Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 714
But of far greater meaning and with a bearing on the future as well as on the past, is the coming of the Norsemen to America, five hundred years before Columbus. A thousand years ago the Norsemen roved the seas of north-west Europe. Their home “Narrative and Critical History of America,” 8 Vols. Edited by Justin Winsor, Vol. I, Chapter II was on the coast of Scandinavia and on the narrow seas below, but their toil was on the sea, and every settlement their harvest. They were themselves driven forward by the eternal pressure of Asia upon Europe. They turned from piracy and plunder to settlement. All the east and south of Britain became theirs in a slow conquest that in a century and a half pushed back the Britons to the mountains and to the far west coast and islands. They settled down, turned Christian, and presently their inland farms and homesteads heard the village church bells in place of the sound of the sea — and that was England. The fire of the maritime spirit died down, to be kindled again five hundred years later with the winds of American discovery, to blaze in glory in the beacons of the Armada — as yesterday in the night sky above Dunkirk. Thus leads a main thread of our history from the Norsemen till to-day.
ADAM SHERRIFF SCOTT, A.R.C.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“A thousand years ago, the Norsemen roved the seas . . .” — page 10
But other Norsemen clung to the far north. They passed Great Britain by and settled in Iceland (a.d. 874). They built up a cultured civilization, a community of some 50,000 souls. There in a treeless land of lava, fiord and open grass, adventure could not fall asleep as in the Sussex farmstead. They blew westward on the wings of the wind and established a farther settlement in Greenland. The chance voyage of a boat driven in a storm (Gunnbjörn, about a.d. 900) first revealed this land. Two generations later an outlaw leader, Eric the Red, led his followers to Greenland, (a.d. 980), and a little later a whole company of settlers to this new home. It also was treeless, but that mattered to them less than nothing. There was a bright carpet of summer grass glistening on the hillsides, like Ireland in the rain, and so they called the place Greenland. This Greenland establishment lasted for four hundred years. The settlers raised cattle and sheep, built stone houses and churches and traded back to their homeland, and so to Europe, with cattle hides and seal skins and walrus ivory.
It was inevitable that the Norsemen should blow on from Greenland to America. The transit was nothing to people whose Fridtjof Nansen, “In Northern Mists,” 1911 great open boats, often over seventy feet long, strong and buoyant, driven with banks of oars or a huge square sail, could ride the seven seas. Due west from the Greenland settlement is the mouth of the Hudson Strait, at a distance of about 600 miles; south-west about 800 miles is the Strait of Belle Isle, leading to the Gulf of the St. Lawrence and the heart of the continent. There was nothing to stop the Norsemen from “discovering” America. They did. The record of it all is preserved for us in the Sagas of the Norsemen and in a sort of Domesday Book, the Land-Names-Book, kept in the Icelandic settlement. Chance led the way. We read how Biarni, son of Heriulf, striking westward from Iceland for Greenland in the year 986, was driven too far, and found a land covered with woods and with low coasts without mountains in sight. So Biarni knew it was not Greenland and steered away. Then came a great wind from the south and blew the ship in four days to Greenland. After Biarni came Leif, the son of the Red Eric who first colonized Greenland itself. Leif bought Biarni’s ship, and sailed on set purpose with a crew of thirty-five. This was in the year a.d. 1000. They easily reached land, but this time it was all covered with snow, and on the shore were great slabs of stone and in the background empty and desolate hills. Leif called it Helluland, which sounds in our English like what it was, but he meant the “Land of Stones.” There is little doubt that this was Labrador.
Leif and his crew sailed on down the seas — south and east and then south it must have been, but there is no count of days, no landmarks of places. No doubt they caught sight here and there of the coast and stood out to sea and on. They landed again at a place where they saw broad beaches of white sand. Here there were thick forests all along the shore. So they called it Markland, the country of trees. This could have been Newfoundland, or Cape Breton, or Nova Scotia. There is no way to tell. They sailed again, a north-east wind behind them, and then, in two days, landed again. This time they had reached the place that every schoolboy knows as Vinland. Here were lakes and rivers filled with salmon, and beautiful woods and trees easy to fashion into houses. It was not cold, though the autumn was well on, and the days had not drawn in so short as in Greenland. They found patches of wild grain and one day one of the sailors found bushes with berries on, which he said were the grapes from which wine was made in southern countries. None of the Norsemen had seen such things as vines, but the man who brought the grapes is called by the saga a “Turk,” meaning a man from the south, and so they took for granted that he knew. They gathered boatloads of American wild grapes, and presumably made wine and anticipated the horrors of the prohibition era by nine hundred years. Leif called this place Vinland and they stayed all the winter through. When they got back they told all about it and others came in new voyages, Leif’s brother Thorvald and different people.
For a few years there were many Vinland voyages. One leader, Thorfinn Karlsefni, tried to make real settlement (a.d. 1007), with a hundred and sixty men in his ships, with many of their wives, and with cattle. They built houses and traded with the savages and were there four years. At least one child was born in America, and christened Snorri, the first hundred-per-cent white American. Then came hardship and quarrels with the savages and the settlers learned for the first time the lurking danger of savage ambush in the woods, that darkens the annals of America. Karlsefni saw his people killed by savages who did not fight like men. Presently so many settlers were killed that the terror of it drove the rest away — back to God’s country, all bright ice and snow, and with no trees to shelter savages.
So that, except for the mention in the saga of odd journeys to the Labrador coast and to the mainland elsewhere for timber, was the end of Vinland. And presently the night fell on the Greenland settlement itself. We do not know how and why it ended. Transit and communication with Iceland seem to have grown less. After the year 1410 the record ends. The last known voyage from Greenland to Norway is dated in that year. When John Davis, the Elizabethan navigator, saw the coast in 1585, there was no sign of any habitation. When settlement was started again by missionaries in 1721, there was no population V. Stefansson, “Unsolved Mysteries of The Arctic” found but the native Eskimos. Of the Norsemen’s colony there remained nothing but ruined stone and scattered rubble; no record; no writing; and over part of it the eternal glacier of Greenland had made its burial of ice. We do not know how the settlement met its end. It may have been that the plague of the Black Death, which passed westward across Europe in that epoch, laid its hand on the little colony. It may be that food ran short and the settlers moved westward, to become long afterwards the “blond Eskimos” of Coronation Gulf. Perhaps the Eskimo fell on the settlement and wiped it out. Readers who wish to pursue the topic further may find it in the fascinating pages of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s book, The Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic.
Meantime, whereabouts was Vinland? The simple truth is that we don’t know. It may have been anywhere down the east coast of Canada or of the United States. The saga tells us exactly how long the shortest winter day was. That would locate its latitude to a nicety; but we no longer understand the method of time measurement used in the chronicle. Fond fancy traces the Norsemen over a wide area. There is an old mill assigned to For illustration of the rock, see “Leif Ericson” them at Newport in Rhode Island. There is the famous Dighton Rock, with marks like Nordic runes traced on it, lying in the Taunton River in Massachusetts, and other tokens elsewhere. But, unfortunately, Nordic runes are extremely hard to distinguish from scratches, and old mills without a miller mean nothing. The latest speculations and investigations, of lively interest to us in Canada, are the attempts to prove that the Norsemen went due west from Greenland into the Hudson Bay and from there south into the interior. Evidence of this is offered in certain resemblances of language (a shaky matter to the trained philologist) and in the avowed discovery of Norse armour, swords, etc., all of which is set forth in Mr. James Curran’s recent volume, Vinland the Good.
In summary, it is perfectly clear from the record that the Norsemen discovered the mainland of America, visited it from Greenland again and again, and once at least attempted a settlement. But the main point of the episode has been, I think, entirely missed. They discovered America and had no particular use for it. To us the words “discovery of America” are so portentous with meaning that we stand aghast at the idea of people finding it and leaving it. We know now that it was really America! and behind it were New York and Hollywood and all sorts of things. To the Norsemen it meant nothing — an empty shore of slate, or at best a forest of wood; but with treacherous savages in ambush among the trees — not to be compared with the bright, clear sky of the north, the glittering icebergs all adrip, and the carpet of green grass and flowers, and the long winter sleep, and the goodwill towards man that drinks and sings and fights but knows no treachery. That is how the Norsemen must have viewed America.
But although it remained for centuries a closed chapter, this coming of the Norsemen to Canada is of more than academic or historic interest. It bears directly on our future. We want them back again. Of all the people who have come to settle among us, there are none to whom the Canadian climate and environment is as congenial as to the Scandinavian races. They are, in a sense, more Canadian than ourselves. I have heard it argued by one of the most illustrious scientists of McGill that the peculiar tone and rigour of our climate, or of most of it, will turn us all into Scandinavians before it has done with us. The Nova Scotian and such may well remain damp enough to be a Scotchman, but the rest of us, especially in the North-West, will “go Norwegian.” This may be a far cry, but even a far cry may have a nearer echo.
And the nearer echo is this. Immigration from the Scandinavian countries should be a major feature of our Canadian policy when at last British victory imposes peace on Europe. Such a peace will undoubtedly bring us a new migration from our home-lands such as never was seen before. But we can no longer dream of the open door of migration thrown wide to all nations. The British Empire can restore and impose peace and humanity and fair play, but it cannot create in the poisoned organism of continental Europe the trust and honour and mutual reliance now lost for generations in race hatred and in the creed of brute force. The hope of world peace, resting on power — for it can rest on nothing else, and on the humane use of it, or else it rots away — this hope lies only in our Empire and in America. The British Isles will be our European bulwark, buttressed with the adherence of nations kindred in race and ideals. In such companionship alone we can place our full faith.
One other bearing on our present world has this bygone chapter of our annals. It throws into a strong light the anomalous position occupied by the territory of Greenland. An accident of history, broken from all meaning, connects it with European sovereignty. Till yesterday this fact was of no consequence. This vast region, one-fifth the size of the United States, is nothing more than a huge bed of ice such as once buried all Canada. Alaska, at first sight its western counterpart, was derisively called, when Secretary Seward bought it in 1867, “Seward’s ice box.” Yet when the box was opened the Alaskan birds began to sing. But Greenland is, and remains, a chunk of ice. Of its area of 730,000 square miles, all but 30,000 is buried under ice. The “green” of Greenland is too small to matter. The fact is that Greenland is suited only for the Devil’s work of air bases and hidden stations of attack from which to threaten the real continent. Even such mineral deposit as its cryolite, known since 1784 and found on the Arksut Fiord, in the ice-free corner of Greenland, is contributory rather to the uses of war than to those of peace. No one can think that the inhabitants of Greenland wish their territory to be a continuing menace to the peace of the world and of themselves. Their parent country, in chains or out, can never guarantee its own security, let alone that of a territory of 730,000 square miles, three thousand miles away. These Danes can play an important role in the world’s future and one that will not be inconsistent with an accepted change in the international status of Greenland after the war.
With the close of the Norse voyages all definite connection between the mainland of North America and Europe came to an end. The continent remained, as it had been for uncounted centuries, empty. We think of prehistoric North America as inhabited by the Indians, and have based on this a sort of recognition of ownership on their part. But this attitude is hardly warranted. The Indians were too few to count. Their use of the resources of the continent was scarcely more than that by crows and wolves, their development of it nothing. Estimates of their numbers varied. But a recent scientific survey Mooney, Smithsonian Institute Papers, 1928 gives the figure of 1,100,000 to cover all the Indians in what is now the United States and Canada. This estimate, according to other authorities, is, if anything, an overstatement. But even at that, it only means one Indian to every seven square miles. But that again gives a false impression. The great bulk of the continent was far emptier than that. Such Indians as existed were in many places grouped together in considerable bodies; such as the 17,000 Iroquois between the Mohawk River and the Great Lakes, or still more, the coast Indians of British Columbia.
This meant that enormous stretches of territory such as those around the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic seaboard, were made up of unbroken forests, impassable except by lake and stream, where the voyager might wander for days without meeting, or expecting to meet, the face or trace of other human beings. The fiction of Fenimore Cooper and the history of Francis Parkman have preserved for us the aspect of what it Francis Parkman, “Half Century of Conflict,” Vol. I, Chap. III once was. “Seen from above,” says Parkman, in speaking of this primeval forest, “the mingled tops of the trees spread in a sea of verdure basking in light; seen from below, all is shadow, through which spots of timid sunshine steal down among legions of lank, mossy trunks, toad-stools and rank ferns, protruding roots, matted bushes and rotting carcasses of fallen trees.” Even “The Prairies,” 1842 more lonely, but with the strange attraction of its very loneliness of grass and flowers, were the wide savannahs, the open prairies that stretched “in airy undulation” from where William Captain (later General Sir William) Butler, “The Great Lone Land” Cullen Bryant saw them in the Ohio territory till they reached the sunset of the far Canadian West below the Rockies. As late as at the first establishment of Manitoba (1870) Captain Butler could write of our North-West, “there is no other portion of the globe, in which travel is possible, where loneliness can be said to dwell so thoroughly. One may wander five hundred miles in a straight line without seeing a human being.” Such, and no more, is the meaning and extent of the Indian ownership of North America.
From this long sleep the continent was awakened by the tumult of the age of discovery that brought the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. His discovery came, like everything else, because it had to. It was a part of the new awakening of Europe when the night of the Middle Ages gave way to the dawn of the modern world. Many causes contributed. The invention of gunpowder ruined feudalism. There are in warfare two permanent enemies, the attack and the defence. First one and then the other is uppermost. In the Middle Ages defence had utterly beaten attack. Huge stone castles on hillsides and escarpments, with well-water and ample provisions, could resist indefinitely. Then came the train of artillery and the castles fell. The attack prevailed and stayed uppermost for centuries, till the Boer war of 1899 first showed trench warfare, that was to mean the deadlock of triumphant defence in the Great War. Now has come the new chapter of aerial bombardment; attack leads as never before.
Thus the close of the Middle Ages saw feudalism give way to De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium, 1543 great national states with trains of artillery and the cannon of ships of war. That meant a new political order. With it came the awakening mind; the art of printing; the rediscovery of Greek learning; the new mathematics and astronomy, Copernicus A.D. 1610 and Galileo’s telescope. The old heaven and earth literally passed away.
Not one but many scientists and navigators revived the Greek Justin Winsor, “Narrative and Critical History of America,” Vol. I theory that the earth was a sphere. Sail west long enough and you would get east. Several model “globes,” like that of Martin Behaim, had been made before Columbus sailed. Hence came new power and confidence in navigation and transport — the compass and the quadrant, and the art of sailing against the wind. Galley oars were packed away for ever in the new triumph of sail. Longer voyages were possible with new opportunities for commerce. The Portuguese ships reached farther and farther down Africa.
STANLEY ROYLE, R.B.A., R.C.A., SACKVILLE, N.B., 1941
“From this long sleep the continent was awakened . . . by the voyage of Christopher Columbus . . .” — page 20
Then came the precipitating cause that set all others into operation. The invading Turks overran Eastern Europe, took Constantinople (1453) and blocked the trade route to the East. From time immemorial trade had passed from Asia to Europe by overland caravans and by the Red Sea. The route was so long and varied that the Asiatic end was lost in the mist. When Marco Polo told Europe about it, they classed him with Herodotus A.D. 1298 and other such liars. Thus the East remained a place of myth and fable and magic attraction, containing somewhere Arabia Felix, and Prester John, and the Great Khan of Tartary, the Empire of Cathay and the Islands of Zipangu. These were the names that later lured Europe to discover empty America, where Cathay turned into New York, and Arabia Felix was Manitoba.
