Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse Words
The Guard- blogspot ^ | 3-15-2007 | Larry Stroud

Posted on 03/06/2011 12:45:36 PM PST by blam

600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse Words

By Larry Stroud, Guard Associate Editor
Published on Thursday March 15, 2007

Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists?

BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language.

The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine, 72, and Frode Th. Omdahl, 51, met on the Internet six years ago when they were each looking for a rare book, “The Viking and the Red Man,” written by the late Reider T. Sherwin. Together they found copies of all eight volumes with the same name, published mostly in the 1940s.

Using Sherwin as a reference, they found that much of the Algonquin language consists of Old Norse, including Old Norse root words often strung together to make new words that were adopted by Algonquin speakers.

Paine and Omdahl were featured speakers on “Norse Tracks in America” at the first Ancient American Artifact Preservation Foundation annual conference in Big Bay, Mich. in 2005. Paine spoke again at the ’06 conference.

Paine is a lifelong student of history who has a doctorate in agriculture engineering. He taught in two universities, and served as a state and regional Extension engineer covering 10 Great Plains states.

He later worked as an electrical engineer for three aviation companies, a career that included being a primary writer of test reports for the certification of the Cessna 208 aircraft, the Caravan. He grew up as a farm boy in South Dakota, where the “white faces among the Mandan Indians” intrigued him.

Omdahl is a native of Stavanger, Norway who now lives in Asker in the same country. He is educated in journalism, graphic design and marketing communications. A lifelong student of history and an eager genealogist, Omdahl got interested in Norwegian emigration to America.

Researching his family history, he also caught interest in “the first wave” of Norwegian emigrants to America, 800 years before the next “wave.” That the Algonquin Indian languages have many words identical to Old Norse is not a new discovery, as evidenced in books other than Sherwin’s, but the application Paine and Omdahl are using is new. The two are using Sherwin’s eight volumes to decipher the Lenape’s ancient picture stick writing, the Walam Olum. For each picture stick, Lenape historians recited or sang a verse.

“The memory verses of the Walam Olum were created by people speaking Old Norse,” Paine said. “The Walam Olum is a 600-year-old American history composed of pictographs and memory verses. The history tells of fighting the mound builders, Iroquois, and of the arrival of white men.

“Our efforts to decipher the Walam Olum have found a striking correlation of the Walam Olum words to Old Norse phrases,” Paine said. “This relationship strongly supports the hypothesis that Old Norse speakers visited eastern ancient North America and left very tangible evidence of their presence.”

“The Algonquin language is Old Norse,” Sherwin wrote in the preface of his Vol. 4. Sherwin, a native of Norway before he moved to the U.S., began comparing the languages because he heard a New England place name before he saw it in print, and was told it was of American Indian origin.

Sherwin disputed this because he recognized the word as one he had long known — and the meaning was the same. Finding a New England map, Sherwin, familiar with dialectical Norwegian, which is much closer to the Old Norse language than literary Norwegian, immediately recognized dozens of place names as Old Norse. They had the same meanings in both Algonquin and Old Norse.

Michigan and Milwaukee are two examples from his books. Those are names said to be Algonquin, with Michigan meaning “middle sea basin” and Milwaukee meaning “good, beautiful land.”

In Old Norse, “midh” means “middle,” or “lying in the middle”: and “sjoe-kum” or “sjoe-kumme” means “sea basin” or “sea reservoir.”

“Lake Michigan lies midway between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, hence the translation would be correct,” Sherwin wrote.

Milwaukee, in Old Norse, is “milde aak(r)e,” meaning “the pleasant land” — an almost perfect match for the pronunciation and meaning in Algonquin, Sherwin said. Omdahl points out that in old Norwegian languages and dialects, “‘aa’ is pronounced as something between the ‘a’ in ‘war’ and the ‘o’ in ‘horse.’”

“Today it is one of the typical Scandinavian letters — an ‘a’ with a tiny ring over it,” Omdahl said.

“Sherwin’s books have been overlooked because of World War II and because the last six of Sherwin’s books were self published, so only a few books went into libraries,” Paine said. “An original catalog error shelved the books in the rarely used dictionary section of libraries instead of in the linguistic section where they belong.”

“After 16 generations of memorization, the consistency of the recorded sounds is remarkable,” Paine said. “This provides strong evidence that the Walam Olum is an authentic historical document that was first created by people who spoke Old Norse — or a language strongly influenced by Old Norse.

“The last seven verses in chapter 3 of the Walam Olum describe the Norse people of Greenland walking to America on the ice,” Paine said.

The verses describe a mass of people walking to the west to a better land, across the “slippery water, the stone hard water.” The migration corresponds with the “Little Ice Age.”

“I invite everyone to view the evidence online at www.frozentrail.org,” Paine said. Respected author Ida Jane Gallagher of Mount Pleasant, S.C., who spent 28 years working beside authoritative professionals researching ancient America — with much of that work in New England — also compares Sherwin’s Algonquian and Old Norse words and confirms Norse migrations in her book, “Contact With Ancient America,” co-authored with Warren D. Dexter andpublished in 2004.


TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: algonquin; algonquins; ancientamericans; ancientnavigation; asker; bigbay; canada; delaware; epigraphyandlanguage; explorers; frodeomdahl; genealogy; godsgravesglyphs; greenland; iceland; idajanegallagher; indians; inuit; iroquois; lanseauxmeadows; larrystroud; lenape; littleiceage; mandan; michigan; milwaukee; moundbuilders; mountpleasant; myronpaine; navigation; newfoundland; norse; norway; reidertsherwin; scandinavia; southcarolina; southdakota; stavanger; thevikings; viking; vikings; vinland; walamolum; warrenddexter
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-100 next last
To: blam

Interesting, thanks. Anyone found the Templar fleet yet?


41 posted on 03/06/2011 6:26:42 PM PST by americanophile ("this absurd theology of an immoral Bedouin, is a rotting corpse which poisons our lives"-Ataturk)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Verginius Rufus
You reminded me of this article:

American Indian Sailed To Europe With Vikings?

Five hundred years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a Native American woman may have voyaged to Europe with Vikings, according to a provocative new DNA study.


42 posted on 03/06/2011 6:45:15 PM PST by blam
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 39 | View Replies]

To: blam
YOWZA!

And I *don't* say that lightly.

(Thanks, bookmarked for later).

Cheers!

43 posted on 03/06/2011 7:14:04 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: Flag_This
Bog iron doesn't need to bubble up. You just go to a stream flowing down from almost any sort of mountain and you can find "iron deposits" ~ but they are NOT enough to maintain any sort of serious iron age civilization, and in the very acidic East Coast everything you make is going to be subjected to substantial corrosion so there aren't going to be many hand me downs.

When Captain whos'this built the House of Seven Gables there in Salem the colonists were still shipping in NAILS from Europe.

I would imagine the smithy in Newfoundland was really popular until they ran out of stuff ~

Remember, these Vikings didn't have a great storehouse of iron mine lore to depend on. Even when DeSoto visited the MidWest he stopped at Terre Haute and sent men with wagons out across the countryside to the West by SW to GET GOLD. They came back with some native copper and iron pyrite.

They missed the gold no more than 10 miles ~ the local Indians knew all about it, but weren't terribly interested in it, or the copper. In fact, the Indians all the way down to Mobile KNEW about the gold site in Southern Indiana ~ but absent improved techniques they really couldn't get enough of it to do anything about, but it's pretty much the ONLY gold between Mobile and just North of Sault Ste. Marine.

44 posted on 03/06/2011 7:21:01 PM PST by muawiyah (Make America Safe For Americans)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 40 | View Replies]

To: blam

Wow. Interesting.


45 posted on 03/06/2011 7:23:27 PM PST by csvset
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
"You just go to a stream flowing down from almost any sort of mountain and you can find "iron deposits" ~ but they are NOT enough to maintain any sort of serious iron age civilization,"

The Vikings obtained most of their iron from bog ore, as did the Saxons in England - I don't know if you would consider those examples of serious iron age civilizations, but it seemed to be suffient to provide for plenty of helmets, swords, mail hauberks, etc.

Producing iron requires many specialized skills, if the Vikings did abandon western Greenland for North America, I could see how that knowledge could easily be lost in a few generations - or even more quickly with the deaths of a few key people.

46 posted on 03/06/2011 8:00:49 PM PST by Flag_This (Real presidents don't bow.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah

“You still have to remember that Japanese and Korean people have some RED HEADED ANCESTORS”

I am 100% celtic but according to my brothers DNA analysis through the Nat’l Geographic genome project we share genes with 40% of Japan.


47 posted on 03/06/2011 8:05:39 PM PST by Domestic Church (AMDG)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 32 | View Replies]

To: Domestic Church

Everybody, even the chimps, are about 98% the same ~


48 posted on 03/06/2011 8:07:39 PM PST by muawiyah (Make America Safe For Americans)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 47 | View Replies]

To: Claud

poing.


49 posted on 03/06/2011 8:09:34 PM PST by Antoninus (Fight the homosexual agenda. Support marriage -- www.nationformarriage.org)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Flag_This
To "do iron work" you really have to have a settled condition with plenty of combustibles and iron in relatively close proximity.

Doing smithing on the run is a different sort of business than rendering ore down to iron, and then doing the build up to implements.

Back in Scanderhoovia the Vikings had access to one of the world's great iron lodes ~ up in Newfoundland, you'll notice that even today modern men have NOT managed to build a major steel industry!

Doesn't mean they aren't trying, but a quick review of literature available on the internet reveals that it wasn't until the late 1800s that the major iron ore deposits in Newfoundland were FOUND and DEVELOPED to any degree.

Remember, in a society with, at best, wooden shovels, it is unlikely they'll find much iron ore under 20 feet of wind blown loess or other debris.

50 posted on 03/06/2011 8:15:37 PM PST by muawiyah (Make America Safe For Americans)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 46 | View Replies]

To: muawiyah
"To "do iron work" you really have to have a settled condition with plenty of combustibles and iron in relatively close proximity. Doing smithing on the run is a different sort of business than rendering ore down to iron, and then doing the build up to implements.

...up in Newfoundland, you'll notice that even today modern men have NOT managed to build a major steel industry!

At L'Anse Aux Meadows the Vikings had all the resources they needed to make iron implements in the exact same way that they did in Greenland and Iceland and the same way the Saxons were doing it in England at about the same time. They weren't making locomotives or I-beams, so there really was no need for a "major steel industry." They just needed enough for the relatively simple tools and implements of the time. This isn't my opinion - this is what the archaeologists found - charcoal, slag and bog ore.

The sagas say that at least one of the Viking expeditions to North America was gone for a couple of years, with over 100 people plus various farm animals; so they had plenty of time to gather the necesary items for smelting iron ore. IOW, it wasn't a case that they ran into trouble and had to pull up on the beach for a quick ship repair before going back to Greenland. They had planned to stay for an extended time.

51 posted on 03/06/2011 8:56:57 PM PST by Flag_This (Real presidents don't bow.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 50 | View Replies]

To: SunkenCiv

Thanks for the ping. Regarding the Basque pre-Columbian explorations of America...I’ve posted this before.

Here is an excerpt from a book called “Cod”.

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140275018,00.html?sym=EXC

Cod
A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky - Author

$14.00 add to cart view cart

Book: Paperback | 5.27 x 7.12in | 304 pages | ISBN 9780140275018 | 01 Jul 1998 | Penguin

A delightful romp through history with all its economic forces laid bare, Cod is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world’s folly?
1: The Race to Codlandia

He said it must be Friday, the day he could not sell anything except servings of a fish known in Castile as pollock or in Andalusia as salt cod.

—Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote, 1605-1616

A medieval fisherman is said to have hauled up a three-foot-long cod, which was common enough at the time. And the fact that the cod could talk was not especially surprising. But what was astonishing was that it spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.

This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters.

The Basques are enigmatic. They have lived in what is now the northwest corner of Spain and a nick of the French southwest for longer than history records, and not only is the origin of their language unknown, but the origin of the people themselves remains a mystery also. According to one theory, these rosy-cheeked, dark-haired, long-nosed people were the original Iberians, driven by invaders to this mountainous corner between the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian Sierra, and the Bay of Biscay. Or they may be indigenous to this area.
....

Basques have been able to maintain this stubborn independence, despite repression and wars, because they have managed to preserve a strong economy throughout the centuries. Not only are Basques shepherds, but they are also a seafaring people, noted for their successes in commerce. During the Middle Ages, when Europeans ate great quantities of whale meat, the Basques traveled to distant unknown waters and brought back whale. They were able to travel such distances because they had found huge schools of cod and salted their catch, giving them a nutritious food supply that would not spoil on long voyages.

Basques were not the first to cure cod. Centuries earlier, the Vikings had traveled from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Canada, and it is not a coincidence that this is the exact range of the Atlantic cod.
....

Eirik colonized this inhospitable land and then tried to push on to new discoveries. But he injured his foot and had to be left behind. His son, Leifur, later known as Leif Eiriksson, sailed on to a place he called Stoneland, which was probably the rocky, barren Labrador coast. “I saw not one cartload of earth, though I landed many places,” Jacques Cartier would write of this coast six centuries later. From there, Leif’s men turned south to “Woodland” and then “Vineland.” The identity of these places is not certain. Woodland could have been Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Maine, all three of which are wooded. But in Vineland they found wild grapes, which no one else has discovered in any of these places.

The remains of a Viking camp have been found in Newfoundland. It is perhaps in that gentler land that the Vikings were greeted by inhabitants they found so violent and hostile that they deemed settlement impossible, a striking assessment to come from a people who had been regularly banished for the habit of murdering people. More than 500 years later the Beothuk tribe of Newfoundland would prevent John Cabot from exploring beyond crossbow range of his ship. The Beothuk apparently did not misjudge Europeans, since soon after Cabot, they were enslaved by the Portuguese, driven inland, hunted by the French and English, and exterminated in a matter of decades.

How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Stoneland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in the Icelandic sagas? They were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank. They could break off pieces and chew them, eating it like hardtack. Even earlier than Eirik’s day, in the ninth century, Norsemen had already established plants for processing dried cod in Iceland and Norway and were trading the surplus in northern Europe.

The Basques, unlike the Vikings, had salt, and because fish that was salted before drying lasted longer, the Basques could travel even farther than the Vikings. They had another advantage: The more durable a product, the easier it is to trade. By the year 1000, the Basques had greatly expanded the cod markets to a truly international trade that reached far from the cod’s northern habitat.

In the Mediterranean world, where there were not only salt deposits but a strong enough sun to dry sea salt, salting to preserve food was not a new idea. In preclassical times, Egyptians and Romans had salted fish and developed a thriving trade. Salted meats were popular, and Roman Gaul had been famous for salted and smoked hams. Before they turned to cod, the Basques had sometimes salted whale meat; salt whale was found to be good with peas, and the most prized part of the whale, the tongue, was also often salted.

Until the twentieth-century refrigerator, spoiled food had been a chronic curse and severely limited trade in many products, especially fish. When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.

Even dried salted cod will turn if kept long enough in hot humid weather. But for the Middle Ages it was remarkably long-lasting—a miracle comparable to the discovery of the fast-freezing process in the twentieth century, which also debuted with cod. Not only did cod last longer than other salted fish, but it tasted better too. Once dried or salted—or both—and then properly restored through soaking, this fish presents a flaky flesh that to many tastes, even in the modern age of refrigeration, is far superior to the bland white meat of fresh cod. For the poor who could rarely afford fresh fish, it was cheap, high-quality nutrition.

Catholicism gave the Basques their great opportunity. The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating “cold” foods was permitted. Because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food. The Basques were already selling whale meat to Catholics on “lean days,” which, since Friday was the day of Christ’s crucifixion, included all Fridays, the forty days of Lent, and various other days of note on the religious calendar. In total, meat was forbidden for almost half the days of the year, and those lean days eventually became salt cod days. Cod became almost a religious icon—a mythological crusader for Christian observance.

The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret. By the fifteenth century, this was no longer easy to do, because cod had become widely recognized as a highly profitable commodity and commercial interests around Europe were looking for new cod grounds. There were cod off of Iceland and in the North Sea, but the Scandinavians, who had been fishing cod in those waters for thousands of years, had not seen the Basques. The British, who had been fishing for cod well offshore since Roman times, did not run across Basque fishermen even in the fourteenth century, when British fishermen began venturing up to Icelandic waters. The Bretons, who tried to follow the Basques, began talking of a land across the sea.

In the 1480s, a conflict was brewing between Bristol merchants and the Hanseatic League. The league had been formed in thirteenth-century Lubeck to regulate trade and stand up for the interests of the merchant class in northern German towns. Hanse means “fellowship” in Middle High German. This fellowship organized town by town and spread throughout northern Europe, including London. By controlling the mouths of all the major rivers that ran north from central Europe, from the Rhine to the Vistula, the league was able to control much of European trade and especially Baltic trade. By the fourteenth century, it had chapters as far north as Iceland, as far east as Riga, south to the Ukraine, and west to Venice.

For many years, the league was seen as a positive force in northern Europe. It stood up against the abuses of monarchs, stopped piracy, dredged channels, and built lighthouses. In England, league members were called Easterlings because they came from the east, and their good reputation is reflected in the word sterling, which comes from Easterling and means “of assured value.”

But the league grew increasingly abusive of its power and ruthless in defense of trade monopolies. In 1381, mobs rose up in England and hunted down Hanseatics, killing anyone who could not say bread and cheese with an English accent.

The Hanseatics monopolized the Baltic herring trade and in the fifteenth century attempted to do the same with dried cod. By then, dried cod had become an important product in Bristol. Bristol’s well-protected but difficult-to-navigate harbor had greatly expanded as a trade center because of its location between Iceland and the Mediterranean. It had become a leading port for dried cod from Iceland and wine, especially sherry, from Spain. But in 1475, the Hanseatic League cut off Bristol merchants from buying Icelandic cod.

Thomas Croft, a wealthy Bristol customs official, trying to find a new source of cod, went into partnership with John Jay, a Bristol merchant who had what was at the time a Bristol obsession: He believed that somewhere in the Atlantic was an island called Hy-Brasil. In 1480, Jay sent his first ship in search of this island, which he hoped would offer a new fishing base for cod. In 1481, Jay and Croft outfitted two more ships, the Trinity and the George. No record exists of the result of this enterprise. Croft and Jay were as silent as the Basques. They made no announcement of the discovery of Hy-Brasil, and history has written off the voyage as a failure. But they did find enough cod so that in 1490, when the Hanseatic League offered to negotiate to reopen the Iceland trade, Croft and Jay simply weren’t interested anymore.

Where was their cod coming from? It arrived in Bristol dried, and drying cannot be done on a ship deck. Since their ships sailed out of the Bristol Channel and traveled far west of Ireland and there was no land for drying fish west of Ireland—Jay had still not found Hy-Brasil—it was suppposed that Croft and Jay were buying the fish somewhere. Since it was illegal for a customs official to engage in foreign trade, Croft was prosecuted. Claiming that he had gotten the cod far out in the Atlantic, he was acquitted without any secrets being revealed.

To the glee of the British press, a letter has recently been discovered. The letter had been sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol, while Columbus was taking bows for his discovery of America. The letter, from Bristol merchants, alleged that he knew perfectly well that they had been to America already. It is not known if Columbus ever replied. He didn’t need to. Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while explorers were telling the world. Columbus had claimed the entire new world for Spain.

Then, in 1497, five years after Columbus first stumbled across the Caribbean while searching for a westward route to the spice-producing lands of Asia, Giovanni Caboto sailed from Bristol, not in search of the Bristol secret but in the hopes of finding the route to Asia that Columbus had missed. Caboto was a Genovese who is remembered by the English name John Cabot, because he undertook this voyage for Henry VII of England. The English, being in the North, were far from the spice route and so paid exceptionally high prices for spices. Cabot reasoned correctly that the British Crown and the Bristol merchants would be willing to finance a search for a northern spice route. In June, after only thirty-five days at sea, Cabot found land, though it wasn’t Asia. It was a vast, rocky coastline that was ideal for salting and drying fish, by a sea that was teeming with cod. Cabot reported on the cod as evidence of the wealth of this new land, New Found Land, which he claimed for England. Thirty-seven years later, Jacques Cartier arrived, was credited with “discovering” the mouth of the St. Lawrence, planted a cross on the Gaspe Peninsula, and claimed it all for France. He also noted the presence of 1,000 Basque fishing vessels. But the Basques, wanting to keep a good secret, had never claimed it for anyone.

The codfish lays a thousand eggs
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she’s done.
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize
Which only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise.
—anonymous American rhyme


52 posted on 03/06/2011 10:20:44 PM PST by Kevmo (Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldn't make any sense at all. ~Ronald Reagan)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies]

To: SunkenCiv

Thanks for the ping. Regarding the Basque pre-Columbian explorations of America...I’ve posted this before.

Here is an excerpt from a book called “Cod”.

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140275018,00.html?sym=EXC

Cod
A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky - Author

$14.00 add to cart view cart

Book: Paperback | 5.27 x 7.12in | 304 pages | ISBN 9780140275018 | 01 Jul 1998 | Penguin

A delightful romp through history with all its economic forces laid bare, Cod is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world’s folly?
1: The Race to Codlandia

He said it must be Friday, the day he could not sell anything except servings of a fish known in Castile as pollock or in Andalusia as salt cod.

—Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote, 1605-1616

A medieval fisherman is said to have hauled up a three-foot-long cod, which was common enough at the time. And the fact that the cod could talk was not especially surprising. But what was astonishing was that it spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.

This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters.

The Basques are enigmatic. They have lived in what is now the northwest corner of Spain and a nick of the French southwest for longer than history records, and not only is the origin of their language unknown, but the origin of the people themselves remains a mystery also. According to one theory, these rosy-cheeked, dark-haired, long-nosed people were the original Iberians, driven by invaders to this mountainous corner between the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian Sierra, and the Bay of Biscay. Or they may be indigenous to this area.
....

Basques have been able to maintain this stubborn independence, despite repression and wars, because they have managed to preserve a strong economy throughout the centuries. Not only are Basques shepherds, but they are also a seafaring people, noted for their successes in commerce. During the Middle Ages, when Europeans ate great quantities of whale meat, the Basques traveled to distant unknown waters and brought back whale. They were able to travel such distances because they had found huge schools of cod and salted their catch, giving them a nutritious food supply that would not spoil on long voyages.

Basques were not the first to cure cod. Centuries earlier, the Vikings had traveled from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Canada, and it is not a coincidence that this is the exact range of the Atlantic cod.
....

Eirik colonized this inhospitable land and then tried to push on to new discoveries. But he injured his foot and had to be left behind. His son, Leifur, later known as Leif Eiriksson, sailed on to a place he called Stoneland, which was probably the rocky, barren Labrador coast. “I saw not one cartload of earth, though I landed many places,” Jacques Cartier would write of this coast six centuries later. From there, Leif’s men turned south to “Woodland” and then “Vineland.” The identity of these places is not certain. Woodland could have been Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Maine, all three of which are wooded. But in Vineland they found wild grapes, which no one else has discovered in any of these places.

The remains of a Viking camp have been found in Newfoundland. It is perhaps in that gentler land that the Vikings were greeted by inhabitants they found so violent and hostile that they deemed settlement impossible, a striking assessment to come from a people who had been regularly banished for the habit of murdering people. More than 500 years later the Beothuk tribe of Newfoundland would prevent John Cabot from exploring beyond crossbow range of his ship. The Beothuk apparently did not misjudge Europeans, since soon after Cabot, they were enslaved by the Portuguese, driven inland, hunted by the French and English, and exterminated in a matter of decades.

How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Stoneland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in the Icelandic sagas? They were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank. They could break off pieces and chew them, eating it like hardtack. Even earlier than Eirik’s day, in the ninth century, Norsemen had already established plants for processing dried cod in Iceland and Norway and were trading the surplus in northern Europe.

The Basques, unlike the Vikings, had salt, and because fish that was salted before drying lasted longer, the Basques could travel even farther than the Vikings. They had another advantage: The more durable a product, the easier it is to trade. By the year 1000, the Basques had greatly expanded the cod markets to a truly international trade that reached far from the cod’s northern habitat.

In the Mediterranean world, where there were not only salt deposits but a strong enough sun to dry sea salt, salting to preserve food was not a new idea. In preclassical times, Egyptians and Romans had salted fish and developed a thriving trade. Salted meats were popular, and Roman Gaul had been famous for salted and smoked hams. Before they turned to cod, the Basques had sometimes salted whale meat; salt whale was found to be good with peas, and the most prized part of the whale, the tongue, was also often salted.

Until the twentieth-century refrigerator, spoiled food had been a chronic curse and severely limited trade in many products, especially fish. When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.

Even dried salted cod will turn if kept long enough in hot humid weather. But for the Middle Ages it was remarkably long-lasting—a miracle comparable to the discovery of the fast-freezing process in the twentieth century, which also debuted with cod. Not only did cod last longer than other salted fish, but it tasted better too. Once dried or salted—or both—and then properly restored through soaking, this fish presents a flaky flesh that to many tastes, even in the modern age of refrigeration, is far superior to the bland white meat of fresh cod. For the poor who could rarely afford fresh fish, it was cheap, high-quality nutrition.

Catholicism gave the Basques their great opportunity. The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating “cold” foods was permitted. Because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food. The Basques were already selling whale meat to Catholics on “lean days,” which, since Friday was the day of Christ’s crucifixion, included all Fridays, the forty days of Lent, and various other days of note on the religious calendar. In total, meat was forbidden for almost half the days of the year, and those lean days eventually became salt cod days. Cod became almost a religious icon—a mythological crusader for Christian observance.

The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret. By the fifteenth century, this was no longer easy to do, because cod had become widely recognized as a highly profitable commodity and commercial interests around Europe were looking for new cod grounds. There were cod off of Iceland and in the North Sea, but the Scandinavians, who had been fishing cod in those waters for thousands of years, had not seen the Basques. The British, who had been fishing for cod well offshore since Roman times, did not run across Basque fishermen even in the fourteenth century, when British fishermen began venturing up to Icelandic waters. The Bretons, who tried to follow the Basques, began talking of a land across the sea.

In the 1480s, a conflict was brewing between Bristol merchants and the Hanseatic League. The league had been formed in thirteenth-century Lubeck to regulate trade and stand up for the interests of the merchant class in northern German towns. Hanse means “fellowship” in Middle High German. This fellowship organized town by town and spread throughout northern Europe, including London. By controlling the mouths of all the major rivers that ran north from central Europe, from the Rhine to the Vistula, the league was able to control much of European trade and especially Baltic trade. By the fourteenth century, it had chapters as far north as Iceland, as far east as Riga, south to the Ukraine, and west to Venice.

For many years, the league was seen as a positive force in northern Europe. It stood up against the abuses of monarchs, stopped piracy, dredged channels, and built lighthouses. In England, league members were called Easterlings because they came from the east, and their good reputation is reflected in the word sterling, which comes from Easterling and means “of assured value.”

But the league grew increasingly abusive of its power and ruthless in defense of trade monopolies. In 1381, mobs rose up in England and hunted down Hanseatics, killing anyone who could not say bread and cheese with an English accent.

The Hanseatics monopolized the Baltic herring trade and in the fifteenth century attempted to do the same with dried cod. By then, dried cod had become an important product in Bristol. Bristol’s well-protected but difficult-to-navigate harbor had greatly expanded as a trade center because of its location between Iceland and the Mediterranean. It had become a leading port for dried cod from Iceland and wine, especially sherry, from Spain. But in 1475, the Hanseatic League cut off Bristol merchants from buying Icelandic cod.

Thomas Croft, a wealthy Bristol customs official, trying to find a new source of cod, went into partnership with John Jay, a Bristol merchant who had what was at the time a Bristol obsession: He believed that somewhere in the Atlantic was an island called Hy-Brasil. In 1480, Jay sent his first ship in search of this island, which he hoped would offer a new fishing base for cod. In 1481, Jay and Croft outfitted two more ships, the Trinity and the George. No record exists of the result of this enterprise. Croft and Jay were as silent as the Basques. They made no announcement of the discovery of Hy-Brasil, and history has written off the voyage as a failure. But they did find enough cod so that in 1490, when the Hanseatic League offered to negotiate to reopen the Iceland trade, Croft and Jay simply weren’t interested anymore.

Where was their cod coming from? It arrived in Bristol dried, and drying cannot be done on a ship deck. Since their ships sailed out of the Bristol Channel and traveled far west of Ireland and there was no land for drying fish west of Ireland—Jay had still not found Hy-Brasil—it was suppposed that Croft and Jay were buying the fish somewhere. Since it was illegal for a customs official to engage in foreign trade, Croft was prosecuted. Claiming that he had gotten the cod far out in the Atlantic, he was acquitted without any secrets being revealed.

To the glee of the British press, a letter has recently been discovered. The letter had been sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol, while Columbus was taking bows for his discovery of America. The letter, from Bristol merchants, alleged that he knew perfectly well that they had been to America already. It is not known if Columbus ever replied. He didn’t need to. Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while explorers were telling the world. Columbus had claimed the entire new world for Spain.

Then, in 1497, five years after Columbus first stumbled across the Caribbean while searching for a westward route to the spice-producing lands of Asia, Giovanni Caboto sailed from Bristol, not in search of the Bristol secret but in the hopes of finding the route to Asia that Columbus had missed. Caboto was a Genovese who is remembered by the English name John Cabot, because he undertook this voyage for Henry VII of England. The English, being in the North, were far from the spice route and so paid exceptionally high prices for spices. Cabot reasoned correctly that the British Crown and the Bristol merchants would be willing to finance a search for a northern spice route. In June, after only thirty-five days at sea, Cabot found land, though it wasn’t Asia. It was a vast, rocky coastline that was ideal for salting and drying fish, by a sea that was teeming with cod. Cabot reported on the cod as evidence of the wealth of this new land, New Found Land, which he claimed for England. Thirty-seven years later, Jacques Cartier arrived, was credited with “discovering” the mouth of the St. Lawrence, planted a cross on the Gaspe Peninsula, and claimed it all for France. He also noted the presence of 1,000 Basque fishing vessels. But the Basques, wanting to keep a good secret, had never claimed it for anyone.

The codfish lays a thousand eggs
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she’s done.
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize
Which only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise.
—anonymous American rhyme


53 posted on 03/06/2011 10:20:52 PM PST by Kevmo (Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldn't make any sense at all. ~Ronald Reagan)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies]

To: blam

Interesting stuff! I have some Cherokee ancestors and I remember talk about red headed native Americans. Of course I could have acquired mine from the Dutch side of the family. :-) It shows up in my family every other generation.


54 posted on 03/07/2011 2:13:14 AM PST by Melinda in TN
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies]

To: Kevmo; Domestic Church
The Relationship Between The Basque And Ainu
55 posted on 03/07/2011 4:43:37 AM PST by blam
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 52 | View Replies]

To: KrisKrinkle
The Norse of the time knew how to work metal, so why were the Amerinds still using flint hundreds of years later?

Because the Indians used the same word for both "firestarter" and "troublemaker."

56 posted on 03/07/2011 5:24:03 AM PST by 668 - Neighbor of the Beast
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: KrisKrinkle

Perhaps more telling than the lack of metal working is why the “native” Americans did not swipe the concept of a usable wheel from the Europeans.


57 posted on 03/07/2011 5:35:45 AM PST by curmudgeonII (Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: blam

bookmark for later


58 posted on 03/07/2011 6:51:19 AM PST by wafflehouse (RE-ELECT NO ONE !)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: blam; SunkenCiv

Great stuff. One more reason why GGG is my only ‘subscription’.


59 posted on 03/07/2011 10:56:54 AM PST by ComputerGuy (HM2/USN M/3/3 Marines RVN 66-67)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ComputerGuy
Thanks.

SunkenCiv does all the work these days.

I appreciate that too.

60 posted on 03/07/2011 11:35:05 AM PST by blam
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-100 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson