Greenland and
the Exploration
of North America,
ca. A.D. 1000-1500
by Kirsten A. Seaver
Posted on 09/03/2020 7:19:41 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
It is now generally accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland across the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent almost a thousand years ago, but what happened in this vast area during the next five hundred years has long been a source of disagreement among scholars. Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait.
The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields of inquiry: the history of medieval Greenland and its connections with the Norse discovery of North America, and fifteenth-century British maritime history and pre-colonial voyages to North America, including that of John Cabot. In order to evaluate the situation in Norse Greenland at the end of the fifteenth century (when documented English and Portuguese voyages of northern exploration began), the author follows the colony’s development -- its domestic economy and foreign trade and its cultural and ecclesiastical affinities -- from its inception in the tenth century. In the process, she looks critically at commonly held views that have gone unchallenged until now.
Among the questions about which the author sets forth new evidence and conclusions are: the extent to which Greenlanders explored and exploited North America after Leif Eriksson, the reasons for the baffling disappearance of the Norse settlement in Greenland, the connection between their disappearance and the beginning of the voyages of exploration that began around A.D. 1500, the routes by which information concerning previous voyages traveled, the history before Cabot of the advance of English fishing fleets from Icelandic waters to the coasts of Labrador, and the influence of the roman Catholic Church on Norse Greenland.
(Excerpt) Read more at sup.org ...
Greenland and
the Exploration
of North America,
ca. A.D. 1000-1500
by Kirsten A. Seaver
There’s no reason why Vikings could not have sailed much further south of Vinland; why stay in the frozen north, when there were undoubtedly warmer lands further on?
Well, Vinland wasn’t the frozen north at that time. That’s why they called it “Wine-land”, because grapes were growing in Northern latitudes during that time.
Did they teach the native northern tribes about long houses and fort walls? I think they traveled further inland than they are given credit for. (Before the Italian/Spanish and English arrived.)Hmmmmmmm? Did native tribes with blue eyes exist?
More than likely they did. A square-rigged ship doesn't tack into the wind very well. Viking long ships and their later, beamy trade vessels were square rigged. Often times you have to change latitudes to pick up prevailing winds going in the opposite general directions. That would entail sailing along the coastline -- perhaps during a change of season -- looking for a consistent shift in the winds.
There's another factor to consider... ship maintenance. Clinker-built hulls have a shit-ton of iron nails holding them together to create those graceful curves. That's a lot of stress and as a ship hogs (flexes) in the waves a lot of nails are going to pop & be lost. The Vikings would need to put their ships up on a sandy beach and go looking for bog iron. Improvise a hearth to 'cook' the iron-bearing rock, then hammer out new nails. Very time consuming and labor intensive. Archeologists are using satellite technology and they think they've found one down the coastline at Point Rosse.
So you have to think in terms of what would be required to sail back & forth and other limiting factors that the Norse would need to take into account.
You have to remember what Europe was like a thousand years ago.
Most of the masses were illiterate, and information was a very valuable and well guarded commodity.
If you discover new routes to new lands, you didn’t climb up and shout it from the mountain top and proclaim yourself heroic. You kept it to the vest like you were holding aces.
Whether it be the vatican, clandestine societies, or even lords/monarchs/dynasties, you wanted to make sure that others were not going to get a jump on your new worlds. Information in general was well kept, and hard to disseminate even if you wanted to. If you had charts and maps that others didn’t, you probably felt like you were on top of the world. Pun intended. Even crusades to the holy land were treated like a competitive race for glory. You’re status in nobility could be vaunted with new discoveries so you didn’t give away trade secrets.
/bingo
I’ve read that the reason the Greenland colony failed was due to increasingly colder seasons. This yielded shorter and shorter growing seasons and the colony couldn’t sustain itself on fishing alone. It was finally abandoned at about the same time that Columbus was getting organized.
Maybe. The Viking longhouses and the Native American longhouses are constructed quite a bit differently, but that could just be a case of a group with less sophisticated construction techniques making a copy of something and having to make adaptations to the design to accomplish it.
There are also tribes of Pacific indians that build longhouses too, but they actually use timber, which is closer to the Viking style, even though we can be quite certain they had no contact with the Vikings. So who knows?
There were reports of blue-eyed, even blonde indians, for example, in the Mandan tribe. But modern genetics suggests that the genes for blue eyes and blonde hair originated in Siberia, which is where we think the ancestors of Native Americans departed the Old World from. So did those genes come from European contact or were they just a very rare recessive trait that the indians always carried with them, but had mostly been “bred out” by the time we ran into them? Or did the indians get them from even older Europeans that came here long before the Vikings?
So that's where I got 'em.
Back when Greenland was...green!
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