SEVEN

The Northern Commonwealth

North America before Christopher Columbus

It is twenty years since I visited Nova Scotia, on the northeast coast of Canada, but it feels as if it were only yesterday that I stood on a rise overlooking Chedabucto Bay, gazing out to sea in the direction of Scotland. I had been told that this was where the founder of the chapel’s grandfather, Prince Henry St Clair’s expedition of 1398 had landed, a full century before the Spanish adventurer Christopher Columbus first set foot on the South American mainland. It all seemed so logical: across that vast sweep of water on that warm July evening was Orkney.

I was in Estotilanda, which only came to be known as Nova Scotia in the seventeenth century when the canny James VI of Scotland and I of England, ever in hope of financial gain, granted the territory to a Scottish nobleman, Sir William Alexander of Menstrie. I had gone to Canada that summer to attend the Antigonish Highland Games, and the Nova Scotia International Tattoo, a military spectacle matched only by that which takes place each August on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. Everywhere I looked, from the place names to the faces and the imported Gaelic language of the West Highlands and Hebrides, the Scots were in evidence, descendants of those early settlers and the victims of the Highland Clearances who followed centuries later. Yet it made absolute sense that their Viking–Scots ancestors, followers of the St Clair princes of Orkney, had been here even long before that.

After a week of travelling the Cabot Trail, looping around the northern tip of Cape Breton, I was convinced. The St Clair dynasty of Scotland reached a zenith in the late fourteenth century when the Sir William St Clair whose father had accompanied Bruce’s heart to Spain married Isabella, daughter of one of the Northern Hemisphere’s wealthiest and more powerful men, Malise, 8th Earl of Strathearn, great-grandson and heir to the Viking Jarl Gilbert of Orkney. Since Malise had no male heir, his titles passed in 1369 in the Celtic tradition through the female line to his grandson, Henry St Clair, who, ten years later, was acknowledged by the rulers of both Scotland and Norway as 42nd Jarl and 1st St Clair Jarl of Orkney (thus 1st ‘Earl’ of Orkney), and Jarl of Shetland. In addition, as if that was not enough, he was made Lord High Admiral of Scotland, Chief Justice of Scotland, Baron of Rosslyn, Great Protector, and Keeper and Defender of the Prince of Scotland.

While it has always been fashionably but inaccurately conjectured that the St Clairs owed their substantial wealth in no small measure to their share of the apocryphal vanished treasure of the Knights Templar, this would have been as nothing compared to the vast landholdings and sizeable income which Henry St Clair now inherited from his two grandfathers. But what should also be borne in mind is that Prince Henry, as he was styled, now had divided loyalties.

In the male-line, with landholdings in Fife and Midlothian, he owed his allegiance to Scotland’s Royal House of Stewart. Through his mother, he enjoyed the status of a Scandinavian potentate answerable only to the King of Norway in Bergen. His descendant Baron St Clair Bonde, whose family is eligible for peerages in both the UK and Sweden, understands the pressures. ‘I am British, and therefore my allegiance is to Her Majesty the Queen and to Scotland,’ he says. ‘However, I must confess that when I am in Scotland and the Scots play against the Swedes in Scotland I am inclined to support the Swedes and conversely, when I am in a similar position in Sweden, I would support the Scots.’ To a very great extent, however, the duality of his situation placed Henry in a useful position to expand not only his personal horizons, but also those of the interests he served.

With the death of her husband, Haakon VI King of Norway, in 1387, Queen Margaret of Denmark, daughter of Valdemar IV of Denmark, was made protector of both countries. When the King of Sweden intervened he was firmly suppressed, and with the Union of Kalmar, signed in 1397, Norway, Denmark and Sweden accepted Margaret’s great nephew, Erik of Pomerania, as their overall ruler. When Prince Henry attended King Erik’s coronation that same year, he would have been well aware that the real power in Scandinavia lay with Queen Margaret, who continued to dominate the continent until her death in 1412. As magnate of the Orkney Islands, with a fleet of wooden ocean-going Cogge ships – flat-bottomed transport vessels – in the North Sea, Henry’s first initiative, having instigated the building of a great castle in Kirkwall, was to bring the remote Faroe Islands into the fold on Queen Margaret’s behalf. This he achieved in 1391.

The Northern Commonwealth of Norway, Denmark and Sweden had already extended its tentacles east into the Baltic, controlling parts of Finland, Germany and Estonia. The far north of Scotland and the Orkneys – the latter territories controlled by Prince Henry – provided a jumping-off point for the western and northern oceans. For generations there had been talk of fertile lands far across the Atlantic. Norse colonies have been proved to have already existed in Iceland, Greenland, Helluland (Baffin Island) and Markland (Labrador). In 1962 early Viking settlements were excavated at Cape Bauld in Newfoundland, and Blanc Sablon, on either side of the Labrador Strait, by the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife, Anne Stine. Their findings confirmed the presence of a Norse colony dating from at least the fourteenth century, if not before.¹

To have made such a voyage with the boats they had at their disposal was entirely possible. St Brendan, an Irish missionary from Munster, is credited with having done so as early as the sixth century, although there is considerable doubt as to exactly where he might have ended up. In 1976 the adventurer Tim Severin successfully sailed a curragh from Brandon Creek on the Dingle Peninsula to Brandon Creek on the Faroes, then across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland.² This was more or less the same route that was said to have been taken by the Viking explorer Leif Erikson in the tenth century. Similarly, in 1991, a West Highland galley – or birlinn – called the Aileach was launched with money raised by Ranald MacDonald, 24th Captain of Clan Ranald, and Wallace Clark. This magnificent boat, built by three McDonald brothers in Moville, County Donegal, and crewed by six Scots-men and six Irishmen, sailors and oarsmen, travelled the 400-mile distance from Westport in Mayo to Stornoway.³

Seafaring was, of course, a dangerous enterprise, but from the fourteenth century, as the desire to explore further afield increased, it became somewhat easier with the development of navigational aids and nautical expertise. Maps began to emerge, particularly from the Mediterranean region. Indeed, much of the credibility surrounding Prince Henry’s enterprise of 1398 relies upon the coincidence of a Venetian voyager Nicolò Zeno being shipwrecked on the Faroe Islands. It was not Nicolò, however, who accompanied Henry to Estotilanda, but his brother Antonio, a Venetian sea captain, whom Nicolò summoned to Orkney from Venice.

The background to the Zeno family is admirably documented in Andrew Sinclair’s The Sword and The Grail: The Story of the Grail, the Templars and the True Discovery of America.⁴ Again, a lot of this is speculation, but the facts are principally drawn from existing records and charts published in Venice by Nicolò Zeno’s great-great-great-grandson in 1558. This Zeno Narrative⁵ is transcribed from letters sent by Nicolò and Antonio to their brother Carlo Zeno, Captain of Venice. These provide a detailed account of the brothers’ first North Atlantic expedition with a ‘great lord of the islands’ to Greenland in 1393, and Antonio’s subsequent voyage to Estotilanda five years later in the employ of Prince Henry, by which time, it would appear, Nicolò Zeno had died. The map that accompanied the account clearly indicates the locations of Norway, Scotland, Engronelant (Greenland) and Estotilanda.

When I was in Nova Scotia I was told that in the folklore of the indigenous Mik’maqs, whose descendants survive to this day, there are long-ago stories of white gods arriving from the sea on floating islands. That the occupants of these floating islands came ashore is certain as they too are commemorated in the Mik’maq tradition, and this inevitably ties in with the claims of the Zeno Narrative. There are various east-coast locations where Prince Henry’s expedition, if indeed they were the white gods whom the Mik’maqs refer to, might have set up their camp.

One is at the Castle at the Cross, a mound of stone and earth which lies 17 miles from Chester, where iron tools have been found. The other is at Oak Island in the Golden River, where there is a notorious Money Pit, a hole in the ground where, should anyone attempt to explore it, a series of flood tunnels are triggered by moving stones which give access to incoming water and thereby make it impossible to progress any further.⁶

To further endorse Prince Henry’s presence, I was also shown a primitive cannon of Venetian design that had been fished out of Louisburg Harbour around 1849. There were eight rings around its barrel, and a detachable breech with a handle, a design that I was informed had become obsolete when cannons of a single shaft were introduced in the fourteenth century. Of course, it might easily have been a souvenir imported in a later century, but that would not make it nearly as intriguing.

In the spring of 1398, the Scots–Norse explorers are thought to have sailed down the New England coast to what is now known as Massachusetts. Exploring inland, they came across a tributary of the Merrimack River and found their way to a location close to what is now the town of Westford. Here, on a rock face, they, or perhaps some contemporary Native American, left behind a carving of a knightly figure holding a shield and sword. Upon the shield is an armorial drawing which the late Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, Albany Herald at the Court of the Lord Lyon King of Arms, readily identified as the arms of Clan Gunn from Caithness, who also shared Viking blood. There is nothing like leaving a carving on a rock to let posterity know without doubt that you have been there. Which brings us to the final conundrum in this chapter.

Much is made of two decorative friezes carved into the arch surrounds at Rosslyn Chapel. One would appear to represent Indian corn; the other, cacti. Both belong to the New World, and, on the instructions of Prince Henry St Clair’s grandson, were depicted a good twenty years or more before the arrival of Christopher Columbus on that continent, thus introducing a strong probability that Henry St Clair was there first. That in itself is fascinating, but my attention was then drawn by the historian Henry Steuart Fotheringham to the Great Hall of Stirling Castle where, before its total restoration by Historic Scotland in 2002, almost identical corn mouldings had existed, albeit the majority weathered beyond repair.

With an exterior makeover that makes it look like a sugar-coated cake, the majority of the surviving exterior carvings, those not already totally decimated by the weather and Reformation, were sensitively reproduced, and within the hall, decorating the high plinths which support the recreated hammerbeam ceiling, can be seen a familiar motif. Similar corn head decoration is featured on the windows in the small inner courtyard beside the Regimental Museum. ‘However, things that are old do get copied by new generations and become so stylised that they ultimately become something else,’ observes Steuart Fotheringham.

It is generally acknowledged that James IV built the Great Hall between 1501 and 1504, but prior to this James III certainly had a hand in starting it. Building work, in an age before mechanical diggers, when everything was fabricated by hand, took time.Whatever the actual year of its completion, it was still long before the details of Columbus’s discoveries in the New World became widely known. The existence of the corn motif does suggest a common provenance with the frieze in Rosslyn Chapel, and the most obvious explanation is that it was the work of the same cooperative of stonemasons. Alternatively, the coincidence could amount to nothing more than a contemporary invention of a fertile imagination, one which became a popular image of the time. The ubiquitous egg-and-dart cornicing of the eighteenth century springs to mind.

On the supposition that his voyage across the Atlantic was a spectacular success, Sir Henry’s euphoria on returning to Scotland after another long sea voyage must have been short-lived. It was to be expected that his enemies would have monitored the movements of such a renowned and politically dangerous man to find out what he was up to. This was no pleasure trip and the eyes of the Northern Hemisphere were upon him. Discounting the very real possibility of his losing all of his ships and men, or of being drowned himself, there would come a time when he had to return and render an account of himself. This would have included his plans for creating a northern commonwealth encompassing Scandinavia, Scotland, Greenland and what is now known as North America as a counterbalance to the dominance of England and the powers of continental Europe.

And then what? The knowledge that a global northern commonwealth based on trade was not just a possibility, but in the making would certainly have alarmed the nation states of Western Europe, and not least Scotland’s immediate neighbour, England. And no doubt England was well aware of what Prince Henry St Clair and the Scots had in mind. After deposing his cousin Richard II, the recently crowned Henry IV of England wasted no time in turning his army on Scotland and laying siege to Edinburgh Castle where he remained entrenched until lack of food and supplies obliged him to retreat.

With his feet firmly planted in two spheres of influence, and the potential for a third in prospect, Prince Henry posed a real threat and his enemies knew that they had to act fast. In 1400 he would pay the price of his gamesmanship. There are varying accounts of Prince Henry’s death. However, the consensus was that he died when his castle in Kirkwall was attacked by raiders from East Anglia, and few were in doubt that it was a politically motivated assassination.

Prince Henry, 42nd Jarl of Orkney and 9th Lord of Rosslyn, left two sons, Henry and John, and nine daughters. Through their marriages they would make the 2nd Prince Henry St Clair one of the best-connected men in Scotland, second only to those of the Royal House of Stewart. Prince Henry’s eldest sister became Countess of Douglas; the second, Countess of Dalhousie; the third, Lady Calder; the fourth, Lady Corstorphine; the fifth, Countess of Errol; the sixth, Lady Tweedie of Drumelzier; the seventh, Lady Cockburn, the Lady of Stirling; the eighth, Lady Herring, the Lady of Maretone; and the youngest, Lady Sommerville. Henry himself married a granddaughter of Archibald, Earl of Douglas and Lord of Galloway, and, through marriage, his eldest daughter became Countess of March.⁷ In an age of landowning power, it is impossible to ignore the full potency of such connections. With Henry’s succession in 1400, followed in 1420 by his son William, the builder of Rosslyn Chapel, the tentacles of wealth and influence of the St Clair dynasty were beyond equal in fifteenth-century Scotland.