Crusader Gold photo essay: L’Anse aux Meadows
David Gibbins
Two chapters in my novel Crusader Gold are set at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland. L’Anse aux Meadows is the site of one of the most extraordinary archaeological finds ever made – the only Viking settlement to be discovered in North America. It was located in 1960 by the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine Ingstad, who followed geographical clues in the Norse sagas to 'Vinland', a place discovered by the Vikings under Leif Eriksson around AD 1000. The Ingstads excavated the site during the 1960s, and further excavations were carried out by Parks Canada in the 1970s. Today, L’Anse aux Meadows is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is beautifully maintained by Parks Canada, who manage an interpretative centre and a superbly reconstructed Viking longhouse next to the site. Of all the archaeological sites I have studied around the world, L’Anse aux Meadows is one of the most evocative – the site of the earliest known European foothold in the Americas, and a place where the seascape and lie of the land have changed little in a thousand years. I took these pictures at L’Anse aux Meadows in early June 2006.
A reconstructed sod longhouse at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a few metres from the site where three Viking longhouses of the early 11th century were excavated. For several seasons, at least, this settlement housed a thriving community of men, women and children, who may have intended to settle permanently. But then madness overcame them. The Viking sagas tell us of a terrible event that took place at Leifsbuðir, ‘Leif’s Houses’, almost certainly this place. The settlement was divided into Norse Greenlanders and Icelanders, each with their own ship and longhouse. A Greenlander woman named Freydis conceived an all-consuming hatred for the Icelanders, and one dark night had them all murdered, hacking the women to death herself. This deed – if it truly happened - may have cast a spell over the place, in the minds of the Vikings; there is no evidence from the sagas or from archaeology that the Norse attempted any further settlement in ‘Vinland.’
A view of L’Anse aux Meadows looking north, towards Great Sacred Isle and Small Sacred Isle. The Viking settlement lay in the middle foreground about a kilometre away from where I am standing, on the grassy meadow beside the little bay that opens out to the west. (‘L’Anse aux Meadows’, ‘Bay of the Meadows’, may refer to this spot, though it has also been suggested that ‘Meadows’ is an anglicisation of ‘Méduse’, the French for jellyfish). The reconstructed longhouse and other building can just be seen. This may seem a bleak place to live, with sea ice and fog hemming it in for most of the year; but for the Vikings it would have been homely, familiar from Greenland and Iceland and Norway. They chose this spot because a stream ran through it, providing fresh water and exposing deposits of bog iron which they smelted to make rivets for boat repair. The bay had abundant fish, the meadows produced berries and other edible plants and the woods that once came close provided game. However, there is no evidence that the Vikings brought cows here for pasturage, the traditional mainstay of their economy, and the long winters may have put too much strain on survival – both physical and psychological.
These two cairns on a ridge above L’Anse aux Meadows may date from the Viking period. I have seen cairns like this in many places on the shores of the Arctic, some of them set up by Inuit hunters – the famous Inukshuk sculptures – but others were undoubtedly built by Scandinavian and European explorers, from as early as the 10th century when the Vikings first settled Greenland. Offshore you can see Great Sacred Island, which figures prominently in my novel. The bay is called Épaves Bay, Shipwrecks bay, for good reason: on the foreshore of the island is the massive rusting hulk of a wreck, one of many in these waters. My grandfather sailed within sight of this island in December 1941, when his wartime convoy out of Halifax was dispersed in a terrible storm and his ship had to return around the northern tip of Newfoundland.
At L’Anse aux Meadows I was told of a local legend of a ‘brown man’, a terrifying bogeyman who comes at night. Later I stood beside this peaty pool, on a ridge above the site with Great Sacred Isle in the background, and realized that much of the low-lying land around me was peat bog. In Europe, many ‘bog bodies’ have been discovered, well-preserved but black and brown with peat. Could the legend of the ‘brown man’ have arisen from the discovery of a bog body at L’Anse aux Meadows? Many of the European bog bodies had been bludgeoned or strangled, a macabre ritual of sacrifice during the Iron Age and medieval periods. Could the madness that led to Freydis’ murderous rampage at Leifsbuðir have spawned other dark deeds as well, perhaps during a desperate final winter before the settlement was abandoned?
In
the Greenlanders’ Saga,
Thorvold sails east and north of Leifsbuðir and then is driven ashore by
a storm. After repairing their ship his men set up the broken keel on a
headland as a waymarker, and call the place Kjalarnes, ‘Keel Cape.’
This is my attempt to recreate the scene, on a rocky spur just east of
L’Anse aux Meadows. As I hiked up the slope and over the promontory, I
came to another spot that puts this remote corner of the world on the
historical map – the place where James Cook stood when he
surveyed this coast in 1763. Over the years I have stood in Cook’s
footsteps at many of the places where he made landfall, on the islands of
the Great Barrier Reef, in Hawaii, at Nelson in New Zealand where I lived
as a boy, and I thought how astonished and delighted he would have been to
discover that Viking explorers had been to this place more than 700 years
before him.
A huge iceberg is visible on the horizon, grounded about eight nautical miles offshore. It almost certainly came from the Ilulissat icefjord in Greenland, over a thousand miles to the north. For images of that site, which also features in my novel, click here.
Photos copyright 2006 D J L Gibbins