“They were probably testing the boundaries of their world,” Jack reflected. “The Phoenicians did the same. The farthest Phoenician outposts date from the earliest period of exploration, and were all short-lived. Mogador in west Africa, Cornwall in Britain. Attractive trading potential, but too far away and vulnerable to last for long. It looks like the same story here.”
“That’s a good model,” Jeremy said, ruffling his hair. “Excavations here in the 1970s revealed lots of evidence for woodworking, for preparing logs and planks suitable for shipbuilding. It’s a little difficult to envisage now, but there were dense forests of deciduous trees reaching right up to these meadows. It would have seemed like a gold mine to the Icelanders and Greenlanders, who had no forests of their own and had to import large timbers from Scandinavia. They repaired their ships here and may even have built new vessels, but most of the timber was probably shipped back to Greenland and Iceland.”
“I’m baffled,” Costas said. “With all that wood, plus great pasturage and fishing, why didn’t they establish a permanent colony?”
“Scraelings,” Jack said.
“Who?”
“The Norse name for the native peoples, the Indians,” Jeremy replied. “It means wretches, which says it all for the Viking attitude. There was quite a large population in Newfoundland at that time, and their war canoes and bows made them more than a match for the Vikings. The archaeology doesn’t give us much to go on, but the sagas tell an ugly story. When Leif Eiriksson first arrived, relations with the natives were tense from the outset. Soon there were confrontations, violent clashes. The occasional murder by one side or the other may have turned to outright war, with more distant bands joining in and the Vikings soon being overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. They probably had to direct all their energy to stockading this place, to building a wooden palisade around their dwellings. It would have been impossible to tend livestock or hunt and fish, and in their weakened state illness would have been rife. They would have been unable to fell trees and prepare timber for shipment back home, their main reason for being here. The sagas tell us that Leif’s brother Thorvold was killed by an arrow, and that may have been the death knell for the settlement.”
“Sounds like the Pilgrim fathers in America, at Jamestown,” Jack said. “Hemmed in by hostile natives, plagued by starvation and disease.”
“There’s an even darker story.” Jeremy took out a battered paperback from his pocket. “These are the Vinland Sagas, passed down by word of mouth and written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century. They’re difficult to read as history, sometimes contradictory and confused, but the discovery of this site proves they’re based on real voyages. According to the Greenlanders’ Saga, another of Eirik the Red’s offspring, his daughter Freydis, organized an expedition to Leifsbu?ir, ‘Leif’s Houses,’ their name for the Vinland settlement. There were two ships, one with about thirty Greenlanders, the other with about the same number of Icelanders. Once they’d disembarked there was some kind of dispute, maybe involving women, some deep-rooted animosity, that led Freydis and the Greenlanders to run berserk and murder all of the Icelanders in one awful rampage. Freydis herself murdered the five Icelandic women, and probably their children as well. If it truly happened, the dark deed would probably have taken place at night inside one of these longhouses.”
“Blood feud,” Jack murmured, remembering his troubled sleep. “I hope that’s not our most enduring legacy from the Vikings.”
“Do we have firm dates for any of this?” Costas asked.
“The radiocarbon dates look about right for the foundation of the settlement, around AD 1000, with the other expeditions recounted in the sagas taking place over the next fifteen years or so. Freydis’ expedition may have been the last.”
“Until Harald Hardrada.”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.” Jack rubbed his hands in anticipation and eyed the compact chart case that Jeremy had placed alongside their bags. “It’s time we looked at that map again.”
Twenty minutes later they stood on the foreshore a few hundred metres from the archaeological site. Behind them lay the gently undulating meadows that surrounded the Viking settlement, and on either side the low-lying coast swept round the tidal flats of the bay. Beside them two Canadian Coast Guard crewmen were readying a lightweight Zodiac inflatable boat they had carried down from the helicopter. Jack shielded his eyes and looked out to sea. The light was pellucid, with the clarity they had seen in the icefjord, and the breeze carried with it a vestige of the chill air that flowed off the ice to the north even in June. For a moment Jack found himself thinking of the iceberg far away in the fjord, wondering whether it would finally melt somewhere near these shores and put Halfdan to rest on the trail of his companions. He brushed the thought aside and focussed on the low rocky mass visible a few kilometres offshore.
“Great Sacred Isle,” he murmured. “That’s what we came here for.”
“There’s no doubt about the identification.” Jeremy was holding a copy of Richard of Holdingham’s sketch and comparing it to a photocopy from the local Admiralty Chart. “According to Maria, Richard was a painstaking scholar and would have transcribed the map as accurately as he could, probably copying from an original sketch which somehow made its way to him from Greenland.” He suddenly put down the sketch and rushed over to a nearby hummock, where a cloud of steam was rising from a small camping stove.
“So what exactly are we looking for?” Costas asked. “Pottery, coins, the odd rusty battle-axe?”
Jack smiled at his friend. “Not a chance. Eight years of excavation at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s produced exactly four Norse artefacts: a bronze pin, a stone oil lamp, a spindle whorl and a gilded brass fragment. And that was for a community that may have numbered over a hundred, and was here for several years. The Norse picked up what they dropped and didn’t throw away anything. If Harald Hardrada chose to leave something, we may find it. If not, we probably won’t find anything.”
Jeremy came tottering over the grass carrying two wooden bowls and spoons, and thrust them at Jack and Costas. “Carved them myself when I was a kid,” he said proudly. “Exact copies of Norse bowls from Greenland. And the stuff inside’s authentic too.”
Costas peered suspiciously at the congealed mass in his bowl and patted it with his spoon. “Looks old enough,” he said. “And smells like a resin factory. I take it this isn’t food?”
“My own recipe.” Jeremy affected to ignore him. “Based on the analysis of Norse refuse sites. Coarse barley flour, ground peas and pine bark. A kind of gruel. Quite good really.”
“Where’s yours?”
“Couldn’t wait. Ate it already.”
“Right.” Costas sniffed his spoon and took an experimental lick. “God almighty. Refuse is about right.”
“It’s all you’re getting. The total Viking experience. No modern food allowed at L’Anse aux Meadows.”
Costas grumbled, and Jeremy turned to Jack, who had quickly polished off his bowl and was staring again at the map.
“This was the place of no return,” Jack said. “If they really got this far, none of Harald’s men ever made it back home alive. They were on a one-way ticket to the end of the world.”
“What about their guides?” Costas spoke through a sticky mouthful, his eyes fixed balefully on Jeremy.
“I doubt whether any of the Greenlanders accompanied Harald this far,” Jack replied. “With only the one longship remaining after Halfdan’s burial they would have had no way of returning, and even at Ilulissat they would have had to await rescue by the Norse hunters and fishermen who made their way up to Nor?rseta in the summer.”