Dispatch IX

Cyndy and I Wish All of You Fellow Vagabonds the Happiest of Holidays and the Best New Year Ever!

Careful what you learn in the history books. Here’s the story behind the true first encounters between Europeans and Native North Americans.

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Visiting L’anse aux Meadows

We’ve come to believe that many of the world’s people are selfish, mean and unkind. Thankfully that wasn’t the case in the north of Newfoundland as we made our way earlier in the week to visit L’anse aux Meadows, the place where Lief Ericsson and a band of Vikings landed at the tip of the island 1000 years ago.

But there was problem. 

While still in Nova Scotia, I had found that the Meadows’ museum closed October 1. It was now late October. Would there be anything to see? 

There was hope, though. While I was searching the website, I found an email address for the museum. Maybe we could at least gain access to the grounds. 

In just a couple of hours Dale, who apparently ran the museum, wrote back to say the grounds and trails on site are always available and that even now we’d be able to visit the original grounds and replicas of the smithy, workshop and long house (where the whole troop of the settlement had lived). Unfortunately, the reconstructed house was closed for the winter. A map of the site came along with the email. To find the site, Dale said we should take the road marked “restricted access.”

“I cannot say if [your visit] will be worth it," she added, "because everyone has different expectations. If seeing the ruins and spending a couple of hours exploring the beautiful landscape at the site of the first European settlement in North America sounds like something you would enjoy then absolutely.  I would, however, suggest checking the forecast because wind and rain at L'Anse aux Meadows is an adventure in itself, especially in the fall!!!” (Dale's exclamation points.)

This only made the trip more delicious. I returned our thanks and said we’d be there in a couple of days. Almost immediately my phone dinged again with Dale’s next email. “If there is a car at the entrance of the visitor center I am probably there.  If you knock loudly I would be happy to let you have a look at the exhibits.”

See. Nice people.

We arrived the evening before our visit in the small town of St. Anthony’s which sits at the very pinnacle of Newfoundland. A full moon struggled through fog and drizzle.  The woman at the front desk suggested the Haven Inn Restaurant up the road for dinner, the only game in the town, unless we wanted another run at Tim Horton’s. The specialty was a thick lentil soup with chunks of chicken. “Something,” as my mother used to say, “that’ll stick to your ribs.”

Food is hearty in these parts. Thick chowders, deep fried haddock or cod. Lots of meat and potatoes in every possible form, and bread. And pies. Galore. Unless you’re burning calories at a furious pace, no one was going to be described as slim on this diet. And sitting in a car much of some days, we were emphatically not burning calories.

It was dead quiet at the Haven; perhaps three people silently munched their meals, and we couldn’t seem to engage the waitress in any conversation. Must be the moon. Or maybe it was us and the glum drive.

Following dinner, we walked through a bitter wind back to our car. We had the feeling we were standing at the very end of the earth, which in some ways we were, alone.  If not for the Viking visit in the morning, and the lentil soup, we might have begun to feel a little low.

The next morning we headed south and then east for 40 minutes to L’anse aux Meadows. The road undulated and took us into a 40 mph wind, a fierce drizzle and a flat treeless land of scrub, granite rock and lichens, an almost alien place. 

As we approached the site, we could hear the crashing of the sea. Far away cliffs hundreds of feet high hung expectantly above the wicked and whipping white caps.

We found the “restricted road” and the museum parking lot, with one lone car. The wind made it feel like 29 degrees as we stepped outside, and for the first time Cyn and I made use of the cold weather gear we had been lugging on our backs since Pittsburgh. I could only imagine what this place must look like in February. No wonder the Vikings were also called bezerkers. 

Around the bend behind a high hill, the big wooden door of the museum awaited us. I hammered on it as Dale said we should, feeling a little like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. Frau Brucher, I presume? It took a few minutes, but just when we had given up, the door opened. Dale greeted us warmly, but said she had errands to run. Ethan, however, a tall, roughly bearded young man from St. Edward's Island (the land of Arcadia -- see Dispatch VII), who knew everything about L’Anse aux Meadows, would be available to show us around. 

He did, and it was a feast.

I asked Ethan how he came to be up in no man’s land. He had worked in Ottawa after college, he said, sitting at a desk, his diploma in hand while running various kinds of numbers for the Canadian government. But he just couldn’t handle the tedium. He’d rather be in a place where he could explore the outdoors, enjoy more time in wild places rather than wild times in otherwise boring places.

Being a wanderer, he loved the idea of our trip. Cyn and I would hear this time and again. “Really?” People would say. “Some day I’m going to do that.” Questions usually followed. “How long? How will you get around if you’re not traveling by jet? What about languages? Can you speak a lot of them? Clothing? Family?” We would always answer as best we could, which often meant we didn’t have straight answers. It always ended with, “That’s going to be amazing (or awesome or crazy!)”

“Come join us,” was usually our reply. And in many ways, many of you have, by signing onto these dispatches. Thank you.

But back to Vikings...

Vikings visit North America

One thousand years ago (see previous Dispatch), Lief Eriksson, the son of Erik the Red, who was in turn the son of a Norse raider named Thorvald Asvaldsson, took a contingent of about 30 Norse seafarers and sailed west from their settlement in Greenland along the coast of Baffin Island (now northern Canada), and bumped along Labrador until they landed at the tip of the place where Cyndy and I were now standing.

The Norsemen liked the look of the place, but they hadn’t come to settle down. This was a working crew and their job was to set up a base for trade and exploration. 

Given the family’s checkered past, it seems Leif and his line suffered from rather severe social shortcomings and not a few anger issues. Thorvald, Leif’s grandfather, had departed Norway when he was convicted of manslaughter, and headed to Iceland where he built a successful settlement that still stands. Around 980 AD, Thorvald’s son, Eric the Red left Iceland behind for the same reason his father high-tailed it out of Norway, and, in a masterful bit of marketing, convinced Norse settlers to join him in Greenland (where there is not a bit of green). 

Leif, Erik’s son, grew up in Greenland, but being apparently as given to wandering as his father and grandfather, eventually found North America, a place he called Vinland (Wineland) because of the grapes they found there. (A thousand years ago, all of the North Atlantic was less cold, and thus there may have been grapes, though there are none to be found now. This multi-century warming trend is one reason the Norse were able to find and survive the settlements they both created and raided throughout Europe and the North.)

We know of all of these details and family adventures because a series of historical sagas were written in the 1200s that describe the escapades of Norse adventurers and Vikings (viking being the old Norse word for raider). Their accuracy isn’t beyond dispute, but they are unusually detailed, which gives the tales more credence. 

There’s the first encounter with Native Americans, for example, where the Norse crossed paths with ancestors of the Innu, Beothuk and Miꞌkmaq peoples. (The Norse didn’t differentiate between tribes and called all of the local people they met “Skraelings.”) Some of these Native Americans were paleoeskimos that had migrated from the north from Asia across the Bering Straits. Others were descended from people who had lived in Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. They were hearty wanderers too, which made them every bit the match of Eriksson’s seafaring Norsemen. 

When the two cultures met, each must have felt as though aliens from Tralfamador had dropped out of the sky. “... Early one morning … [the Norse] saw many skin boats … The strangers (Native Americans) rowed towards them and stared at them in amazement… The men were dark in complexion, grim-looking and with unruly hair on their heads. Their eyes were big and their faces broad. They remained there for awhile and stared in astonishment. Then they road off south around a point.”

Another meeting led to a failed attempt at trade. “…Then the Skraelings opened their packs which contained furs and sables and pelts of all kinds, and offered to trade them, preferably for weapons; but Karlsefni (a Norseman) forbade his men to sell arms.” (So much for open-handed intercultural exchange.)

Whether the issues were a lack of trust, language, land, grapes or social ineptitude, Viking life in North American went poorly. Native Americans apparently didn’t care much for the red hairs. Leif left a contingent behind, but within a few years the strange looking white men packed up their Nordic wears and headed back to verdant Greenland. 

Still, the evidence of their visit remains, and after Ethan answered our questions, showed us around the museum's replicas of Viking ships, and even let us sit and watch the excellent documentary about the Meadow in the screening room all by ourselves, it was time to venture into the gusty wind to get a taste of what life was like in the land that has inspired stories like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.

I think the pictures say it all…

After rambling around the grounds like wide-eyed children, we ended the afternoon hiking up the the knoll above the museum to the sculpture re-enacting the arrival of the Norse, and did some re-enacting of our own.

The wind and waves cracked like great whips, and we imagined the view of a handful of battered Viking ships making their way into this rocky harbor. There they stood in this entirely unknown place, blown there by nothing more than their wooden ships, blood-red linen sails and an irresolvable case of wanderlust — this thing that drives the human race forward, over unknown horizons, for better or worse.

Before we departed, we stood on the knoll to take in the wildness, feeling, just a bit like Viking wanderers ourselves. And in my case, like a boy who had finally satisfied his long-harbored curiosity,

Then it was time to move on. 

This time to Bona Vista, 600 miles away to the northeastern side of the big island; a place known for its rugged beauty, roaming icebergs and breaching whales. The next morning was clear and radiant, and we saw a more appealing side of St. Anthony’s as we waved good-bye.

It would take us two days more to make Bona Vista, retracing some of our trip back down the Viking Trail, past the resolute edifice of Gros Morne and then inland to what we had been told was the windiest place in all of North America. 

Meanwhile ...

We cracked on!

Hoping you are too as we enter 2022 to uncover more adventures!

All the best!

C- Squared

This is a series about Cyndy and Chip’s Vagabond Adventure - our journey to explore all seven continents, all seven seas and 100+ countries by land and sea, never traveling by jet. COVID has forced us to begin North America, not a bad start, but soon we'll be heading overseas. What will the world be like following a global pandemic? What people will we meet? What cultures, places, languages and music will broaden us? Are we being pulled apart or are we coming together? We’ll find out. Come along with us on our #vagabondadventure. And tell us what you know and what you have learned in the parts of the world where you live.