Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester

there is a further irony, a further puzzle. The ink on the map is now fading to the point of near invisibility, despite Yale’s best efforts at conservation. Just why such deterioration might suddenly accelerate, nine hundred years after the map was supposedly drawn, remains unexplained. If this is all an elaborate ruse, then this fading has produced an ironic coda to the story: just like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the Vinland Map seems to be drifting away into nothingness.

      However, despite all the brouhaha surrounding Yale’s document, the finding in Scandinavian libraries of a series of other (and this time undoubtedly genuine) charts, and a further discovery in 1960 that was brought about by what those maps had drawn onto them, finally dashed any further claim for the primacy of Columbus. The other maps were all fair copies of a much less sensational, but in the end far more useful document that is known today as the Skálholt Map. It was drawn in Iceland in 1570 by a schoolmaster named Sigurd Stefansson, simply as an exercise to show from his readings of a variety of Icelandic texts just where the Nordic explorers and traders had landed on the various shores of the North Atlantic Ocean.

      The original is long gone; but the copies that exist all show the same thing: an Atlantic - here called Mare Glaciale, the icebound sea, with islands such as the Faroes, Iceland, Shetland, and Orkney all in their more or less accurate relative positions - bordered by an almost wholly connected skein of landmasses. There was Norway, of course; then Gronlandia, then Helleland, Markland and Skralingeland (which Nordic scholars suggest — as flagstone-land, forest-land, and land-of-the savages - to be portions of Labrador); and then finally, jutting from the southwest of the chart, a slender, north-pointing peninsula — marked simply as Promonterium Vinlandiae, the Peninsula of Vinland.

      This was the clue that concluded a decades-long search. Ever since the Icelandic sagas had mentioned Vinland, Americans, and Canadians, mainly in the north-east, had been scouring their properties and their neighbourhoods for anything that might suggest a one-time Norse settlement — for who would not wish to know that European feet had been placed first on their front garden, or that Nordic sailors had walked first on their own village beach? Runestones - all of them fakes - popped up in unlikely places like Minnesota and Oklahoma; a Nordic statue was uncovered beside Thoreau’s Merrimack River; the unusual colour and height of the Narragansett Indians of Rhode Island was bruited as evidence that Norsemen had once set up a colony near Providence; and a wealthy Harvard chemistry professor named Eben Horsford¹³ claimed to have found the site of Leif Eriksson’s house in Cambridge, no less, beside a traffic light near Mount Auburn Hospital. He, along with a violinist named Ole Bull, raised funds to have a statue raised to the Nordic settler on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It still stands.

      Despite all this nonsense, in the mid-1950s a Norwegian scholar of Viking history, Helge Ingstad, felt certain from his studies of the Skálholt Map that he knew where Leif Eriksson’s Vinland must have been. It was, he surmised, in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, and somewhere on a great north-running peninsula, under the mountains of the Long Range, which lies on the island’s western side. Armed with this educated hunch, he began to make annual excursions to Canada, asking repeated questions of villagers and farmers in the outports between the town of Stephenville Crossing and the tiny inlets nearly three hundred miles north, on the shores of the Strait of Belle Isle.

      One day in 1960, he and his daughter Benedicte sailed on their small yacht up to the tiny settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows, at the very northern tip of the island. There Ingstad met a local fisherman, George Decker, and asked him the question he felt he had asked a thousand times. Were there by any chance any ruins nearby, which might have been from a settlement of Norsemen?

      Decker replied with a studied casualness. “Yeah, I know where there are some old ruins. Follow me.” He took a stunned Ingstad over a field of cloudberries, wild iris, and gale-stunted pines, to where there were stood almost a dozen very large grass-covered mounds, all set on a slight slope that ran down to Epaves Bay. Decker watched as his visitor gulped with amazement. He was delighted that the Norwegian was so astonished, he said later, but often wondered to himself why it had taken outsiders so long to get around to asking.

      In that instant, the world - at least, the world of archaeologists — shifted on its axis. Once the diggings began history was rewritten, profoundly, and at a stroke. L’Anse aux Meadows — the words are a linguistic contortion of the French for The Bay of the Jellyfish — became in short order the most famous archaeological site in North America. With barely a cirrus cloud of doubt, this spot is now acknowledged as the base of operations for the Norsemen who settled and lived and created homes for themselves on the far side of the sea. Quite possibly - quite probably, in fact - L’Anse aux Meadows was the Vinland settlement itself. Leif Eriksson, his kin and his kith, provably and finally, had now joined that select group of men and women who had been first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The excavations continued. They were conducted by Ingstad and his wife over the next seven years, the pair reburying the site each winter, for protection against both the ferocious snowstorms and the destructive grinding of icebergs washed up on the beach.

      Formal public announcement of the find was made in the pages of the National Geographic magazine in November 1964. It was revealed that the Norsemen had built themselves a total of three large stone-and-sod houses and five workshops, one of which clearly was a smithy. Iron nails had been found, and spindles, and a copper pin used for decoration. Specialists working with the University of Toronto’s main subatomic particle accelerator and at the Radiological Dating Laboratory in Trondheim both brought the very latest technologies to bear on the various samples - mainly charcoal from the smithy furnace - and came up with agreement that everything at L’Anse aux Meadows had been created between 975 and 1020. The sagas’ date for the Vinland settlement — depending how the stories were read — was 1002. It was like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, snapping itself neatly into place, locked solid.

      The excavations continued until 1976, after the Canadian parks service had taken over from the then quite elderly Ingstads. They found cooking pits, bathhouses, and an enclosure for keeping cattle. Rotted remains of butternuts were also discovered - and since agricultural climatologists are certain that in the first millennium, no butternut tree could have grown north of New Brunswick, it is assumed that the visitors must have taken their knarrer and penetrated even farther south. It is also assumed that they sailed south-westwards from their camp, crossed the notoriously bumpy waters of the St Lawrence estuary to the American continent, eventually landing on Gaspé, or on Cape Breton Island, and then heading either upriver or even overland to seek richer pastures and tastier crops. (Since New Brunswick also is the northerly limit for the appearance of wild grapes, it offers some additional credence to the Norse use of the name Vinland—Wine Land.)

      A second site (smaller in extent than L’Anse aux Meadows) may have been found more recently: archaeologists working on the southern end of Baffin Island in 2000 say that the discovery of sod-and-stone walls, a whalebone spade, and a crude form of a house drainage system all suggest the work of Norsemen. Rival scholars deride this as wishful thinking and insist it is no more than an indication of the gathering sophistication of the palaeoInuit of the Dorset culture who are known to have occupied this corner of the Canadian subarctic. Those who support the Norse claim say it suggests their Viking-inspired knarrer were shuttling between sites in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Hudson Bay islands for far longer than imagined, and that the notion that all the Europeans scuttled back to Greenland or Norway and left Canada alone for centuries is myopic and wrong-headed.

      But one further intriguing morsel of history remains. In 1004 a child was born in Vinland. It was a boy, named Snorri, the child of Gudrid and Thorfin Karlsefni. According to an Icelandic custom that continues to this day, the lad was given a surname derived from his father’s first name, thus Snorri Thorfinsson. He was, undoubtedly, the first European child to be born on the American continent. Since he travelled back to Greenland with his parents if and when the L’Anse aux Meadows outpost was eventually closed down, in around 1008, he most probably died there, or in Europe - unaware to the last that he would in time come to be remembered as Canada’s first European native son.

      8. REPUTATIONS