of the nineteenth century these settlers obtained foundation stones for their houses by blowing boulders apart. Occasionally the dynamite didn’t go off, or the prospective home builder changed his mind, or for some other reason all that endured was the hole, somewhat like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
If Birgitta Wallace & Co. are correct we find ourselves restricted to L’Anse aux Meadows, which is either a grave disappointment or an exciting discovery, depending on your outlook. The name could mean the cove or bay with grass around it, or possibly Meadows is a corruption of Medusa—for the shoals of jellyfish found there during summer. Old sailing charts call it Méduse Bay, Jellyfish Bay. It is on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, about the latitude of London, within sight of the Canadian mainland, and near this bay are the ruins of a Norse settlement. Carbon 14 tests give a date of approximately A.D. 1000.
Not much is left. There is the ground plan of a big turf-walled house—fifty by seventy feet, with five or six rooms—and the outlines of various smaller structures including a smithy, a bathhouse, five boat sheds, a kiln, and two cooking pits.
Very little handiwork has survived, partly because there is so much acid in the soil. Almost everything made of bone or wood has disintegrated, whatever was not carried off by Eskimos, Indians, and early Newfoundland settlers. There are rusty traces that once were nails, a piece of copper with cross stripings that might have come from a belt, a whetstone, a bone needle, a bit of jasper, a stone lamp of the old Icelandic type, a steatite spindle whorl—meaning there were women in the house—and a bronze ring-headed pin. Pins of this type were used by Vikings to fasten their capes. And in the smithy was a large cracked flat-topped stone—the anvil—together with scraps of bog iron, clumps of slag, and patches of soot.
The great house burned, says Dr. Helge Ingstad, who supervised the excavation, although it is impossible to say whether this happened by accident or design.
L’Anse aux Meadows must have been an agreeable place to live. There were fields of berries and flowers, salmon in the lake, herds of caribou—many more animals and birds than there are now. The sea was alive with cod, seals, and whales, and the weather probably was mild.
Then why was Paradise abandoned? And why is there no sign of other settlements?
The answer seems to be that these people arrived too soon. Europe was not ready to support them, and with only spears, axes, knives, and swords these few colonists could not hold out against the skraelings. Whether they were killed in one overwhelming raid, whether they intermarried with the natives, or perhaps moved farther south, or at last gave up and retreated to Greenland—neither the ruins nor the old vellum manuscripts reveal.
It is certain, though, that they got this far on several occasions, and it would be exceedingly strange if they traveled no farther. Even the most conservative archaeologists admit the possibility of Viking sites on the mainland.
A lump of coal uncovered in a Greenland house strongly implies a voyage to Rhode Island. This house, which stood at the head of Ameralik fjord in the western settlement, may have belonged at one time to Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife, Gudrid. The coal was found deep in the ruins by Danish archaeologists, and there are two curious things about it. First, there was just one lump, with nothing but woodash in the fireplace. Second, it is meta-anthracite, which does not occur in Greenland, nor anyplace along the east coast of North America except in Rhode Island.
And there is an eleventh-century Norse penny, probably struck between the years 1065 and 1080, during the reign of Olaf III, which turned up at an Indian site near Bar Harbor, Maine. It’s possible, of course, that the penny was lost by a Colonial American coin collector. Or it might have been brought from Newfoundland by an acquisitive Indian. However, the obvious deduction seems best: eleventh-century Vikings either lived or traded in Maine.
What all of this means is that you are at liberty to follow the mooring holes of imagination as far as you care to. Through the Saint Lawrence waterway, for example, to the Great Lakes and beyond. After all, nobody can prove that a party of Norse adventurers did not reach the Mississippi and follow it to the Gulf, and from there sail west, following the downward coast.
The Mexican Indian legend of Quetzalcoatl says that a bearded white man appeared out of the east on a raft of snakes and later departed in the direction from which he had come, promising to return in 500 years. So you may imagine a Viking ship with a carved serpent head on the prow, with a fair-haired bearded Norwegian in command. And when five centuries had passed a bearded foreigner did arrive, not exactly commanding a raft of snakes, although many people swear he had a complement of snakes aboard. He was, of course, much darker than a Norwegian; and his name, Hernando Cortés, is not unfamiliar.
You will get a chilly reception from anthropologists if you attempt to relate Quetzalcoatl to a Viking, or any other such fabulous theory. But the alternative is to join the conservatives, in which case you will have to be satisfied with a spindle whorl, a bone needle, and some furnace slag.
KING GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS was of the opinion that building small ships was a waste of young trees, so when he wanted a new flagship to intimidate his enemies he commissioned a monster.
The Vasa was 165 feet long, 40 feet wide, 180 feet from the keel to the tip of the mainmast, and weighed 1,400 tons. She carried sixty-four bronze cannons—forty-eight jutting through a double row of gunports on either side, sixteen smaller ones on the top deck—and she was decorated like an opera house. A gigantic golden lion lunged from the prow, a golden lion’s head roared from every gunport, and both decks were painted bright red so that the sailors’ blood would scarcely be noticed. Above this majestic spectacle floated the orange-yellow and deep indigo colors of seventeenth-century Sweden.
The captain, Söfring Hansson, should have been delighted with such a command, but there were things about the ship that he did not like. He thought the Vasa was too long and narrow and the superstructure uncommonly large. He reported as much to the grand admiral of the Swedish Navy, Klas Fleming, but the admiral did not respond; or, if he did, Captain Hansson was not satisfied.
Consequently, a few weeks before the scheduled launching, Hansson invited Admiral Fleming aboard to witness a test. With the ship tied up at her mooring thirty sailors were told to run across the deck. When they did so the Vasa heeled “by the breadth of one plank.” Hansson immediately ordered them to rush across the deck in the opposite direction. This time the ship heeled by the breadth of two planks. Hansson sent them across the deck a third time and the ship heeled still farther. At this point, according to testimony given during the court-martial, Admiral Fleming ordered the demonstration stopped.
Because the meaning of Captain Hansson’s test was perfectly clear you would assume that preparations for the launching were suspended. After all, it would be insane to continue outfitting a ship for disaster.
But of course the work went right ahead.
The explanation for such a paradox is simple and it will not surprise the good student of human affairs. King Gustav had commissioned this vessel. He had selected the builder and personally had approved the plans. Gustav looked forward to the Vasa leading his fleet. Nobody wanted to tell him what was going to happen.
So, about three o’clock one Sunday afternoon in August of 1628, while thousands of Stockholm citizens crowded the wharves to wish her Godspeed, Captain Hansson gave orders to cast off. The Vasa had been loaded with 2,000 barrels of food, plenty of beer and cannonballs, 133 sailors, assorted bureaucrats and politicians, and a
