First Contact: the Viking vs. Native American Battles

Under green cliffs runs a winding channel, disturbed by a lone navigator, a man striking forward in a canoe meant for three. The eight companions with whom he set out have been abducted by pale and bearded men, armed with radiant weapons and shields. The man reaches his village, tells them of the ambush, and then rallies a war party for the counterattack. His people are native to the land. Long ago, their ancestors abandoned the Eurasian landscape, braved prehistoric seas in the tundra of mammoths, and settled deep into a world hitherto untouched by humans. As one age passed into the next, the bridge between the two hemispheres was broken, and each half of the planet diverged in mutual ignorance of the other. Millennia bore witness to the cyclical death and birth of great empires, peoples and languages, prophecy and faith. The Vikings of Scandinavia, having ravaged Europe and established outposts on Iceland and Greenland, have just interrupted tens of thousands of years of hemispheric estrangement. They promptly kill their eight Native American captives. This small band of Norsemen are led by Thorvald Eriksson. His brother Leif earlier made landfall on the American coast, but failed to encounter any native inhabitants. Now the swarm of indigenous canoes comes into view. The Vikings gather to their ship for cover. A staccato rain of stonehead arrows beats against their raised shields. After some time, the siege ends, and the indigenous people paddle away. But a fateful arrow protrudes from the trembling side of Thorvald Eriksson. He asks his men to lay him to rest in this foreign soil, with a pair of crosses at his head and feet. After the captain's final orders are carried out, his men return to the American settlement founded by Leif Eriksson, and return to Greenland in the spring. But soon there is another stir. A distant toll of iron and plumes of listless smoke, dragonboats cruise along the water's edge. A man called Thorfinn Karlsefni has reached the Leif Eriksson settlement, along with a party of nearly 70 settlers, Christian and pagan alike. It seems divine favor has blessed these seagoing people with a beached whale from which to feed. They settle warmly in their sod houses for the long winter. One day, out of the spring woods, people appear. Although frightened at first by the Norse bull, they soon open their packs to present warm pelts from the local fauna, and gesture toward the Norse weapons. Through guarded and fumbling attempts to communicate, Karlsefni makes clear that he will not trade his iron weapons. Instead, he offers the milk of their livestock. The Native Americans take delight in the strange beverage, trading all of their pelts for it. Then they disappear again. Karlsefni orders his men to build a palisade around the settlement. The people return in the fall in greater numbers, with more pelts. In the tense reunion, one Native American attempts to take an iron weapon, and a Viking strikes him dead. The other Native Americans flee, but Karlsefni anticipates retaliation. He sends out his Norse warriors to lure them into the forest, and then they ambush them. Tomahawk and arrow meet axe and shield. The Vikings scatter the Native Americans and leave a number of them dead in the woods. Karlsefni's expedition remains at the settlement for the winter. Then they load their ships with American grapes and pelts, and depart. This story comes directly from the Saga of the Greenlanders, one of two Icelandic sagas that record the Viking settlement of Greenland. Leif Erikson's voyage to mainland America and the Viking expeditions to the American lands they called Markland, Helluland, and Vinland. The other, called the Saga of Erik the Red, tells this same fundamental story with important differences. It combines the expeditions of Thorvald and Karlsefni into one, and records a massive battle in which Native Americans kill multiple fleeing Vikings, who are in turn only rescued when the brave woman Freydis scares off the Native Americans by beating her exposed breast with a sword. Both sagas are the products of oral histories, probably first written down in the early 1200s. Each is clouded by medieval folklore. Corpses reanimate to give prophecies, and disembodied voices guide the explorers. In Erik's saga, Thorvald is killed when a one-legged creature shoots an arrow into his groin. These stories are the relics of the closing of an age. As Viking clans coalesce into kingdoms, and the Scandinavian settlements on Greenland are abandoned, and the old tales of a short-lived quest to a western land are resigned to a compendium of rumor and fable, to be told around the hearth or carried far by the traveling merchant. It's in Italy, around 1340, that a monk relays what he's heard of Markland. Further westwards, there is another land, named Marcolotta, where giants live. In this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build with them except huge giants. However, no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features. In 1492, the Vatican records that no news has come from Greenland, that country at the end of the world, in eight decades. Christopher Columbus reaches the Bahamas that same year. Scholars are left to doubt that the Vikings ever reached mainland North America. Until, in 1960, archaeologists in Newfoundland discover mounded ruins. Excavations will resurface sod houses, an iron forge, and chopped wood recently dated to the year 1021. Here, the contemporaries of the Erikson brothers and Carl Cephany may have traded with indigenous people and launched expeditions possibly as far south as Maine or New York. But after a handful of years, the mighty Vikings abandoned their colony, mysteriously retired from their efforts to expand their domain westward in a bountiful country. The tentative mapping of their expeditions reveals that the Norse had likely met the ancestors of the Beothuk or Dorset Native Americans, a people whose resistance may have been the death knell for these first European settlements in the Americas. Thus reads the saga of Erik the Red. Although the land was excellent, they could never live there in safety or freedom from fear because of the native inhabitants. So they made ready to leave the place and return home. If America had been spared the wrath of the Vikings, Europe hadn't been so fortunate. When I watched Vikings, Merchants, and Explorers from MagellanTV, I was blown away by both the brutality inflicted on Europe as well as the lasting impact the Viking era had on the world today. You can go watch the documentary right now. It has this really cool balance of present-day sites of fabled Viking raids alongside really quality battle recreations, all wrapped up in a great overview of who the Vikings were. HistoryDose viewers can take advantage of a special holiday offer right now. Buy one get one free gift card for an annual membership by clicking on the link in the description. You'll have access to Vikings, Merchants, and Explorers as well as Magellan's huge catalog of 3,000 history documentaries. And they're adding new documentaries in history, crime, and science every single week. So click that link and you can start streaming these through your TV, mobile device, laptop, or other streaming device right away.