Canadians at Table. Dorothy Duncan

groups found, as well: “They touched the dew with their hands and they thought they had never known anything so sweet…. Every brook was full of fish. They made pits where the land met high-watermark, and where the tide ebbed there were halibut in the pits. There was a great quantity of animals of all sorts in the woods…. There was no want of salmon either in the river or the lake — salmon bigger than anything they had ever seen before…. Fields of self sewn wheat grew there.” One of the crew, a German called Tyrker who was also known as Leif’s foster father, explored the area and found what he believed to be vines and grapes, something he said he recognized from his homeland in Europe. Many historians and botanists have questioned his description and his judgment. Were these really grapes, or could they have been another “wine berry,” such as wild currants, gooseberries, raspberries, squash-berries, or cloudberries?[6]

      The sagas tell us that Eiriksson’s group built huts and wintered there, and as there was no frost that year, their cattle browsed outdoors. In the spring, they took a load of wood (probably a combination of driftwood from the shore and timber cut from the forest) home to Greenland, along with the unexpected and incredible stories they had to tell about what they had found. The first arrivals were soon followed by other vessels loaded with passengers. One of the expeditions brought 160 men, in addition to women and livestock.[7]

      Archaeologists and historians have now confirmed that Vinland (or Vineland), one of the communities described in the sagas, was at L’Anse aux Meadows. The settlement has been uncovered at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula in western Newfoundland, which proves the Men from the North were probably the first Europeans to realize, as early as the year 1000 AD, that North America existed. Close to one hundred men, women, and children lived at the settlement for nearly three decades while they tended their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats, spun and wove clothing from the fleece, fished the rivers and the ocean (cod bones, seal bones, and whale bones have been found in the excavations), foraged for fruit and herbs in the forest, and developed gardens with the vegetables and herbs from home that they trusted to grow and flourish in that climate. These would have included turnips, carrots, cabbages, beans, peas, onions, and garlic. Meanwhile, they continued to explore the eastern shores of present-day Canada, for North American butternuts have been found at the site, although their known range is farther south in what is now New Brunswick. As there are similar European species, the Norse were familiar with butternuts and considered them a delicacy. As well, growing in the same area one can find wild grapes known today as riverbank grapes. Both of these can be harvested in late August and would have been of great value in Greenland.[8]

      The Norse men and women constructed many buildings of timber frame covered with turf; they had earthen floors, low doors in the walls, and smoke holes running along the roof ridge. There were several dwellings with benches along the walls that were used for sitting or reclining during the day and sleeping at night. Remnants of long fires (like those in the homeland) that burned in the centre of the floor to provide for cooking, heating, and light have been found. They also developed small slate-lined compartments in the earthen floors next to the fireplaces that could be used as ember pits, into which the embers were swept at night and covered with ashes, making it unnecessary to light another fire in the morning to cook the first meal of the day. This technique, again, is a well-known feature of larger homes in Iceland and Greenland.[9] Ancient cairns have been discovered, which were aligned in such a way that they acted like sundials for telling time. As they could be seen from the dwellings, they would have indicated times for meals.[10]

      The dwellings differed in size and comfort, suggesting there was probably a class structure in the community that may have ranged from chieftain to slave.[11] As the years went by and the settlement grew, it is obvious that some of the existing buildings had additions added to accommodate new arrivals or larger families. Four workshops and a smithy confirm that ship repairs and blacksmithing were regular skills and trades carried out by the craftsmen in the community. Bog iron was smelted in the smithy, a skill not known at that time to the Native people.

      The sagas describe the encounters between the newcomers and the Native people, whom they called Skraelings. Some of the encounters were peaceful, while they bartered and traded, but others were fierce encounters, leading to loss of life on both sides.[12] Such conditions may have contributed to the ultimate decision of the Norsemen to leave the rich resources they had found rather than live in a continual state of anxiety.

      These courageous and enterprising explorers eventually returned home with their final cargoes of wood, taking with them their memories and their stories of a rich and fertile country that became the foundation for the famous sagas. Two worlds had met and parted. It would be almost five hundred years before they would meet again, and almost a thousand years before extensive archaeological research proved that the ancient folklore and legends of the countries bordering the North Atlantic were not fiction but fact.[13]

      CHAPTER THREE

      The Sea Was Covered with Fish

      SPICES WERE AMONG THE MOST COVETED OF trade goods to the fifteenth-century merchants of Europe. At that point in the world’s history, spices such as pepper, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and cinnamon were often as valuable as gold. They were brought overland by camel caravans from the spice-rich areas of India and the Orient to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. This kind of enterprise was always dangerous and expensive, and merchants were both eager to expand the trade and willing to finance increasingly ambitious ventures to reach the spices by alternative routes. Why not sail west to the lands where they grew rather than take the long and treacherous overland route to the east? So began a series of voyages of discovery during which those early explorers who risked their lives and fortunes by sailing west found instead a vast new land mass that stood in their way — or was it perhaps an unknown and unexpected segment of a shoreline of either India or China? Hence, they gave the name “Indians” to those members of the First Nations whom they met when they landed.

      One of those explorers was Giovanni Caboto, a Genoese native and Venetian citizen with long experience in the eastern spice trade. Sailing under an English banner, he is credited with “discovering” the Grand Banks in 1497. Like so many other explorers, he was attempting to find the riches of the Orient, but instead returned to England to report to the Bristol merchants who had hired him and to King Henry VII “that the sea was covered with fish which could be caught not merely by nets, but with weighted baskets lowered into the water.”[1]

      With this information, the merchants and traders of Bristol and Devon realized they no longer needed to rely on importing vast quantities of fish from Iceland to satisfy their customers. They turned their attention to this new and unexpected source of cod, which was so plentiful that it became known as the “Beef of the Sea” and was soon synonymous with the word fish. The soft gelatinous flesh of the cod dried quickly and could be stored for long periods without refrigeration, filling an economic need at the time in the markets of Europe. When those first fishing vessels arrived, the crews would fish for cod from the rail of their ships with hand-held lines and then take the catch ashore to Cabot’s New Founde Lande, where it was cleaned, salted, and spread to dry. After that it was loaded in the ship’s hold and transported home to England to be sold at the markets there.

      Seeing Britain’s success, other countries quickly followed suit, and fishing fleets from Portugal, Spain, and France struggled with England — both physically and politically — for supremacy in the area and control of this resource. It was the French fishermen who introduced a different method of fishing and preserving the catch called “greenfishing.” Instead of drying the fish on shore, the fishermen gutted and salted the catch before stowing it in the ship’s hold. Months later, when the vessel returned home, the fish were still moist or “green.” The crews that used this method also fished from the deck with hand-held lines weighted with lead and protected from the spray and wind with small screens attached to the sides of the ship. When the hold was full, the greenfish (salted and wet) were taken back to France to be dried and sold.

      Early European explorers described the codfish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as so plentiful that they could be caught in weighted baskets lowered