Chapter 13
The Western Isles
“It is best to search while the trail is new.”
- Edda of Sæmund the Wise
The discovery of further islands to the northwest was a replay of the discovery of Iceland itself. Tradition holds that the first Viking to site fresh land was the Norwegian Gunnbjørn Ulfsson in the early ninth century. He was caught in a storm on a trip from Norway to Iceland and after a long journey, saw previously unknown rocky islands that he named after himself – Gunnbjørn’s skerries. He also caught sight of a much larger landmass to the west, but when he reported his findings, no one was interested since Iceland still had available land.
Nearly a century later, Iceland was becoming over populated – at least by Viking standards – and in 978, Snæbjörn Galti, decided to go and search for Gunnbjørn’s mysterious land and colonize it if he could. After putting together a crew, he sailed to Gunnbjørn’s skerries to gather information about what lay beyond. By this time the skerries were thinly populated with men who wanted to escape the crowds of Iceland, and they confirmed that there was indeed something to the west.107
Snæbjörn’s persistence paid off, and a few days sailing brought him to the eastern shore of Greenland, a massive volcanic island larger than all of Scandinavia put together. He set up his colony, but disaster struck almost immediately. The site he chose was a difficult one since the eastern coast of Greenland is largely not suitable for human habitation. More damaging, however, was the internal quarrelling which soon had the colonists at each other’s throats. Some violent argument erupted – the precise issue is unknown – both sides drew weapons, and Snæbjörn was killed in the fighting. Without its leader, the colony collapsed, and only two survivors returned to Iceland.
Although the attempt at the colonization of Greenland had been a spectacular failure, it had proved that the new land existed and could be reached from Iceland. Only four years later a second attempt succeeded. This time the expedition was led by a hotheaded Norwegian named Erik Thorvaldsson, better known as Erik the Red. Recklessness seemed to run in the family. His father, Thorvald, had been exiled from Norway for manslaughter, and Erik continued the family tradition a few years later, getting banished for the crime of ‘some killings‘. He fled to Iceland for refuge and claimed a farm on the northwest coast hoping to settle down.
Everywhere he went, however, trouble seemed to follow. At his first farmstead, two of his slaves inadvertently started a landslide and damaged some of his neighbor’s property. In the ensuing demands for payment, Erik killed a man – the delightfully named Eyjolf the Foul – and was forced to flee again. This time he settled on one of the islands off the coast of Iceland, safely out of reach of Eyjolf’s kinsmen.
His new farm was even less successful than the first. Within a short time he was again quarreling, this time killing not only his neighbor, but the man’s sons as well, a crime which finally got him exiled for three years.108
Erik was running out of places from which he could be banished, and he clearly needed a place without existing laws, so he bought Snæbjörn’s ship – and the services of the surviving crew – and headed west. The old sailors managed to repeat their earlier trip, and Erik spent the three years of his exile exploring the coast looking for a suitable spot for a colony. Rounding the ice-bound southern tip of what is now Cape Farewell, he discovered two habitable fjords on the western coast at roughly the same latitude as Iceland.
Erik was probably not aware that he had reached an island since the ice floes prevented him from sailing around it, but he noticed that there were no predators – either human or animal.109 Convinced that he could make a colony work, he sailed back to Iceland and began to recruit settlers.
Like all good salesmen, Erik recognized the value of publicity, so he called the new land ‘Greenland’ to make it more attractive. The pitch worked dramatically, as more than five hundred Icelanders agreed to make the trip. This was due at least in part to Erik’s powers of persuasion and his description of Greenland’s plentiful reserves of fish and fowl. The old lure of an empty land for the taking certainly played a part as well, all the more so because the days of claiming good land in Iceland were gone. The island was beginning to show the first unmistakable signs of ecological decay. In the search for ever more pastureland, the settlers had cut down all the birch forests and the deforestation was starting to erode the uplands. Not only was there no new land, but some of the newest farms were failing as the soil deteriorated.
In 985, Erik set off with twenty-five ships, loaded down with all the supplies needed to start a new life on the frontier. The journey was a difficult one, and those who went knew they were risking everything in a thousand mile journey through stormy seas. Eighteen of the twenty-five made it to Greenland, and when they pulled up their ships on the beach, there was probably a palatable sense of disappointment.
Now they discovered by just how much Erik had oversold the place. If Iceland was barely habitable, Greenland was downright hostile. Lying mostly above the Arctic Circle, it was at the very edge of the technical and survival abilities of the Vikings. While there was plenty of land – the eight hundred and forty thousand square miles of Greenland makes it the largest island on earth – nearly all of it was uninhabitable. A vast glacier covers the interior, leaving only a bleak, mountainous strip of coast barely fifty miles wide. There is almost no timber or iron, and the warmer months are too short for growing wheat or other staple crops. If they ran out of any vital supplies, they would have to import it from Iceland, a difficult, and unreliable prospect in the tenth century.
Fortunately, there was enough marine life available to supplement their diets. Luxury goods like sealskins, walrus ivory, and the fur of Arctic fox, hares, and polar bears could all be harvested in small amounts. They were in high demand in markets at home and could even be brought to the continental centers of Europe.
The colonization got off to a good start. Erik had probably selected a spot for himself during his three years of exile, and knew exactly where to go. He planted his farm at the head of several long fjords, and called it Brattahlíð, meaning ‘the steep slope’. It was an exquisite estate. Protected from the frigid arctic waters by the banks of the appropriately named Eriksfjord, it still boasts some of the best farmland in Greenland today. The maze of necks and islands in the fjord allowed enough meadow grass to start raising stock animals – the Viking version of wealth – and the rest of the settlers spread out around him.
Thanks to some clever Viking innovations like using irrigation as cold protection for their crops, the colony eventually swelled to four thousand inhabitants.110 So many settlers arrived that a decision was made to establish a second colony a hundred and seventy miles to the northwest.111Erik was naturally chosen as the Gothi of the Eastern Settlement, and established a meetinghouse for an island-wide ‘Thing’ at Brattahlíð.
In the summer months, when the warmer weather made travel more palatable, some of the colonists would journey nearly a thousand miles to the north in search of walrus, seals, and beached wales to harvest.112 These voyages resulted in enough of a yield that even accounting for the vagaries of sea travel, Erik became a wealthy man.
Trips back to Iceland and Norway were not frequent, but enough ships made the voyage in both directions that contact was maintained. In addition to the continuous trickle of immigrants who had left Scandinavia and found Iceland overcrowded, there were also relatives who would come to visit, or colonists who gave up and returned.
Although Erik himself never left Greenland again, his children inherited his wanderlust and made several trips back to the homelands. By his wife Thjodhildr, Erik had at least three sons, the oldest of which, Leif, made the dangerous crossing from Greenland to Norway in the summer of 999.
The purpose of his visit isn’t known, but he brought his wife as well, perhaps intending to settle there. He managed to find employment with King Olaf Tryggvason as a member of the royal bodyguard. Olaf had need of such men, because he was in the middle of a campaign to forcibly christianize Norway, and there was considerable resistance. The king ultimately failed in his attempt – and lost his life in the bargain – but he made one important convert. Some time in the winter of 999 Leif accepted the new faith, and was baptized together with his wife.
Before he died, Olaf convinced Leif to return to Greenland as an evangelist and spread Christianity. Leif agreed, but on the return trip was caught in a storm and blown badly off course. When the winds died down, and the fog lifted, Leif caught sight of land, but was confused when he saw heavily wooded hills instead of the barren, rocky coast he was expecting. Realizing that he was somewhere west of Greenland, he turned around and sailed in the opposite direction. Unknowingly, Leif Erikson had glimpsed the New World.
His attention for the moment, however, was the afterlife. When he reached Brattahlíð, he set about the business of conversion, starting with the Eastern Settlement. He found an eager audience for his message, but success came at the price of splitting his family. His mother Thjodhildr became a devout Christian, but his father Erik the Red, a proud pagan, was horrified. Tensions escalated further when Thjodhildr built a church at Brattahlíð, and informed her husband that she would no longer sleep with him until he abandoned his gods – a tactic which the sagas inform us ‘was a great trial to his temper.’113
Fortunately for familial relations, Leif announced a new project that diverted attention from the religious dispute. There was an undiscovered country to the west, and he was going to explore it. He invited his father along – Erik’s success in Greenland had made him a sort of good luck totem – but the patriarch, already in failing health, declined.114
Leif Erikson was not the first Viking to spot the Americas. That honor belonged to Bjarni Herjólfsson, son of the second most wealthy inhabitant of Greenland. Herjólf had been one of the original settlers, a close companion of Erik in Iceland. He had done quite well for himself there, but had been unable to convince his son Bjarni to join him on the island. This was probably because Bjarni was already a successful merchant in Norway, and had no desire to start over on an overcrowded island. He did agree, however, to visit his parents each year, a promise he appears to have kept. In 986, however, when he arrived in Iceland for his annual call, he found no trace of his father, just a rumor that he had left for Greenland.
Bjarni immediately decided to go after him, but was faced with a serious navigational problem. Neither he nor anyone else in Iceland had been to Greenland, or even knew how to get there beyond the vague understanding that it was to the west. There was no map, no compass, not even a description of what the colony looked like. Nevertheless, he set out with a volunteer crew, and not surprisingly, got completely lost and overshot his goal.
His first glimpse of land was of rolling hills covered with trees, a sure sign that he was in the wrong place. To men used to Iceland and expecting Greenland, the sight of so many trees was astonishing. They were everywhere, a vast, unbroken green carpet from the edge of the beach to the gently sloping hills in the distance. The Norsemen named it Markland, ‘Tree Land’, and continued north, not wanting to stop and explore.115
They next came to an island dominated by curious flat stones so large that two men could lie heel to head without touching the edges. The only sign of life they saw were the polar-foxes that darted away from the ship when they neared the shore. The Vikings called this Helluland, ‘the Land of Flat Stones’.116
Again, Bjarni didn’t allow exploration of the island because he was anxious to find his parents. This time, his sail caught favorable easterly winds, and after four days, they finally reached Greenland. Bjarni was reunited with his father, and – probably not willing to go through the harrowing journey again – decided to stay on the island permanently. His story of a new country to the west was treated as a curiosity, but there was little interest initially in pursing it.
Even Bjarni was content to let the issue drop. He was a trader, not an explorer, interested in cargoes and profits, not setting up colonies or fighting off natives. When his father died some time later, he inherited the estate and settled down to a life of farming.
A decade later, when Leif Erikson announced his intention to sail west, Bjarni still had no interest in going along, but he sold Leif his ship, and pointed him to the surviving members of his crew – most of whom signed up for the expedition.117 All told there were thirty-five men, a large number for a single vessel. This was to be a journey of exploration; both to find a suitable place for a colony, and more importantly, to find a source of raw materials. If the land were really as tree-rich as Bjarni claimed, then all of Greenland’s resource problems were solved. Although Leif was not aware of it, the very survival of Greenland’s colonies were also at stake.