on them.Norwegian small farmers couldsurvive in Greenland now. Eski-mos today farm the place, al-though less efficiently than the Vi-kings.Did the Greenlanders simplydie out? Only one unburied bodyhas been found. All others wereprepared for Christian burial by

survivors.True, one excavator whostudied twenty-five skeletal re-mains in one graveyard concludedthey were stunted and deformed,perhaps tubercular and malnour-ished, but two medical scholars ofOslo University have dismissed hisevidence as too scanty for suchprecise observations because thebones were too far decayed to beuseful specimens and no otherskeletons show such deficiencies.The cemeteries have, on the otherhand, produced a matchless col-lection of upper middle-class cos-tume of the late Middle Ages ofsuch a quality as to show pros-perity rather than hard times. Asfor malnutrition, there was thepossibility of damage to the pas-tures by insects, mice, or winderosion. Only wind erosion can befound for certain, and nothing likeenough to favor the hypothesisthat the Greenlanders starved todeath. Inbreeding might haveweakened the community, buttheir Christianity would at leasthave discouraged and slowed mar-riage within too close a degree ofconsanguinity. There was also oc-casional immigration, and the vis-its of merchant ships were some-times prolonged. Furthermore, inthat environment, an endogamousor inbred society could have sur-vived, because only the healthyoffspring would have reachedmaturity.

Did the Eskimos exterminatethe Norsemen? The two groupsarrived in Greenland at about the

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same time, and probably met eachother in the thirteenth century.Some barely intelligible triumph-tales in Eskimo folk-lore hint athostility but are too obscure to betrusted; they could as well com-memorate private quarrels as racewar. The Norsemen traveledamong the Eskimos and eachgroup had objects made by theother. They did not compete forexistence. The Norse lived mostlyoff domesticated land animals,while the Eskimos hunted wildsea animals. The proximity of theirfourteenth century stone huts in-dicates neighbor lines. Only theNorse could have taught the Eski-mos the valuable skill of makingwooden tubs and have contrib-uted two common Norse words tothe Eskimo language. All thingsconsidered, there is no reason tobelieve the Eskimos annihilatedtheir blond neighbors after cen-turies of living near them.

Perhaps the Eskimos peacefullyabsorbed the Norse? There is atheory that Eskimos did not existearlier, that they are the result ofa blending of a pre-Eskimo Dorsetpeople with the Greenland whites.This is a minority view, shared byonly two scholars. Evidence ofcross-breeding ought to have ap-peared in the bones of the grave-yards, but few skeletons hint thatany non-Scandinavian ancestrywas at all possible. Interculturalmixture ought to have modifiedthe architecture, but the housesremained unchanged. Finally, the

very last burials were of Europe-ans, in European clothes, memo-rialized by tombstones with Chris-tian inscriptions, and holdingcrosses in their hands.

We can be sure that Greenlandwas neglected by the homelandafter the fourteenth century. Nor-way declined because of economiccompetition from the Hanseatictowns. While most of Europe im-proved ship building, Norway'snaval architecture stagnated. Anew German dynasty moved theseat of government to Copen-hagen, and showed no interest inEurope's wild west. Norway suf-fered the Plague in 1349-1350,Bergen was twice sacked by Ger-man pirates, and Greenland pro-duce met fatal competition fromthe White Sea trade with Russia.Iceland survived only by sellingfish to Englishmen in the fifteenthcentury. Greenland apparentlywas written off by the homeland.In an age of endemic piracy Eng-lish seamen became familiar withIceland. They may well havelearned about Greenland too.

Beginning in the 1470's therewas a flurry of seafaring towardthe northwest. The Danes set outin 1472. Bristol seamen made an-nual searches for mythical islands,beginning in 1480. It is claimedthat Portuguese sailors spied New-foundland in 1472. We may besure there was traffic in the north-west Atlantic waters in the genera-tion of Columbus. In dealing withlate medieval and Renaissance

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navigations it is safe to assumethere were more than have beenrecorded. Records have a way ofgetting lost, literacy was not highamong sea dogs, and the manypirates were more interested inpreventing reports .than in gener-ating archives. Those Bristolisland-hunts, for example, wouldhave been good covers for piracy.

Greenland, still remembered in1494 as far away as Rome, wouldhave been easier to loot than Ber-gen. Much of the excavation ofGreenland shows that the scat-tered farmsteads were mostlyburned. One type of loot whichpirates have invariably hankeredafter is absolutely unknown to anyGreenland site, whether Norse orEskimo. Although wooden objectswhich may have been palls havebeen found, there is no commun-ion plate, no tabernacle, no chalice,no paten, no candlestick of pre-cious metal. This gap in the arch-aeological story of a Christianpeople hints at selective thievery.Without proof, and awaiting thefinding of a more certain answer,we can suggest what may havehappened to the Greenland com-munity. The relatively defense-less Greenland farmers were per-

haps harried by pirates until theydespaired, burned the houses thatstill stood, and, much reduced innumbers, moved to the mainland.Where did they go? In almost anyinhabitable place they might meetand be overcome by violently in-hospitable Indians. That may havebeen their end.

vGreenland's only interest is in-

trinsic. Its European inhabitantsdeflected no current of history.The reason it led to nothing inparticular is simple: Those whoknew of Greenland in those half-thousand years thought it was partof Europe. Every indisputablymedieval map (the recently issuedVinland Map may not be medie-val) pictures Greenland as a longpeninsula extended from Norway.No one conjectured that it mightbe near the Indies. The only per-son who looked west for the Indieswas Columbus. He probably heardof Greenland since he was an avidstudent of geography, and he mayhave visited Iceland, but he washeaven-bent for Asia. A north-westerly peninsula of Europe,however remote and mysterious,was irrelevant to his dream.

SOURCESNot a single document writtenin Greenland has survived, noteven a monastic chronicle, a par-ish Centennial History, or dioc-

esan visitation. Like Dead SeaScrolls, something of the sort may

yet turn up. Most of the trulyscientific archaeological, anthro-pological, historical, and linguisticstudy has been printed in Scandi-navian learned journals and mu-seum reports.

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The English literature on thesubject abounds in flapdoodle,and the inquirer must proceedwith caution. For a physical des-cription of Greenland any twen-tieth century printing of The En-cyclopaedia Britannica will do.Julius E. Olson edited "The Voy-ages of the Northmen" in Olsonand E. G. Bourne, eds., The North-men, Columbus, and Cabot, 985-1503, Original Narratives of EarlyAmerican History (New York,1906), which may be relied on,although one may well skip the

genealogies. Before getting intothe quagmire of secondary specu-lations the reader should consultthe works of Helge Ingstad, "Vin-land Ruins Prove Vikings Foundthe New World," National Geo-graphic, CXXVI (July-Dec., 1964),708-734, and Land Under the PoleStar: A Voyage to the Norse Set-tlements of Greenland and theSaga of the People that Vanished(New York, 1966). If more iswanted, the Library of Congresssubject-heading used by most li-braries is "Vikings."

Colonial Dining HabitsSo great was our famine [1608] that a savage we slew and buried,the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; and so did divers oneanother boiled and stewed with roots and herbs. And one amongst therest did kill his wife, powdered [salted] her, and had eaten part of herbefore it was known; for which he was executed, as he well deserved.Now whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonado'd [boiled orgrilled], I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heardof. This was that time which still to this day we called "the starvingtime." It were too vile to say and scarce to be believed what we endured.

Captain John Smith, "The Proceedingsof the English Colonies in Virginia"

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Medieval Europeans in America