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The Coming of Man to America—Land Chain of the Alaskan Seas—Vast Lapse of Time Obliterates all Record—Pytheas the Greek in the Northern Seas—Coming and Going of the Vikings

The original “Canadian”—indeed the original American—arrived by sea. His “people” came from Asia after a migration that had covered so many thousand miles of distance and so many thousand years of time that he did not know that he had migrated or even that he was on the move. Presumably he was of the Mongolian type represented still so directly by the Eskimos, by the vanishing Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands, by the Thlingit Indians of Alaska and indirectly by all the Indians of America from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego. Anthropologists do not doubt that the animal man, originated as one stock, a first cousin but not a direct descendant, of the baboon and the larger apes. It is out of the question that different forms of men originated separately in different parts of the earth and then intermingled, and still further out of the question that one and the same kind of man (the one we know) originated in the same form in separate places. All archaeological evidence—buried bones and skulls, remains of implements and immemorial refuse heaps buried for uncounted centuries—point to Asia as the first home of mankind, and within this capacious birthplace the original cradle may well have been somewhere in the uplands of Persia and the Bible Lands of Mesopotamia. From this central point man migrated in all directions, responsive to the roving instinct that seeks food and avoids danger. Some portion of the human race thus moved gradually across Central Asia and beyond it to the inhospitable regions of the far north east of what is now Siberia, the coldest, bleakest place in all the world where Verkhoyansk holds the world’s record for cold, marking down to 94 below zero. Thus wandered primitive men from one bleak region to another, and finally to the sea where he made his fortunate transit across the Bering Strait, or along the Aleutian Islands and thus reached America. From this first Alaskan lodgement mankind wandered, or rather filtered, on down the continent, moving towards sunshine and warmth, all the way till their furthest advance reached the cold again over nine thousand miles below in Patagonia. But certain groups migrated from their first Alaskan landings along the Polar Seas. These were the Eskimos—acquiring as they went, in the course of centuries a culture of their own, following the coast to Hudson Bay and down and round it to Ungava and finally to Greenland.

We cannot doubt, all scientists accept, this origin of man and his sea-transit to America. Given plenty of time and it is easy enough. There may have been still easier island bridges above water in those days. But even without them the islands in Bering Strait are within sight of one another, and people with any kind of primitive boats might make the longer but warmer Aleutian transit.

Man in America is therefore a new comer, unable to rival the aristocratic descent of the baboon men of the Old World—the ape-man of Java (of whom it is hard to say which he is), or the Piltdown man of Sussex (intelligence just dawning) or the Neanderthal man of Germany—more jaw than brain.

But this accepted theory of the expansion of mankind into America is not needed to account for the spread of other forms of life plant and even animal. It is now widely believed that the American continent was originally broken away entire from Europe and Africa—into which its facial outline still fits marvellously—and was slowly rafted westward, or its loose foundations, across the Atlantic. It is still rocking on gently in the same direction a few yards every year. The original separation may well have carried out to sea a vast collection of animate life, as passengers on the raft. But man could not have been among them. He is not old enough.

But his use of the sea ended with the original transit. There was no coming and going, nor the faintest survival of transmitted memory of what had been left behind. The 1,000 languages of America, North, Central and South, connect throughout among themselves, but bear no trace of Asiatic kinship. Only for the tribal Indians of the Pacific coast and for the Eskimos did the sea remain a part of their life. The dug-out, after all only a floating tree, must be older than Noah’s Ark: the Eskimos worked out the contrivance of the Kayak—their unsinkable boat of skin, the mainstay of their life—along with their snow house, the igloo, their mainstay against death from the cold. They thus were able to occupy all the northern sea shores of Canada including that of Manitoba and Ontario, later indeed abandoned, but occupied by them till almost within touch of history. In the [1] ”Lahontan’s Narrative,” 1703 narrative of the young French Baron Lahontan^[1] recounting his marvellous journey (1687) into the present Minnesota, too marvellous for general belief, we read that he was told that beyond the sources of the rivers he ascended, other streams ran down to a great salt sea, and that on this sea lived men who paddled in boats of skin. But the Eskimos’ use of the sea was merely that of fishermen along shore. There was practically no “sea faring” in the true sense.

Still less was there for the generality of the “red” Indians who slowly spread inland from the Pacific coast across the continent. Their life was turned away from the sea. They evolved a navigation for streams and sheltered waters, calm lakes and portages. Having evolved the bark canoe and the tobacco pipe they rested, like travellers after a long day’s paddle, and were resting still when found. Nor did the Indians take to the sea even when they reached the Atlantic Ocean. Among the most miserable, in means of support, of all the half-starved Indians of the North were the Beothuks, the “Red Indians” (red grease, not skin) of Newfoundland who gave their name later to all the others. Miserable also appear the shivering Micmacs of the Gulf of St. Lawrence whose wretched condition evoked the pity of Jacques Cartier.

The real sea story for Canada begins with the arrival of the ships of the Vikings, driving over the waves from Greenland with the wind on the quarter, all life and colour, a great swelling sail of gold and blue, and a glitter of painted shields along the gunwale, and the foam smashing under the dragon-beak of the bow. These, if one may dare drop into the vernacular, were “the real boys.”

But before paying the proper tribute to these great seamen of the north, never in their own range surpassed, one may turn a moment to the twilight memory of a great southern navigator, a Greek of more than a thousand years before them, who almost discovered America, and who if he had done so, would have made a better use of it than did the Norsemen who despised it.

Sailors’ tales, even when quite true, often prove too wonderful for the belief of their friends ashore. When a ship load of Greeks came back from a three years’ voyage and said they had been all round Africa and up the other side, they might have got away with the story except for their adding to it that when they went round the bottom of Africa the sun was in the north part of the sky, instead of the south. [2] Sir Clements Markham, “Pytheas Geog. Journal,” 1893 That proved them liars. So it was when Pytheas^[2] came home from a long voyage and said that he had been away across the Ocean, clean past an island Ultima Thule, the last land, till he came to a place where the sea and sky came together, with a great crashing and hissing sound, and that there he had turned back. And it was probably all true. He was apparently right close to the coast of Greenland, could have seen it if the sky had cleared but the mist was rising, as it often does, so thick from the grinding and crushing of the ice pack—breaking into fragments, lumps and splinters, that land and sea all seemed one. As for the sound he heard, you may hear it any spring when the breaking ice of the St. Lawrence is carried past Lachine. The sight of the sea and sky meeting in mist may be seen, we are told, by anyone off Greenland at the season, and close by the coast.

Pytheas was not afraid of the open sea. The Romans were. The timid poet Horace writing verses in his vineyard, tells us that the man who first put out on to the dark sea must have had a heart of oak and been wrapped three times round in brass. No oak and brass for Horace! A book of verses underneath a vine was better. But the snug crowd under the forepeak of a viking ship, reading the verses of Horace—for some of them could read Latin—may well have chuckled over the notion of danger on the open sea.

Pytheas was a Greek of the Phoenician settlement of Marseilles. He lived three hundred years before the Christian era. He was a scientist equipped with all the Greek knowledge of astronomy and of the form and motion of the globe which the mediaeval world was to lose. He made a celebrated voyage out into the Atlantic and along the coast of Europe. He “discovered” the British Isles, “travelled all over Britain on foot” (the words are those of the historian Polybius), estimated its latitude and circumference. He brought home news of the “tin islands” on the coast of Cornwall. He sailed eastward along the shores of the North Sea, then westward six days from the ‘last land’ (Iceland). It was beyond this island and further west that he came to the meeting of sea and sky in the mist. Had the sky cleared he would have seen Greenland: from there the transit was easy to the mainland of North America. Had Pytheas ever seen, as the Norsemen did, the woods of Nova Scotia and the wild vines of New England he would never have let go of it as they did. Canada and Great Britain would have been discovered in the same voyage. Yet it made no difference. No one would have believed him. Even as it was, no one did. It was two hundred years before Mediterranean sailors came back to British shores: and thirteen hundred years before the Norsemen made their westward way past Ultima Thule to Greenland. Pytheas wrote an elaborate book, A Journey about the Earth, or All about the Ocean—it has different titles, sounding singularly up-to-date. But it was lost. It survives now only in quotations of other earlier quotations from it.

With the Norsemen began a real knowledge of the northern seas. As everybody knows they colonized Iceland, establishing [3] F. Nansen, “In Northern Mists,” 1911 settlements, schools, a centre of civilization^[3]. From Iceland certain Norsemen (first Eric the Red) sailed on, or were blown, to Greenland. There they made a settlement, well equipped, with stone houses and barns, cattle and comfort, and trade with the home country. Inevitably the Norsemen of Greenland were blown on to the mainland. We have in their sagas and in their records accounts of the Voyage of Leif Ericson to a land of rock and slate (Labrador), a “markland” of trees and woods (Nova Scotia) and a “softer country with grapevines and longer days”—Vineland—which is, or isn’t, New England. No one knows. They even attempted permanent settlement there: but their contact with the savages of the woods, with ambush and sudden death, gave them a horror of the place—as sailors are said to have of life ashore—and they left, never to return, except for random voyages in search of timber.

America was no lost paradise to the Norsemen. They just didn’t want it. Had they been in earnest about settlement their ships would have run back and forward as easily as a ferry. We are in some doubt of what Pytheas’s ship was like. Greek galleys of that date are known only from pictures in vases and are probably only about as truthful to a real galley as a willow-pattern plate to a willow tree. They look hopelessly clumsy and shallow, with a mast dead-centre and a sail as square as Euclid.

But the Norsemen’s ships, the first vessels ever to sail Canadian seas were wonderful things, superior in many ways (apart from their limited cargo space) to anything that sailed the seas in the days of Christopher Columbus. We do not have to guess what they were like from pictures distorted by an artist’s fancy. Several actual ships have been dug out from the heavy clay of the Scandinavian hill sides which has preserved them intact.

[4] “Saga of Olaf Trygg-Yason” Moreover one of the Norse sagas^[4], the epic poems of old Norway, gives us a full account of the building of King Olaf’s ship. It was 135 feet long on the keel, a length which the sweeping rise of stem and stern would increase to 165 feet overall. People accustomed to hotel life will be amazed to hear that the ship contained “thirty rooms.” But these “rooms” merely meant “spaces,” one for each bench of rowers. Compare, as a matter of philology the “living room” which Mussolini needed in Ethiopia. This leaves 45 feet for the fore and after decks for cargo space and living, or rather “huddling” quarters. “The sailing equipment of these ships,” [5] Quoted by H. B. Culver, “Book of Old Ships,” 1924 writes a technical authority^[5], “was rather rudimentary. Primarily intended to be propelled by oars, their floors were rather flat with very easy lines of entrance and departure. The sides rose almost vertically with quite a sharp turn in the bilge. With a free wind they must have sailed fast.”

The mast of a Viking ship was not maintained upright all the time. When erect it was wedged fast with a sort of wooden boot-jack and held with stays and shrouds but by slackening away these ropes it could be lowered or slanted back to any required extent to serve as a ridge pole for a tent-covering lashed over the entire ship on a still night at sea or when at anchor. The rudder was rigged, not at the extreme of the stern, but a little way along the right hand side of the boat, this side being therefore the “steer board” or “starboard.” The tiller stuck out sideways, not lengthwise, from the rudder post, the steersman thus sitting in board and holding the tiller as one does an oar, with two hands. The remains of Viking boats, such as the one in a Chicago museum are at best but venerable memorials of time and wear and decay. The actual reality must have been all life and light and colour: the coloured sail, full to the wind, the glittering shields, the sparkle of the polished wood and the foam that smashed white under the oars! Such were the first ships in Canadian waters.

The Norsemen abandoned Greenland. They ceased any regular visit to the settlement after the middle of the thirteen hundreds. When the Danes came again the settlers were gone—nothing left but the crumbled stones of roofless house and byre and church, over which slowly advanced the moving ice of the Greenland glacier. They may have died of the Black Death, the Plague which devastated all Europe, moving westward: they may have sought other homes: the [6] Vilhjalmur Stefansson, “Greenland,” 1942 best authority, Vilhjalmur Stefansson^[6], thinks that they were absorbed by moving hordes of Eskimos. At any rate they dropped out of the maritime history of Canada for six hundred years. Then with the coming of the Great War of 1939 Greenland suddenly assumed a new meaning to us, a European danger on our door step, a vital point in the air map of Europe and America, not to be left under the sovereignty of a small dairy-farm nation unable, not from lack of valour but from lack of numbers, even to protect themselves. Among the minor points of settlement of a later day will be the readjustment of the status of Greenland.