The northern tip of Newfoundland
is hardly the sort of place to give rise to memories like those preserved in the sagas about Leifr Eiriksson’s Vinland,
the land of wine and grapes, and the archaeological evidence removes all doubt that the people who used L’Anse aux Meadows
were also familiar with regions further south.
There is thus no reason to
identify the site with Vinland, as the Ingstads attempted to do. However, it is highly unlikely that such a large staging
post would have disappeared entirely from people’s memories – memories that clearly go back to some extent to
real events – and it may well be that L’Anse aux Meadows is the place described in the accounts of Thorvald’s
(Leifr’s brother) voyage as Leifr’s Camp.
The Vinland sagas consist
of two independent works: The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders.
The Saga of Erik the
Redin fact has little to say about Erik himself, who led the settlement in Greenland from Iceland in 985/6. It appears
to have been written to elevate the memory of the first Europeans to have a child in North America, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir
and Thorfinn karlsefni, whose son Snorri was born during their three-year expedition to Stream Firth, east and south of Leifr’s
Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders focuses on the role of Leifr Eiríksson.
It describes his first
voyage of exploration to Vinland in some detail and includes the tale, also found in Eiríks saga rauða, of how he got
his nickname (‘the Lucky’) by rescuing some stranded sailors from a rock on his journey home (rescuing others
is still considered a sign of luck among Icelandic seafarers).
The information from
the sagas is, of course, very general, but in spite of this appears to correlate excellently with the geographical facts.
Bjarni, who is the first to see three lands in the New World, may be supposed to have sighted Newfoundland, Labrador and Baffin
Island, and the information given on Leifr’s voyage seems to suggest that we should concentrate our search for his Vinland
somewhere in the southern Gulf of St Lawrence.
If we assume that the
grapes mentioned in the saga are true wild grapes (Vitis riparia) and not just some kind of berry, the northern limit
for Vinland can be set somewhere along the southern shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence. And it is here that wild grapes were
such a conspicuous part of the local flora when the first post-Viking Europeans arrived in the 16th century that the French
explorer Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) gave the name Île de Bacchus near the modern city of Quebec at the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
On the south side of
Miramichi Bay in New Brunswick is a smaller bay called Baie de Vin (Wine Bay), a name which goes back to the early settlers
– even though there is some local speculation that it has more to do with wind than wine. It is hardly possible to imagine
anything closer in spirit to the way Leifr regarded the land he visited 500 years earlier when he chose to call it Vinland
— the land of grapes.
Leifr is said to have
undertaken two days’ sailing over open water southwest from the second land sighted by Bjarni (i.e. Labrador). That
would bring him to the southern shores of the Gulf, with Prince Edward Island lying in the sea north of the mainland and cut
off from it by a shallow channel — exactly as the saga tells us.
Leifr then finds a salmon
river with a sea lagoon at its mouth, which makes good sense if we are thinking about him sailing west through the Northumberland
Strait and entering the Miramichi Bay.
The saga also mentions
self-propagating wheat, which may refer to wild rye (Elymus virginicus), which grows in the same area and looks much
like wheat. The northern limits of both wild rye and wild grapes coincide fairly closely with the northern limit of the butternut
(Juglans cinerea), as found at L’Anse aux Meadows, proving beyond doubt that the explorers who brought these
nuts to L’Anse aux Meadows would also have come across true wild grapes in profusion on their travels.
According to The Saga
of the Greenlanders, in the place they named Vinland Leifr’s men encountered salmon both larger and more numerous
than any they had seen before.
The Canadian archaeologist
Catherine Carlson has shown that in the 11th century there were no salmon in the rivers of Maine or further south as a result
of the warmer climate then prevailing. The rivers flowing into the southern shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence, however, would
have been, then as now, teaming with salmon.
Moreover, according to
the marine biologist David Cairns of the University of Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, salmon enter these rivers for
breeding after two years at sea as opposed to just one in Newfoundland, making them appreciably larger than those farther
north.
A careful reading of
The Saga of the Greenlanders’ account of Leifr’s journey, therefore, provides a series of instructions
and directions that would prove eminently practicable to anyone wishing to navigate a Viking Age ship from Newfoundland or
Labrador directly across the Gulf of St Lawrence to Prince Edward Island and on into the Northumberland Strait between the
island and the mainland.
One would first sight
land at the northeast of the island, just as Leifr did. After Leifr enters the strait it is not clear from the saga whether
the writer thinks of him as making his landfall on the island itself or on the mainland.
At both sides of the
strait there are shallow waters, large tides and tidal pools, leaving open the possibility that Leifr sailed all the way through
the strait from east to west before landing at Miramichi Bay in New Brunswick, which opens up to port shortly after one emerges
from the strait. Miramichi Bay is the most impressive sea lagoon in the area and it offers all the natural qualities the saga
attributes to Vinland: wild vines and large salmon in one of the best-known salmon rivers around the Gulf.
The only discordant note
in this comparatively precise account is the winters, which are generally rather severer than the one described in the saga.
There seems to be good
reason to identify Leifr’s Camp, visited by Leifr’s brother Thorvald (and later by his sister) in The Saga
of the Greenlanders with L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland. Thorvald explored the regions to
the west of this place in his first summer, finding islands and shallow waters, and to the east the following summer experiencing
more dangerous waters. This fits in well with Newfoundland and L’Anse aux Meadows as a starting point.
The route taken by Karlsefni
and Gudrid (in The Saga of Eirik the Red) is reasonably consistent with a journey beyond Newfoundland and southwest
along the southeast coast of Nova Scotia, conceivably all the way to the Bay of Fundy and perhaps beyond.
They are said to have
spent time in a very streamy fjord, called Stream Firth, which describes the Bay of Fundy excellently, since the greatest
tidal range here is the greatest of any place on earth (on average 15-16 meters). In the saga there is an island in the mouth
of the bay and the seas around it do not ice over in winter.
Once we accept the identification
of Leifr’s Vinland as described in The Saga of the Greenlanders with the southern shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence,
it becomes possible to square all the directions given for the journeys of Karlsefni and Gudrid in The Saga of Erik the
Red with the saga’s notions of Leifr’s Vinland.
It is said that Karlsefni
sailed north from his Stream Firth in order to find Leifr’s Vinland by sailing north round a place called Keel Point
(which is said to be south of Leifr’s Camp in the account of Thorvald’s expedition). Karlsefni himself sails north
past that point and then turns west, with land to port – which the saga believes sets him on a course for Leifr’s
Vinland. These bearings make sense if Stream Firth is situated toward the south of Nova Scotia, with Keel Point at the extreme
north of Nova Scotia on Cape Breton.
The cumulative map that
emerges from the saga accounts of the Vinland voyages bears a striking likeness to maps we might find in any modern-day atlas.
We have already found physical remains from these voyages at L’Anse aux Meadows
at the northern tip of Newfoundland, remains that prove beyond doubt that the people who built the camp came from Iceland
and Greenland and that they subsequently journeyed farther south to places where butternuts and wild grapes grew — and
the salmon was bigger than they had ever seen before.
