Читать книгу Canadians at Table - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 7

They Had Never Known Anything to Taste So Sweet

WERE THEY SETTLERS OR SOJOURNERS? Or were they simply searching for wood, so desperately needed at home in Greenland to build and repair their vessels, dwellings, and farm and household items? The “Men from the North,” also known as Norsemen and Vikings, were reputed to be pirates, raiders, traders, and at times colonists. They were feared and respected from Russia to the Mediterranean Sea for their bravery and exploits. Many aspects of their life were simply a continuation of the ancient customs and traditions they had practised in their home countries — such as their long sea voyages, their construction of houses from stones and turf, their clearing of rocks and stones from patches of meadow, their hunting of whales, seals, and wild reindeer, and of course fishing. They lived by raising livestock as well as by hunting and fishing. In their native lands it was not possible to grow grain, but the sparse vegetation was nutritious and enabled them to keep many cows, sheep, and horses. They also made butter and cheese. Their most important implements and weapons were axes, knives, scythes, sledgehammers, blacksmith’s tongs, harpoons and other fishing gear, bows and arrows, and spears.[1]

For centuries the Vikings were known for their daring adventures, which were recounted in their sagas, told and retold around the long fires at home in Iceland and Greenland by hardy sailors and storytellers.[2] A fascinating parchment map, known as “The Vinland Map,” bears the inscription:

By God’s will, after a long voyage from the Island of Greenland to the south towards the most distant remaining parts of the western ocean sea, sailing southward amidst the ice, the companions Bjarni and Leif Eiriksson discovered a new land, extremely fertile, and even having vines, the which island they named Vinland.[3]

The sagas differ in some details, but have much in common. One of the sagas describes the voyage of the merchant Bjarni Herjolfsson, who was en route from Iceland to Greenland when his vessel was caught in a violent storm with strong north winds and dense fog that carried him off course to the west. There he and his crew saw an unfamiliar forested shore. When the storm abated and the sun came out, Bjarni was able to get his bearings and sail his vessel to Greenland, where he described what he and his crew had seen. His description raised a number of questions. What was the new country like? Was it a good and fertile land, a place where perhaps one could settle down and live permanently?[4]

It was Leif “The Lucky” Eiriksson, son of Eirik the Red, who decided to investigate. His ship was fitted out, the women busying themselves with the big woollen square-sail, mending and strengthening it, while the men and eager youngsters carried provisions and equipment on board, including dried fish, smoked meat, butter, cheese, and water for the large barrels. They also brought axes, tongs, and a sledgehammer for a smithy, various kinds of gear for hunting and fishing, and weapons. It was rather sparse equipment for a long voyage into the unknown, but the thirty-five people on board knew how to live off the land. The next autumn a weatherbeaten ship returned. Yes, the new land in the west had been found; it was a large and strange country, with riches of many kinds — pastures for cattle, forests, game, seals, walrus, and fish. Leif had built substantial houses in the new country, and he had called it Vinland.[5]

The Vikings’ distinctive wooden ships and the men who sailed them were known and feared from Russia to the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. Tom Henighan

Detailed references are included in the sagas, not only about what this group found when they landed on that forested shore but to what subsequent groups found, as well: “They touched the dew with their hands and they thought they had never known anything so sweet…. Every brook was full of fish. They made pits where the land met high-watermark, and where the tide ebbed there were halibut in the pits. There was a great quantity of animals of all sorts in the woods…. There was no want of salmon either in the river or the lake — salmon bigger than anything they had ever seen before…. Fields of self sewn wheat grew there.” One of the crew, a German called Tyrker who was also known as Leif’s foster father, explored the area and found what he believed to be vines and grapes, something he said he recognized from his homeland in Europe. Many historians and botanists have questioned his description and his judgment. Were these really grapes, or could they have been another “wine berry,” such as wild currants, gooseberries, raspberries, squash-berries, or cloudberries?[6]

The sagas tell us that Eiriksson’s group built huts and wintered there, and as there was no frost that year, their cattle browsed outdoors. In the spring, they took a load of wood (probably a combination of driftwood from the shore and timber cut from the forest) home to Greenland, along with the unexpected and incredible stories they had to tell about what they had found. The first arrivals were soon followed by other vessels loaded with passengers. One of the expeditions brought 160 men, in addition to women and livestock.[7]

Archaeologists and historians have now confirmed that Vinland (or Vineland), one of the communities described in the sagas, was at L’Anse aux Meadows. The settlement has been uncovered at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula in western Newfoundland, which proves the Men from the North were probably the first Europeans to realize, as early as the year 1000 AD, that North America existed. Close to one hundred men, women, and children lived at the settlement for nearly three decades while they tended their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats, spun and wove clothing from the fleece, fished the rivers and the ocean (cod bones, seal bones, and whale bones have been found in the excavations), foraged for fruit and herbs in the forest, and developed gardens with the vegetables and herbs from home that they trusted to grow and flourish in that climate. These would have included turnips, carrots, cabbages, beans, peas, onions, and garlic. Meanwhile, they continued to explore the eastern shores of present-day Canada, for North American butternuts have been found at the site, although their known range is farther south in what is now New Brunswick. As there are similar European species, the Norse were familiar with butternuts and considered them a delicacy. As well, growing in the same area one can find wild grapes known today as riverbank grapes. Both of these can be harvested in late August and would have been of great value in Greenland.[8]

The Norse men and women constructed many buildings of timber frame covered with turf; they had earthen floors, low doors in the walls, and smoke holes running along the roof ridge. There were several dwellings with benches along the walls that were used for sitting or reclining during the day and sleeping at night. Remnants of long fires (like those in the homeland) that burned in the centre of the floor to provide for cooking, heating, and light have been found. They also developed small slate-lined compartments in the earthen floors next to the fireplaces that could be used as ember pits, into which the embers were swept at night and covered with ashes, making it unnecessary to light another fire in the morning to cook the first meal of the day. This technique, again, is a well-known feature of larger homes in Iceland and Greenland.[9] Ancient cairns have been discovered, which were aligned in such a way that they acted like sundials for telling time. As they could be seen from the dwellings, they would have indicated times for meals.[10]

The dwellings differed in size and comfort, suggesting there was probably a class structure in the community that may have ranged from chieftain to slave.[11] As the years went by and the settlement grew, it is obvious that some of the existing buildings had additions added to accommodate new arrivals or larger families. Four workshops and a smithy confirm that ship repairs and blacksmithing were regular skills and trades carried out by the craftsmen in the community. Bog iron was smelted in the smithy, a skill not known at that time to the Native people.

The sagas describe the encounters between the newcomers and the Native people, whom they called Skraelings. Some of the encounters were peaceful, while they bartered and traded, but others were fierce encounters, leading to loss of life on both sides.[12] Such conditions may have contributed to the ultimate decision of the Norsemen to leave the rich resources they had found rather than live in a continual state of anxiety.

These courageous and enterprising explorers eventually returned home with their final cargoes of wood, taking with them their memories and their stories of a rich and fertile country that became the foundation for the famous sagas. Two worlds had met and parted. It would be almost five hundred years before they would meet again, and almost a thousand years before extensive archaeological research proved that the ancient folklore and legends of the countries bordering the North Atlantic were not fiction but fact.[13]