"The Vikings and the Eskimos"
 
by Samuel M. Wilson
 
in Natural History (February 1992, pp. 18-21)
 
     The Vikings, the Scandinavian mariners who plundered European
coasts from the eighth through the tenth century, are not
remembered for their gentle manners.  The Groenlendinga Saga, one
of the Norse heroic narratives, begins by telling how, because of
some killings, Thorvald and his son Erik the Red left Norway for
Iceland.  By this time, A.D. 982, Iceland was extensively settled. 
Erik married Thjodhild, and they had a son, who bore the name Leif
Eriksson.  After more killings, expulsion from one town and fights
with other men at another, Erik was banned from Iceland.
 
     He fitted out his ship in Eiriksvag, and told the people
     there that he meant to look for the land that Gunnbjrn
     Ulf-Krakuson had sighted when he was storm-driven west
     across the ocean--Gunnbjarnarsker, or Gunnbjorn's
     Skerries.  He would be coming back, Erik said, to get in
     touch with his friends should he discover that land
     [retold from The Norse Atlantic Saga, translated by Gwen
     Jones, Oxford University Press, 1986].
 
     In A.D. 984, Erik the Red found the land Gunnbjorn had
described, and set out to build a new colony: "He called the
country he had discovered Greenland, for he argued that men would
be drawn to go there if the land had an attractive name."
     Sixteen years later, a prosperous and widely traveled Norse
captain named Bjarni Herjolfsson sailed from Europe to Iceland,
where he was in the habit of spending every other winter with his
father.  On his arrival that winter, however, Herjolfsson found
that his father had sold his farm and gone to Erik's colony on
Greenland, and so he followed in his fifty-foot sailing ship.  He
had no map of the route or compass (nor did anyone else at that
time), and he was going to a place he had never been.  He ran into
bad weather and was swept to a coast that did not answer to the
formidable descriptions of the mountains and glaciers of Greenland.
     Bjarni Herjolfsson had found the coast of Labrador, the
easternmost part of continental North America, a land covered with
forests and low hills.  But he was looking for his father, not a
New World, so he turned around without landing and sailed two days
back to Greenland.  This makes Bjarni Herjolfsson the first
European on record ever to have seen the New World, and about the
most forgotten name in the history of the "discovery" of the
Americas (among those whose names we do know).  The five-hundredth
anniversary of Herjolfsson's voyage would have fallen only eight
years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean.  But neither
Columbus--who traveled to Iceland on one of his early voyages as a
merchant seaman--nor anyone else among the fifteenth-century
scholars and sailors interested in sailing west across the Atlantic
was aware of Herjolfsson or his discovery.
     Herjolfsson told the story of his detour to Erik and others,
and later Leif Eriksson went to explore this new coast.  Not to be
outdone by his father's euphemistic labeling of Greenland, Leif
called the place Vinland hit goda, or "Wineland the good," although
wine grapes could possibly grow there.  (Some argue that this wild
exaggeration results from a mistaken transmission of the Norse
sagas, whereby vin, or "grassland," was confused with vin, "wine").
     On Vinland, the Vikings discovered people, whom they called
Skraelings (barbarians).  Just who these people were has been a
subject of scholarly debate.  They may have been arctic sea
people--Eskimos or their predecessors--but archeologist Robert
McGhee proposes that they were Algonquian-speaking Indians of the
Atlantic northeast, who could have traveled this far north each
summer.  Whoever these Skraelings were, the first recorded
interaction between New World and Old World people was a disaster--
and almost eerily prophetic for subsequent European-Indian
interactions.  Leif lent his ship to his brother Thorvald, who
sailed for the North American coast.  Thorvald found a large, flat
headland on a forested bay, walked around for a while, and
declared, "This is a lovely place, and here I should like to make
my home."
 
     Then they made for the ship, and saw three mounds on the
     sands up inside the headland.  They walked up to them and
     could see three skin-boats there, and three men under
     each.  So they divided forces and laid hands on them all,
     except for one who got away with his canoe.  The other
     eight they killed, and afterwards walked back to the
     headland, where they had a good look around and could see
     various mounds on up the fjord which they judged to be
     human habitations.
 
     Act 1, scene 2 of the encounter of two worlds begins an hour
or two later, after Thorvald and his men have had a nap:
 
     "Rouse ye, Thorvald, and all your company, if you would
     stay alive.  Back to your ship with all your men, and
     leave this land as fast as you can!"  With that there
     came from inside the fjord a countless fleet of skin-
     boats and attacked them.
 
     Although Thorvald was killed in this battle, he turns up in
later stories, one indication that the sagas are far from reliable
historical documents.  They were often written down centuries after
the events they describe took place.  But the archeological site of
L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of the island of
Newfoundland, testifies unequivocally to the Norse presence there.
     The attempts to colonize Vinland lasted a few more years after
Thorvald's misadventure but ultimately were unsuccessful. 
According to the sagas, the venture was doomed by Skraeling
hostility and internal fighting among the Norse.  Possibly Vinland
was also just too far away from Greenland, Iceland, and the
Norwegian homeland for a colony to survive there.  Greenland
ultimately suffered the same fate, but more slowly.
     According to the testimony of the Norse sagas, erik the Red
did not find people on the southern tip of Greenland, only
"habitations of men, fragments of boats of skin, and stone
artifacts, from which it may be seen that the same kind of people
had passed that was as those that inhabited Vinland, whom the
Greenlanders called Skraelings."  Apart from this observation,
there is little mention of interactions with New World people on
Greenland in the early years.  The Historia Norvegiae (a history by
an unknown author written about A.D. 1170) records fights with the
Skraelings about A.D. 1150, and there are early description of them
as "horribly ugly, hairy, and swarthy, however, until the final
days of the Norse colonization of Greenland, in the 1400s, the
island's cohabitants are scarcely mentioned.
     The Skraelings whom the Vikings first encountered on
Greenland, or at least those who shared the island with the Norse
for most of the time that followed, were the Eskimos.  Historians
and archeologists concerned with this era call them the Thule;
their modern-day descendants are more properly known as the Inuit. 
By coincidence, both the Thule and the Norse had reached Greenland
at about the same time, setting to work to colonize the island as
a new extension of their territory.  Neither were Greenland's first
settlers, however: people had already lived there for nearly 3,000
years.
     The first colonizers of Greenland did not head for the
relatively mild southern tip chosen by the Norse, but instead
colonized the northern tip, the most northerly bit of land in the
world.  Lying just 450 miles from the pole, the land is now called
Peary Land, after the admiral.  When they arrived, these first
inhabitants were already well adapted to life above the Arctic
Circle, making tools that archeologists assign to the arctic small
tool tradition.  They lived in small tents (less than ten feet in
diameter) during both winter and summer and moved their settlements
often.  Unlike the later Thule, however, they preferred to hunt
land mammals such as musk ox and caribou instead of sea mammals,
and the archeological evidence that they used dog sleds and kayaks
is equivocal.
     In Greenland and the eastern part of arctic North America,
these early inhabitants slowly transformed their life style and
material repertoire into what archeologists call the Dorset
tradition.  These "Paleo-Eskimos" hunted both land and sea mammals,
occupying some settlements for longer and longer periods.  Dorset
artifacts are more like those that Thule and later Inuit of the
northern ice might have used--dog sleds, shoes for snow and ice,
kayak parts, large knives similar to those used more recently to
make snow houses, or igloos, and harpoons for hunting seals,
walruses, and even larger arctic sea mammals.
     The earliest Vikings to reach Greenland may have encountered
people of the Dorset tradition, but the latter may have already
been replaced by the Thule, who were moving from west to east.  The
origins of the Thule people are obscure, but the similarity of
their culture to that found in the western Arctic suggests that
they traveled from Siberia, the Bering Strait, and northern Alaska
across 5,000 miles of frozen coasts, pack ice, glacial outlets,
seasonal passages of open water, and hundreds of island of the
Canadian Arctic.  Their superior adaptation to the arctic
environment allowed them to cross this territory in a few centuries
or less, displacing or assimilating the local groups they
encountered.  The Thule were emphatically sea people, hunting
seals, walruses, and especially baleen whales (their favorite was
the bowhead whale, which averages forty feet in length and weighs
about forty tons).
     There is good archeological evidence for Thule settlements on
the coast of Greenland by A.D. 1100 and some suggestion that the
first Thule migrants arrived even earlier.  Don Dumond's
interesting and readable book The Eskimos and Aleuts (Thames and
Hudson, 1987) puts Thule people on Ruin Island off the coast of
northern Greenland before A.D. 1000.  And Moreau Maxwell, in
Prehistory of the Eastern Arctic (Academic, 1985), discusses the
carbon-14 dating of the early Thule expansion and suggests that the
dates for the first wave of immigrants might be in the 900s, rather
than the 1000-1100 date usually assumed (although he also warns
that radiocarbon dating in the Arctic is a very tricky business). 
According to Maxwell, one of the surprising points
 
     is the evidence since the 1970s of strong Norse contact. 
     Since the Norse sagas refer to voyages no farther north
     than Upernivik (73 degrees north latitude) and then only
     in the fourteenth century, it had long been assumed that
     Thule sites with metal objects must have been late in the
     sequence.  It is now clear that the Norse were
     penetrating northwards at least as far as 79 degrees
     north latitude less than 50 years after the initial Norse
     settlement of Brattalid [Erik's farm] on southern
     Greenland.
 
Other recent archeological research shows Thule settlers moving
steadily down the coasts from northern Greenland, trading walrus
ivory for European goods.
     The Norse colony in Greenland consisted of two scattered
settlements, Brattalid and other homesteads to the east and another
group sixty miles to the west.  What became of them?  The question
has been debated since the colony failed.  Archeologist Thomas
McGovern examines the question from many angles in a fascinating
article, "Cows, Harp Seals, and Church Bells: Adaptation and
Extinction in Norse Greenland" (Human Ecology, 1980).  He looks at
fluctuating global climate, the Norse economy, the hierarchical
organization of their society, and their interactions with the
Thule.  The question that underlies his discussion is, why did the
Norse hold so strongly to unsuccessful European ways, when the
Thule offered an ever-present example of better ways of surviving
in Greenland?
     McGovern says that several factors are involved.  For one
thing the Norse economy worked all right when the climate was good
but was unstable when it deteriorated after 1200, during the period
of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age.  Ultimately he
blames the demise of the colony on the Greenlander elite, who held
the outpost to old and ineffective ways until it could no longer
survive.
     A report from about 1340 says that "now the Skraelings have
the entire West Settlement; but there are horses, goats, cows and
sheep, all wild.  There are no people, neither Christians nor
heathens."  Did the Skraelings kill all the colonists?  It is
doubtful, for even though their relations were sometimes violent,
they had lived side by side for a long time, the Thule near the
mouths of the fjords and the Norse deeper within.  More likely, the
colony grew smaller and smaller and less able to sustain itself,
while events in northern Europe made Scandinavian traders less
willing to cross the dangerous Atlantic to trade with those who
remained.  The colony is last mentioned in documents from 1409, and
the archeological evidence suggests that the eastern settlement was
completely deserted by the end of the 1400s.
     The descendants of the Thule, the Inuit, eventually occupied
all of Greenland's coast.  They took Admiral Peary to the North
Pole and still live on the island.
 
WILSON06 ART