NORTHERING1 “Thoreau’s inner compass may have been aligned to the southwest, but his imagination consistently pointed north. To the ‘Esquimaux’ he imagined standing silently over their fishing holes on Flint’s Pond. To the ‘Northmen,’ whose Scandinavian sagas enrich his books, and whose playful god was the namesake for Thor-eau. To the ‘Land of the Midnight Sun,’ where ‘sunrise and sunset are coincident, and that day returns after six months of night.’ To the aurora borealis, that ‘burning bush’ and ‘fiery worm’ he saw from Concord hilltops during magnetic storms. To the Arctic pack ice and its local surrogate, the drifting floes of Fairhaven Bay. ‘He seemed a little envious of the Pole,’ said Ralph W. Emerson as his friend’s body lay coffin cold.” — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE “You shall not be overbold When you deal with Arctic cold.” — Waldo Emerson 1. Henry Thoreau’s playing around with the idea of West was roughly similar to the manner in which other authors have played around with the idea of North. In this particular chronological file we will record the actual physical northering — but elsewhere we will need to be dealing with this literary northering. HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH 1,000 BCE Apparently in this timeframe, Norse and Celtic settlement of North America was beginning. THE FROZEN NORTH “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Exploring North HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH 330 BCE After circumnavigating Great Britain, Pytheus of Massalia (Marseilles) discovered his “Ultima Thule” (modern Iceland or possibly Norway). His two original texts having been lost to antiquity, so we know of his explorations only through enthusiastic criticism by Strabo and Polybius. He would be ridiculed for claiming to have seen a “midnight sun.” THE FROZEN NORTH Nine centuries later, translations of these reports would inspire Irish monks to sail toward the Fairy Islands, or Faeroes, in cockleshell skin boats. The Alexandrian conquests introduced Babylonian and Egyptian astrology into the Hellenic world, and Hellenic astrology into the Indo-Iranian world. It would be the process of the blending of the philosophies and religions of these different cultures that would lie behind much of the scholarship of the Hellenistic era. Etruscan bronze statuettes from this period depict mixed-gender wrestling (males nude, females in thigh- length pleated tunics). DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Exploring North “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH 600 CE St. Brendan sailed with fourteen Celtic monks, probably in flight from marauding Norse ships. He described in detail the eruption of Mount Hecla, Iceland. These monks settled into monastic life in Iceland until they would again be forced to flee before the Vikings in 795 CE, presumably this time to Greenland. THE FROZEN NORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Exploring North “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH 985 CE Eric (The Red) Thorvaldsson mapped a great deal of Greenland’s southwestern coastline. Subsequently he would lead a massive expedition to colonize Greenland in the vicinity of modern Julianehaab and Godthaab. Eric’s son Lief Ericksson then apparently proceeded on to North America, presumably landing in modern Anse au Meadow, Newfoundland (“Vinland” of the Norse Sagas) and New England. CARTOGRAPHY THE FROZEN NORTH Bjarni Herjolfsson, blown off course during a trip to Greenland, made a landfall somewhere along the coast of Newfoundland or Labrador, then coasted northward. It is likely that he used the elevation of the pole-star to judge his latitude. CARTOGRAPHY Thoreau would write about the “Spirit of Lodin,” then quote: “I look down from my height on nations, And they become ashes before me;— Calm is my dwelling in the clouds; Pleasant are the great fields of my rest.” What is the “Spirit of Lodin,” and who was he quoting? Bjørn Jónssons wrote about a Lik-Lodin (which means “Corpse-Lodin”), a person who apparently lived around the middle of the 11th century. In the summertime this Lik-Lodin used to sail north of the populated areas and, as an act of piety, bring home the desiccated corpses of the shipwrecked seamen or hunters he found in caves and clefts, who had died out on the drifting ice. Sometimes this Lik-Lodin would find, next to the corpse, an inscription in the runic characters which the man had written telling of his ordeal of exposure and starvation. In sagas he is said to have boiled the flesh from the bones prior to offering them Christian interment in churchyards, although clearly this was not intended as a gesture of defilement of the corpses but rather as a gesture of purification. The “spirit of Lodin” would thus be the spirit of a person who sought to perform gratuitous gestures of decency and consideration for others. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Exploring North “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH 1,000 CE Iceland officially converted to Christianity, although heathen practice would still be permitted in private. Lief Ericsson and other Greenland Norse skippers were exploring Labrador and possibly the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We have a hard date (October 9th of the year 1000) for Leif’s first sight of “Vinland,” although tantalizingly we don’t know what piece of New-World coastline he was looking at on this date. CARTOGRAPHY The archeological site L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northernmost peninsula of Newfoundland, appears to have been a Norse settlement dating to these preColumbian times. It consisted of a group of some six stone and turf buildings similar in style to those used in Iceland and Greenland. This location fits the “Promontorium Winlandiae” of some medieval maps. Radiocarbon analysis of samples from the site dates the wood of their hearth fires to 900 ± 70 CE and to 1080 ± 70 CE. A ring-headed bronze pin commonly used as a clothes- fastener by the Norse, has been found within one of the house outlines. A fragment of bone needle of the type used by Norsemen has been found along with a piece of copper formed by a primitive smelting process unknown to the native Americans of the time. Implements of stone have not been found. Several lumps of iron HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH slag, rusty nails, a needle whetstone, a stone lamp, and a small stone Norse spindle-whorl were found in the houses, indicating that the occupants of this site were Europeans who were, among other things, accessing the local bog iron. This intricate process had been developed in Europe as far back as 2000 BCE and had become known in Norway by 400 BCE. It was widely used during the Viking age and later in Norway. To fashion usable materials, it required very close temperature control during smelting as well as a knowledge of tempering. A source of ore nodules has been discovered close to the brook near the house site and their smithy has been found across that brook from their homes. Carbon-14 dates from the hearth in the smithy range between 890 ± 70 CE to 1090 ± 90 CE. Refer to James Graham-Campbell, ed. CULTURAL ATLAS OF THE VIKING WORLD (NY: Facts on File, 1994), Helge Ingstad, WESTWARD TO VINLAND (Erik J. Friis, Trans. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), and Gwyn Jones, A HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968). HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH 1497 King Henry VII of England commissioned an Italian sea-captain, Giovanni Caboto of the Matthew out of Bristol harbor, a classic 15th-Century caravelle, to sail west and claim new lands for England. The voyager would blunder upon an unexpected new land — not the Orient, as Caboto had anticipated, but the eastern coast of an immense new-found continent. His map has not survived. CARTOGRAPHY Caboto would go down in history as John Cabot, the explorer who claimed the “New Founde Land” for a British King. Cabot planted the English flag on what is now Cape Bauld, Newfoundland. On a subsequent voyage in 1498, Cabot would enter Hudson Bay at 64°N. THE FROZEN NORTH HDT WHAT? INDEX EXPLORING NORTH EXPLORING NORTH The Micmac and the Beothuk tribespeoples on Newfoundland were probably the 1st native Americans to have regular contact with Europeans. Arguably, Cabot wasn’t the 1st European to arrive on these shores, as Basque cod fishermen seem to have been visiting the Grand Banks even before Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492 — but had been keeping exceedingly mum about where it was that they were finding all their marvelous finny fish.2 At least four centuries earlier even than that, 11th-Century Norse Vikings may well have landed at L’Anse aux Meadows, and legend has it that an Irish monk, St. Brendan, landed in Newfoundland four centuries before those Vikings. Whatever, John Cabot’s voyage for King Henry VII in 1497 did mark the beginning of an era — British colonization of the New World. The 1st interracial contact presently of record was made in this year by John Cabot who would take three Micmac with him when he returned to England. It may well be that the Micmac did not appreciate Cabot’s services as a tour guide, since in the same area during his 2d voyage a few years later this explorer would disappear from our radar scopes.