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“GENERATIONS OF OFTEN FAR-FETCHED SPECULATION WERE FINALLY RESOLVED IN THE 1960S WITH THE LOCATION AND EXCAVATION OF L’ANSE AUX


MEADOWS. INITIAL WORK BY ANNE STINE AND HELGE INGSTAD UNCOVERED FOUNDATIONS OF THREE LARGE HALLS CLOSELY RESEMBLING 11TH


CENTURY TURF-COVERED ICELAND AND


GREENLAND STRUCTURES. IN ALL THE WORK REVEALED EIGHT HOUSES, FOUR WORKSHOPS AND AN IRON FORGE, WITH 50 OR SO IRON ARTIFACTS IN NORSE STYLE.”


fleet of canoes. In the ensuing fight, an arrow killed Thorvald. (A less reliable saga says that he was killed on a later voyage by a Uniped, the mythical one-legged creature borrowed from John Mandeville’s medieval travel book.) This episode of massacre and battle is the first recorded Contact of European and American aborigine. The identity of the Skrellings is still un-


settled. Speculation runs from Inuit of the Dorset culture or later, to Innu (Algonquian Indians) to Beothuck,


forerunners of the


Mi’kmaq. It’s possible that the Norse encoun- tered several different groups. But, since most of the Norse activity was in Beothuck terri- tory, it’s a fair presumption that this tribe was the main player in the Greenlander saga. The excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows


have yielded fairly sparse evidence of Native contact. But, as we shall see, the saga’s descrip- tion of initial contact with the Skrellings fits later accounts of Beothuck seasonal migration.


NORSE VERSUS SKRELLING T


he explorations, by now almost a monopoly of Eric the Red’s extend- ed family, continued four years later. This expedition was led by Thorfinn


Karlsevni, who had married Leif ’s widowed sister-in-law. At their base at Leif ’s village, Karlsevni’s wife Gudrid gave birth to Snorri, the first European child born in America. A second family on the trip included Eric’s il- legitimate daughter Freydis. Moving southward to a harbor better


suited to livestock, the settlers encountered a group of Skrellings in skin boats. The first meeting was friendly. In the words of the sagas, as translated by the


Norwegian–American scholar Einar Haugen: Early one morning, as they were looking


around, they caught sight of a great many skin-covered boats. The men in the boats were waving wooden sticks at the ships, and they were waving them in a sunwise direction. It sounded very much as if they were threshing grain. Then Karlsevni exclaimed, “What can this mean?”


Snorri Thorbrandson answered, “It may


be that this is a signal of peace, so let us take a white shield and lift it up before them.” So they did, while the others rowed up to


them, gazed at them with astonishment, and then went on land. They were dark men and ugly, with unkempt hair on their heads. They had large eyes and broad cheeks. After they had stayed a while and marveled, they rowed off to the south of the cape.


After a mild winter in which the cattle


prospered, the Skrellings came again in fleets of boats. This pattern fits the seasonal move- ment of the Beothuck, described centuries lat- er. At the end of the Fall, they would withdraw from the coastal region and move inland to hunt caribou, returning to the fishing grounds of the shore in the Spring. With the return of the Skrellings, the Norse


started to trade in earnest. The Norse enter- tained the Natives with swigs of their cows’ milk and gave them strips of red cloth. Dyed cloth, the redder the better, later became a sta- ple of Native trade, but the Skrellings craved the milk above all. According to Haugen’s translation of the


Greenland Saga, “Karlsevni asked the women to carry out vessels of milk and other dairy products. At once the savages wanted to buy this and nothing else. So the trading turned out in this way, that the savages carried their purchases away in their stomachs, while Karlsevni and his men had possession of their furs.” The Norse refused to sell their spears and


swords, which the Skrellings asked for, a wise decision it quickly turned out. The trading atmosphere suddenly soured when the Norse- men’s bull ran out of the woods, bellowing loudly and frightening away the visitors. The Skrellings returned in a hostile mood


three weeks later. Under a shower of arrows and a strange projectile, which Samuel Eliot Morison speculates was a blown-up moose bladder, the Norsemen began to panic. A true scion of her father Eric the Red, Freydis taunted the men for their cowardice; then, picking up a sword from a fallen Norseman,


she stepped to the front, “bared her breasts, slapped them with a sword and screamed like a hellcat.” The sight so startled the Skrellings that they broke off the attack. But the threat of hostile Natives caused the Norse to evacuate and head home. Says the saga, “Karlsevni and his men were


now convinced that even though the country was richly endowed by nature, they would always live in dread and turmoil because of the enmity of those who lived there before. So they made ready to break up and return to their own country.” On the way back, Karlsevni’s crew inau-


gurated another tradition of Contact. They kidnapped two Native boys from Markland and brought them to Greenland for baptism and lessons in Norse. In spite of this linguistic resource, Native


contact wasn’t a factor in the third expedi- tion. But the formidable Freydis certainly was. In the summer of 1014, she returned to her half-brother’s outpost in partnership with a group from Norway, led by two broth- ers Helgi and Finnbogi. Reluctant to split the profits, she nagged her husband into killing the brothers and their crew and seizing their ship. She allegedly dispatched their women with her own hands. When she returned home, Leif uncovered the murders and ban- ished her from his lands. This crime ended the recorded history of


the Norse voyages to America. In addition to the shadow cast by Freydis, possible changes in trading patterns and diminished profitabil- ity, Morison speculates that the ventures were ultimately discouraged by the hostility of the Skrellings and their effective surprise attacks. “So Skoal! to the Skrellings,” he concludes.


“They did well to run the white men out of their territory, for by so doing they enjoyed American isolation for almost five hundred years.” X


James Ring Adams is senior historian at the National Museum of the American Indian and managing editor of American Indian magazine.


SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 41


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