IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1003, the Chieftain Thorfinn Karlsefini, him who was Leif's brother, took three of Leif's ships and went "a-viking". They sailed to Vinland across the Western Sea and there they made their landfall "at a place where a river came down to the sea and it was a long ways to the land". Writing in the early 1950's, the Icelandic scholar Frederick Pohl figured this could be no other spot on the whole northeastern North American coast than where the Bass River on Cape Cod drains Follins Pond near Hyannisport - summer home to the rambuctious Kennedy clan of dubious political fame….

According to the Icelandic Sagas which most scholars use, the party had rounded a large Cape with many shallows (Monomoy Point at the "crook" of the Cape Cod elbow is a graveyard of wrecks in its shifting shallows…) and sailing somewhat further on they came to where the Bass empties into the ocean. Here, too, the foreset is shallow and the water shoal at low tide… The Vikings recorded they grounded several times before they floated once again with the flood and thus up the river.

Arrived in Follins, they espied the only rock outcrop therein - a lone erratic glacial boulder on the west shore. They called this a skerry, which was a Norse word for a rocky ledge or outcrop. Skerries were what they sought when they wanted to moor their ships, for it was a Viking practice to hand-drill holes in these skerries into which they later inserted eyed iron pins to which a line might be made fast. As long as a strain was maintained on the line, it would remain secure… We have already read of this skerry and how I came to grief upon it one day some 950 years later!

Fanning out through the countryside, the party found ample wood and water and so decided this would be where they would winter over. Thorfinn set them to cutting timber (the area abounds in pine trees) and soon they had constructed a series of "booths". Booths, as the Sagas describe them, were sort of semi-subterranen abodes of timber covered with sod, and in them the Vikings, who had no real knowledge at this stage of the mild Cape Cod winters (due to the ameliorating effects of the distant Gulf Stream), felt they would be safe. It was a familiar strategy they used in the harsher climes of their homelands.

And so life settled in in Vinland. The Vikings had brought some stock with them, including some of Thorfinn's bulls, and soon these were out to pasture in new-cleared land. One day a group of very strange personages appeared: dusky brown men and women and naked children. Soon the Vikings had induced them into their camp and as they saw the group carried game and food they had collected, they sought to trade. The Sagas relate that red cloth was very popular and things were going famously, when all of a sudden one of Thorfinn's bulls in his nearby pasture began to bellow! This so terrified the silent savages that they all ran off into the woods and disappeared - to the Vikings immense enjoyment…

One day a "German" who had accompanied the party - one Strycher if I recall - was found missing and a party was sent to search for him. They soon found him in a clump of wild grape vines with which the land then (as now) abounded. He gave them to understand that wine could be made from these grapes which satisifed them greatly - thus the name "Vinland" (Land of grapes") came to be - at least this is one account. There are others…

Now it happened when they came out from Greenland that Spring that Thorfinn's unmarried sister, Freydis, had accompanied them. And in one of the boats were two brothers - the Finnbogi brothers - along with their retinue of followers…

Soon Freydis came to Thorfinn, who was head of the entire encampment, and said that the Finnbogis had been, well, …making passes at her. Thorfinn,who had much work to do and things to see to, chose to ignore this complaint from the ranks and told Freydis to be on about her business and not be making trouble. However, she persisted (maybe the Finnbogis were persistent too…lol) and she began to upbraid her brother that if he were half a man, etc. he would get this affair straightened out.

Finally, having had enough of this discord within his subterranean booths (so to speak), Thorfinn told the Finnbogis that they must remove together with all their followers and build themselves a new set of booths a mile or so away on the shores of "the smaller pond that was above the big one." Now it just so happens that a short way above Follins Pond is Mill Pond, a small landlocked pond in the remote pine barrens of the inner Mid-Cape…. So the Finnbogis trekked through the woods and following Thorfinn's order, built themselves a new booth on the shores of this small pond.

But Freydis was still not mollified and continued to grouse to Thorfinn and anyone else who would listen…

Early one morning, so the Sagas relate, she gathered a group of her own followers together and motioning them to silence, they took their weapons and stole away through the woods to the site of the Finnbogi camp. Arriving there, Freydis issued her war cry and a challenge to all sleeping in the booths below to come forth and fight and die like true Viking warriors! To emphasize this, it is said she "…smote upon her bare breasts with the broad side of her sword, which sound awakened the sleepers below".

They tumbled forth yawning but with swords ever at the ready. Unfortunately for them, they could only issue forth from the booths one at a time through the narrow passageways, and Freydis and her band were waiting and as they emerged they beheaded them everyone! "And when they were finished, they fired the booths and they were no more".

Ah! Yes-s-s-s-s- A woman for all seasons was that Freydis! (She appears later in the chronicles of the Sagas, where we learn she once drove back a band of truculent "skraelings" or the "screamers" who lived in these woods, using this same tactic of smacking her bosoms with her sword - which sight greatly horrified the skraelings who took to their heels!).

Epilogue

One fine summer day maybe back in the mid-1950's, I had the use of a small rowboat for the afternoon and decided to "go a-viking" a bit myself and explore along the pond shore. Soon I had found the small creeklet that drained down from Mill Pond back in the woods and ran under the road through a culvert and thence into Follins. I manuvered my boat through the culvert and pushed under dense overhanging vines of wild "muscatongs" - their heady aroma and the swarming humming insects in the vines telling me that soon it would be September and time to pick them…

I came out into a peaceful little land-locked pond and floated silently - a sort of modern Thoreau dreaming on the follies of humankind… By degrees I became aware that a middle aged man was standing not far away on the shore and watching me. I rowed slowly toward him. It was pretty remote around here in those days and the woods came down to the pond on all sides. I paused about ten feet offshore.

"Must be one of them college fellers lookin' fer the Vikings", he allowed. I said yes, I was one of that somewhat ephemeral group who came and went at times through the woods hereabouts. We began to chat and by degrees he told me he had lived here all his life, having inherited his grandfather's farm which owned property down to the pond's shore on the other side. I don't know how it came up but I remember suddenly he was telling me about "something that would have interested you fellers"… a large deposit of charcoal he said and it had once lain just under the surface in the woods near the shore.

"Charcoal?" I said. "Charcoal?" How did charcoal get here?" He went on to say that they never rightly knew - there had been a big mass of it when he was a kid and best they could figure was that "something burned" there once. I could find no argument with this observation, and asked him if he could show me the place. "Can't no more," he said in his flat Codder dialect. "All gone now you know. All dug out years back. We used to dig it fer grandaddy's forge up at the farm. All burned up in his forge years ago…"

We talked idly some more and then he had to leave and I rowed slowly back - under the grape clumps, through the culvert and into Follins once again. I used to spend several days each summer up at the Cape in those days…looking…wondering. Usually alone. I had the run of an old abandoned shed that the owner let me sleep in. I had no lights so used to roll into my sleeping bag not long after sundown. That night I dreamt of Vikings and their consorts - who chased Indians through these woods so long ago - and smote upon their breasts with their broadswords. Once many years later I went back and it was all developed now - bungalows and summer houses and the pines all cut down and gone. There were streetlights now, and basketball backdrops and kids and dogs everywhere and little gardens full of roses which grow in the salubrious Cape Cod air. The name the developer had given this development was "Viking Landing," though a check with some of the residents revealed they had no idea why….

"Sic transit gloria mundi"

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(The following was added long after above was written.)

Your interesting web site (NB: this was from me to a group recreating Leif's voyages from Norway...) brought back memories of my own personal involvement in the search for Viking evidences back in the pre-L'Anse aux Meadows days...

Leif Ericson Biography (from ODIN)

I was a young archeology student and I undertook first some investigations for the late scholar Frederick Pohl who was an early researcher into the Icelandic Sagas and a lifetime advocate for the Norse as having landed on Cape Cod at the site of Follins Pond. I was the first field investigator to go there for Fred (this would have been in early 50's) along with my associate Bob Hurst, and one of the very first to make it out to the "skerry" in the pond, which contained an ancient drilled "mooring hole" - just as Pohl had predicted would be the case from his armchair study in Brooklyn, N.Y.! In those days and for awhile, the heady conclusion was that this was the spot where whitemen first stood in North America! I had swum out to the skerry with no clothes on and carrying a box camera over my head. I backed up to get a picture of the hole - and backed over the edge of the rock! I fell into the water, and cut an artery in my wrist on sharp oyster shells! Naked, seriously cut, and with a photo of the first "Norse Mooring Hole" in my camera - it was a heady introduction to subsequent "Norse adventures!"

Follins Pond to this day still fits the description in the Sagas for "Vinland" the site upon which they landed, but has largely been either discredited or ignored. An item I ran across and believe has never been published or told yet, concerns the find of substantial subterranean charcoal masses on the shores of adjoining Mill Pond which fit the location for the burned "booths" of the Karlsefeni Party: I have never related what a local informant told me about these charcoal pits before. They were largely removed by his grandfather maybe around the turn of the century, who used the convenient "find" as fuel for his blacksmith forge!

Years later, together with Charles Boland, author of the onetime best-seller "They All Discovered America", and one of the wealthy Streeters of Backbay, who loaned his oceangoing ketch for the project, I helped recreate the "last day's sail in from the Northeast" of the Norse as they came in from the Atlantic to the shores of Vinland on their initial voyage, one fine summer day in the Year 1000! We were to land at Provincetown, but changed course some miles offshore to sail further to the West and raise the entrance of Duck Creek, where the legendary "Holland House" (? memory fails here ...) is located and where the famous "Norse Axe" was discovered in a "Colonial" house foundation... Newspaper reporters who had gathered to greet us for our sunrise landing ("...they came in from the Northeast, and the men were grateful to lick the sweet dew upon the grass..." recorded the Sagas) failing to meet us, filed stories of our aborted landing: "Trio Missing at Sea" said the New York Times - with the obligatory Maltese Cross marking our "last known position" on the map.

My wife, sitting down to breakfast coffee and her morning paper down in Connecticut, was greeted with this headline! Though my primary interests remained the prehistory of the Indians of the Northeast, I did follow on with some of the "Viking fervor" which was popular in the '50's... I found and published on a group of "mooring holes:" so-called in shorewise rocks and ledges of western Long Island Sound and speculated on their origins. I noted, cautiously, that there were many possible explanations for such holes in shoreline rocks other than the activities of Norse sailors.

It remains a curiosity to this day, however, how well the topographic descriptions of the Sagas still fit the coastal waters from Cape Cod to the great "fjord" of the Hudson River in New York... the only such river in all of North America that can properly be said to deserve such a desgination!

I wish the new generation of Viking enthusiasts the very best in their ventures. Skoal to the Northland!