First in America
By ROBERT CONQUEST
rr ins remarkable work* has already been I full)) summarised in the dailies and elsewhere, and the reader will already know of the dramatic researches • which united its two elements—the account of the Carpini mission to the Mongols and the pre-Columban world map showing the Norse discoveries in the North Atlantic—and dated the whole MS to the early fifteenth cen- tury. The book is beautifully produced and has excellent plates. Its research is of the type that is both splendid and readable. The detail of carto- graphical tradition in the late Middle Ages is for the committed specialist, indeed, and the lay- man must skim it or take it up as an obsession. But the equally scholarly yet less intricate pieces like Mr. Skelton's dozen pages on 'The Mapping of...Greenland' can give this reviewer, at least, the sort of pleasure that makes one say, `To think that some people read novels.'
Mr. Painter, dealing with the Tartar Relation, rightly remarks that 'of these two manuscripts the Vinland Map as a document in the history of Western civilisation must be admitted as para- mount.' For the story of the Norse discoveries and attempted settlements in North America is one of the most attractive themes in all history, on several counts. The Saga of Eric the Red and the Tale of the Greenlanders, accounts at once heroic and matter-of-fact, are fascinating read- ing in their own right. But they also carry (with the other few relevant scraps of documentation from that time) one of those intellectual problems which continually provoke and tantalise the mind.
The study is, naturally, one much beset with axe-grinders. And the publication of the Vinland Map'has brought them out in the expected droves. One commentator even managed to turn it into an anti-American occasion, by arguing that only `crackpots'—mainly American chauvinists wish- ing to lengthen the history of their country— hold that the Norsemen got as far south as the present US. In reality, this is far and away the majority view among Scandinavian, British and American students alike. Professor Brondsted (whose The Vikings,f just out in Penguin, is a useful account of the whole old Norse culture) has elsewhere put their penetration as far as North Carolina and southwards. Although it is an extremely refractory point, the observations reported in the Tale of the Greenlanders on fhe length of the shortest day in the most southerly settlement is held by the most recent school of Scandinavian scholars (supported here) to indi- cate a latitude around the Chesapeake Bay.
Grapes (clearly reported in all the sources) can perhaps be brought a little farther north than their present limit in Maine by the probable warmer climate of the time. But the link of their growth with temperature is by no means straight- forward, and this point has yet to be discussed' rigorously. In any case, the hypothetical rise of a few degrees would not make Newfoundland practically snowless through the winter like Karlsefni's first base at Straumfjord' and his 'Hop' was 'a long way' farther south.
It has lately been argued that the discovery of a probable Norse site near the tip of New- foundland indicates that this area was the centre of all Norse activity on the continent. This is
* THE VINLAND MAP AND THE TARTAR RELATION.
By R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston and George 0. Painter. (Yale University Press, 105s.) t THE VIKINGS. By Johannes Brondsted. (Pen-
guin, 6s.)
an obvious non sequitur. But it is interesting that Mr. Painter believes the form of the building to indicate a period of occupation later than the time described by the sagas.
The representation of the American coast on the Vinland Map does not, of course, add any further proof than we have already of the Norse discoveries. Nor can much be made of its shape, size or latitude. Still, it is a striking demonstra- tion of early Norse knowledge of territories south and east of Greenland. And it shows, in conven- tionalised form, the division into three 'lands' which is the essential of the saga topography. The natural breaks, as can be seen in many of the earlier maps of post-Columbian exploration of the North American coast, are between Labrador-Newfoundland (thought to be one as late as 1534) and Nova Scotia, and between Nova Scotia and.Cape Cod.
The main Norse expedition, which was seeking to make. a permanent settlement, was in Ameri- can water for three years. The idea that in that time it would not have worked 1,200 to 1,500 miles down the coast from the first likely land- fall on Labrador is simply a priori prejudice. During a similar period, Eric the Red explored a thousand-odd miles of the far more inhospitable Greenland coast, including the penetration of fjords nearly a hundred miles long. Indeed, Gardar, the second discoverer of Iceland, at once made a circuit of that island -a comparable distance and with far less experience and pre- paration. And Karlsefni, the chief explorer of Vinland, was seeking a rich land already acci- dentally discovered, and had no real motive for, staying in the higher latitudes. In fact, the topo-, graphical, climatic and--to an only slightly lesser degree—botanical 'fixed points' can only be crammed northwards by a mixed batch of special
assumptions which there is no reason to accept.
If the Map as such adds little to the older records, the same is not true of the legends inscribed on it. Its attribution of the discovery to a joint expedition by Leif and Bjarni is another and probably corrupt variant of the several which have come down to us. But the long account of the visit of Bishop Eric Gnupson to Vinland in AD 1117, his remaining there at least a year, and his return. opens up fascinating pos- sibilities. No more than the bare fact of the Bishop's visit to Vinland had previously been known. We are now told that he was a 'bishop legate of the Apostolic See in Greenland and the neighbouring regions' (this was just before the establishment of a regular see in Greenland). Mr. Painter points out that missionary work as we now know it was unheard of in those cir- cumstances, and that Bishop Eric's visit to Vin- land can hardly be explained except as a tour of outlying Norse settlements. We know that trips to the American lands were made by the Green- landers at least as late as the mid-fourteenth cen- tury. Mr. Painter suggests that a handful of trading and hunting posts may well have per- sisted. This would have been thought a most unlikely speculation a few years ago. But even if We do not accept it, the present book anyhow extends the scope of the Norse contact with America, and should teach us not to under- estimate the men, who, lacking firearms, and at the far edge of a long and bold venture, only just failed to settle the new continent 500 years before the successful effort, and had to say, in the words of the dying Thorvald Ericson, 'We have won a fine and fruitful country but will hardly be allowed to enjoy at.'
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