VIKING MISCELLANY

First Sighting...

Perhaps the traditional account of the first sighting of these far distant lands conveys this idea: it is usually said that one Bjarni I think his name was, blown father west than any Viking had ever been on the Western Sea, sighted what may have been the coast of Labrador late in the 9th century. What did he do? He turned around and sailed back home without ever landing! His verbal recounting is said to have been what originally piqued Leif's interest...

Scots and Norse....

These seagoing traditions of the Norse may have been incorporated by the ancestors of the Sinclairs - the seagoing Scots clan who lived on the outermost islands of Scotland. Subject to Viking raids for centuries, many of these Scots were themselves of Viking blood and followed similar lifeways. It came to be common knowledge at the faraway English Court, that these "canny Scots" knew secret ways across the ocean to distant and unknown lands.. I am leading by degrees here to one of the most bizarre and unexplained findings I ever had anything to do with: a stone landgrant marker with the date "1284" on it and a Latin inscription for the designation of the English Kings which was once found, in my presence, undisturbed, deep in the CT woods! Perhaps I should write a book... this latter find was really a weird one...

Ever Westward...

To return to your question however: basically the North Atlantic here is conceived of as "stepping stones" of islands if you look at it that way: first the Northmen moved out to Iceland by the 9th century I guess it was; then on to Greenland (Leif) by 1000 A.D. or so and settled permanently there. Shortly thereafter, they pushed even further west to "Vinland" - wherever and whatever that might have been: 'L'anse aux Meadows is only logical and defensible place at this date.

Basques, Cod, Etc.....

As to the preColumbian explorations of Basques and fishermen from the Iberian peninsula ... their Catholicism may have been one driving force for them going ever further out to sea to fish. Europeans under Rome's domination in those days, ate codfish by the barrel, and there was much profit in supplying the only food the Popes approved of! lol Several centuries before Columbus, these reticent fishers had apparently discovered the North American Grand Banks: the mother and father of all fishing sites for Cod! Again, some intrepid captains among them - maybe now with a renegade Scot or Norsemen among their number - found that just a few days sail to the west brought them to a land which was heavily wooded and abundant freshwater at hand...

To practical navigators, this beat having to go all the way back to their European ports to refit and stockup - so soon they had a community established here. They refitted their vessels, built wood barrels and casks for their catch, built tryworks ashore for rendering oil from whales (these ruins have been found), and managed to lose mallorjca (sp?) pottery datable to this period overboard at various places in the harbor! And all this was done without fanfare or much publicity (indeed, all these early colonizings and explorations had their commercial side - and "Does Macy's tell Gimbles, already yet?" You bet your sweet bippy they don't! lol

My First Involvement...

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 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.! His first popular announcements, as I recall, were in an edition of the famous Saturday Evening Post, the original of which later became defunct. 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 (my mother's on loan!) over my head. In my excitement of discovering the predicted holes, I did the classic photographer's joke of backing up to get a better picture - and backed right over the edge of the rock! I fell into the water below, and cut a small artery in my wrist on sharp oyster shells! Naked, seriously cut, and with a photo of the first "Norse Mooring Hole" in my camera (still held overhead), I came up spluttering aand assessed the situation. I called to my companion Hurst, taking his leisure in our camp behind the trees atop the bluff. "Bob! I'm cut bad; I have no clothes on, and I have my Mom's camera out here! What shall I do?" I shall never forget the laconic reply that floated back down upon the balmy summer breeze, one word: "Punt!" It was a heady introduction to subsequent "Norse adventures!"

Follins Pond on Cape Cod...

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. (This is not far from the "compound" of the famed Kennedy clan up there). 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!

Problems With Pre-Columbian Contacts...

What "discredits" these putative "other" Viking sites from Maine to Mexico (and all the other pre-Columbian candidates, Viking or no) is what vitiates all claims to the contrary in science: the absolute paucity of hard evidence. IF such people were here and IF they were here in any threshold significance of numbers, their evidences should be encountered by modern trained investigators. But they are not. It is a parallel to the same "non-evidence" put forth for the many transcendant claims on the Board: the "evidence" is NOT evidence: it is ambiguous tenderings at best and irrelevant guessing at worst. In the case of the Vikings and Vinland and the Sagas: there is a wealth of armchair surmise, which cites literary convergences of tales and records and sailing instructions, etc. And there is the peculiar correspondence of many topographic and geographic features of the North American East Coast with the Icelandic Sagas (especially the Cape Cod region). And westward to the mouth of the Hudson. But the "hard evidence" is missing - or discredited.

First Whiteman in N.A.?...

Let me relate a tale for you as I best recall from memory from the Sagas (check a map if you need to). In the summer of 1003 A. D., Thorfinn Karlsefini (he was one of Leif's brothers) sent three "smallboats" of his men to explore the waters "to the west of Vinland" where they had but recently wintered. (Assume that to be Follins Pond on the Bass River on the southern arm of Cape Cod). The Sagas relate they sailed to the west some distance and "came unto a narrow Sound".

This COULD just be the "Race" as we used to call it, or Plum Gut at the eastern entry to Long Island Sound (itself c. 110 mi. long). They sailed down this Sound they said (it is along its northern shores in CT that I found my "mooring holes"). At its western end (the East River as it enters NY Harbor), "...they came to an island which was a rookery (for birds)." Staten Island lies in the right location here - and the early European settlers centuries later remarked it as a great breeding place of seabirds.... Get this! There was a pregnant woman in the group, and they made camp on this island and she gave birth to a son - Schnorri, I seem to recall was his name as recorded in the Sagas. If this is true, then this was the first white child born in North America and he was born on Staten Island in New York Harbor in the summer of 1003 A.D.! lol

The Hudson River is a Fjord...

These adventurers then turned north to sail "up a large fjord". This is exactly how a Norwegian, accustomed to fjords in his native land, would regard the Hudson River which comes in here and is a drowned river system for most of its length - there being tidal effects all the way inland to Albany! The Hudson is the only river on the Northeast American Coast that could be properly called a "fjord" (drowned by arm of sea). Some distance up this fjord, they put ashore on the west side to "scale the cliffs". The west side of the Hudson up from the harbor at NYC and just across from Manhattan, is the famous Palisades cliffs which line the west bank of that river! Having scaled the heights, these adventurers "...saw far to the west a range of hills". That is exactly what you see from the tops of the Palisades: the Poconos and the Ramapo "mountains" (low hills) of New Jersey!

No Hard Evidence...

Now this and countless other fascinating details are all down in the Sagas. But not one single campsite or unquestioned piece of hard data has ever been recorded here, so the whole thesis is discarded (and in which I concur, though I spent my own time and treasure in trying to establish it myself long ago). But unromantic as it seems, there are other more likely ways to explain these things, and there are problems galore with accepting myth and ancient writings, etc. (These same Sagas for instance also record that before they reached Vinland they came to a place called "Hopland" I believe (recalling all this from memory now) and it was inhabited by a race of "one-legged men". Now if we are going to "believe" the part about the Palisades - then what are we to make of the description (also quite exact) of "Hopland" and its bizarre inhabitants? I know with your wide reading as you have shown on the Board in your posts in these matters, you must be struck by the parallels here say, to the voyages of Ulysses, no?, and the remarkable part fiction, part fact, nature of them reported in the Odyessy, etc.....

Disturbances....

As you know, the most difficult sites to excavate and investigate are those that have been nearly continuously inhabited for generations. Digging, plowing, and other activities disturb the soil and the artifacts beneath (as the blacksmith tale demonstrates). And all it takes is one phony 'artifact' to call question to all the finds on a site

I think I shall try to tell in a subsequent post, the Saga account that may bear on the "charcoal" deposit, and my encounter with it. I never published on this or told many people... and since it relates a tale about a Viking Lady no less, I think it might be well received!

Sailing Leif's Last Day...

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" as related by their Sailing Master and later (300 years! lol) put down in the Icelandic Flatyjarbok by pious monks. This all took place one fine summer day about the Year 1000 as they came in on a fresh Nor-easter from the Atlantic to the shores of Vinland. We "recreationists" were to land at Provincetown, but changed course some miles offshore to sail further to the West instead 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 many years before... 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..." record 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. Thus are maritime legends perpetuated! Had this happened dwon here in the so-called 'Bermuda Triangle,' that story would have entered the mythology of the Triangle, even though we all survived.

The Mooring Holes...

Many years ago, 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.

We can pretty much eliminate wave action for the holes as they have specific constraints (which makes it all the stranger). There are some borderline candidates that may result from rock-boring crustaceans, but these are mostly easy to discard. (Your Colonial Sailor guess is of course on target). Holes drilled in stone by hand have a characteristic bulged triangular x-section not seen in machine drilled (modern) holes. This is caused by the driller shifting his grip on the chisel every so often and this rotates the bit characteristically. The Vikings were proficient Iron Age artisans; it takes about 10 mins. to drill suitable holes with hammer and rock chisel: have done so myself in tests. A further constraint is that the hole must be inclined from the vertical away from the direction of tension on any presumed anchor rodes.

It remains a curiosity to this day, however, how well the topographic descriptions of the Sagas 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 designation!

The Skraelings...

It is the further case, if you follow the Sagas, that metal swords, battle axes and all, the Vikings in the end were hard pressed by the "skraelings" (OId Norse for "screamers"!) who with long blackhair and dusky faces often set upon them from the woods.... Eventually, they left off coming out to Vinland altogether... partly because these Skraelings were so unpredictable. As for the Greenland Colonies, it is quite clear that the Inuit, with weapons largely of animal bone not even stone, attacked and drove the Northmen from their isolated "West Settlement" farms and eventually - aided somewhat perhaps by famine and other reverses from the "Little Ice Age" in the 1300's or so - massacred and killed them.

The Sagas...

The Icelandic Sagas which most scholars start with were put down in the 13th century retelling events that occured in the 10th - so you see the first thing is the gap there of three centuries. Against this are put the usual checks of the veracity of oral traditions among illiterate folks, etc. etc. The writers of the Icelandic Sagas were monks and I think the basic collection is called the "Flatyyarbok" which I think means something like book-of-the-flat-rock-place and must refer to where their monastery was or something like that as best I recall.

What is intriguing about the many tales is the extreme detail of seemingly minor and trivial events: day to day sailing instructions are recorded and wind shifts and bearings and sighting of land and other events. Time of daytime meals is even recorded and who ate what, etc. Clouds, winds, etc. This wealth of "trivia" is what leads many scholars to feel the events related are true copies of originals or somehow have great veracity. Against this must be set the occasional entrance from stage left of one legged men and sea serpents - all in a Viking's day! lol