1

The Discovery of the West

Iceland from Settlement-AD 1100

The Icelanders are the most intelligent race on earth, because they discovered America and never told anyone.

-Oscar Wilde

Somewhere in the vast northern ocean, between Iceland and Norway, Thorsteinn Olafsson got himself involved in the biggest mystery of the Middle Ages by making an honest mistake: he turned his ship a few too many degrees west. His passengers would have preferred to arrive in sweet home Iceland, but instead they had to settle for an iceberg. They got nice and close. Closer. Closer: wham. The wooden ship made a sound like a massive tree branch wrenching and splitting. There was no fair fight here between the ship and the iceberg; frozen glacial water is older and far stronger. Damaged and doomed, the ship's direction was suddenly the same as the iceberg's: wherever the currents pulled and the wind blew, there the ship went. Adrift.

Lucky for them, the winds and currents eventually blew them to land, albeit not the one they were hoping for. "By winter," a loose and pretty all-encompassing term in the Arctic, "the ship made it to the East Village of Greenland," according to a short report written roughly five years later.

The ship had arrived at the world's biggest island. From an administrative point of view, Thorsteinn had technically delivered his passengers to Iceland: this was Iceland's colony of southern Greenland.

Despite rolling around the northern North Atlantic for months, the folks on board apparently continued to enjoy one another's company. Over the next four years, none of them chose to hop on a boat to Iceland (although it remains unclear whether there were any ships available to be hopped on). Thorsteinn, probably a decent guy despite his poor sense of direction, developed a crush on a lady passenger, Sigrid Bjornsd—ttir. So he asked her uncle for her hand, and they decided to marry inside that massive stone church the Greenlanders so prided themselves on.

When Sigrid Bjornsd—ttir walked inside the stone church one calm September morning, her future looked as steady as the turn of the seasons. The grand arched window of the majestic fieldstone church cast light onto the crowd of "many noble men, both foreign and local," as noted by local authorities. With "a yes and a handshake," the two happy castaways were presented as husband and wife.

The wedding certificate, signed by Greenland's pastor Pall Hallvardsson, was later delivered to the bishop of Iceland and stored in Sk‡lholt for centuries, until some historians dug it out and did a double take at the date: September 16, 1408. This was the last-ever day on record in Erik the Red's Greenland. Shortly thereafter, following roughly four hundred years of Norse settlement, the entire vibrant community disappeared. Vanished. To this day, no one knows exactly why.

Icelanders in the Viking age had discovered Greenland in the search for more land and had turned its stock of walrus and narwhals into a global enterprise. Hungry for wood and wheat, the Icelandic Greenlanders had then launched even farther west, and thereby discovered sailing routes from Europe to North America five hundred years before Columbus. Greenland hadn't just hosted a single flimsy settlement; it had been the burgeoning site of a trade empire, a crucial link between the raw resources of North America and the powerful Viking civilization in Norway. Archaeological evidence today suggests a far bigger presence than we'd initially assumed from written records.

So how did a community of thousands, after five centuries, simply disappear without a trace? How could an entire island nation become a ghost town? And what was it like in that early America?

To unravel the mystery, we'll follow Iceland's three most famous explorers-Erik, Leif, and Gudrid-through the bizarre, violent, and lucky events that shaped their lives. Many of us know the simplified versions of their stories, but, as usual, the truth is a lot more complicated. Our heroes murdered people, got lost a lot, converted to Christianity, got lost again, murdered some more people, rescued castaways, lied, benefited from bribes, murdered a few more people, and finally died on a farm. What's more, despite what you've heard about the legacies of Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson, the true explorer here is the neglected heroine Gudrid Thorbjarnard—ttir, who left behind a comfortable life and bonded with the natives in North America while the men tossed rocks at one another. Incredibly, all these explorers were part of the same family by blood or marriage. Their family tree is the starting point for our Greenland mystery.

The story ends with a disappearance. But it begins with exile.

Like many people, I used to romanticize stormy ocean crossings. Waves crashing over the deck. Scissors flying through the galley. Sailors straining to save their ship in the face of the ocean's immeasurable power. Reef the main! Stretch the sheet! Ten degrees starboard! During my own sea crossing a few years ago, I found storms considerably less romantic.

The mayhem forces you to raise your voice and scream, even during face-to-face conversations. Your fingers grow numb as they grip your shipmate's shoulder. Get some damn rest! Down in my cabin, I discovered I couldn't undress without completely lying down. Late in the night, I woke up with cold seawater dripping through the deck and onto my bed. A drop landed on my cheek and slowly traveled inside my ear. I gave up on sleep. I heaved myself up, constantly gripping the railing, the ladder, anything. Up on deck, I nearly stepped on the sea chef who was "just getting some fresh air" while unable to stand upright. When we'd first sailed from the harbor mouth in northern Iceland with spirits high, we'd joked that it would make for exciting television to film a cooking show inside the galley of a rocking ship. Now, looking a bit green, he seemed very unlikely to host such a show. "The worst thing about seasickness," he told me from his hands and knees, "is knowing that you are not going to die." Food was canceled for the day.

This antiromantic venture took place during the crossing from Iceland to Stavanger in Norway. Coincidentally, we were sailing the first voyage of Erik the Red in reverse, tracing the route he had taken a millennium earlier, to bring our wooden schooner, the Opal, to the dry dock of Scandinavia's finest boat builders. Erik the Red is, of course, the founder of the first Icelandic settlement in Greenland-but his story didn't begin very nobly.

When Erik was just a toddler, he was forced to flee Norway along with his father, Thorvald, who was exiled after committing "some murders." They fled west to Iceland, boarding a knarr, a broad-beamed ship designed for a small crew and large cargo, and spent about a week making that stormy ocean crossing. Knarrs were the crucial tools for Viking voyages in the open North Atlantic. Much, though, was still left up to Njšrdur, the god of the sea. The captain could maneuver with a rudder attached to the starboard side, but ultimately the wind of fortune dictated his journey. A single strong gust, and the one-masted boat could lose its most important piece of wood. No wind, and the crew could spend days watching the coast of their destination without getting any closer. Fair wind at last, and the knarr could reach a top speed of eight knots (for comparison, a harbor seal's top swimming speed is about ten knots).

Erik and Thorvald headed west across the Norwegian Sea. When the wind was harsh, Erik got cold. When it rained, he got wet. When the boat broke the waves, splashing them over the deck, he hardly slept. A knarr has limited space below deck, nowhere to hide from the elements. Assuming the journey went normally, he would have reached Iceland after seven to ten nights. The knarr averaged 6.5 knots on long journeys-modern rebuilds of knarrs by curious archaeologists have established the vessel's efficiency-but speed, of course, was not the only determinant of his journey's success.

The schooner I sailed hundreds of years later was no faster than the knarrs; after all, the wind still blows the same way after a thousand years. In good weather and fair winds, the ship sailed at eight knots. In swell and currents, we were down to four or five nautical miles per hour: Jogging speed, running speed, jogging speed, running speed. Of course, we had the benefit of cabins below deck, waterproof jackets, and a nauseated chef-but our greatest advantage was being able to navigate without looking for Norwegian birds, whales, leading stars, or the position of the sun. For we-lucky modern sailors-had a compass.

To say that Iceland, Greenland, and mainland North America were initially discovered by men blown off course assumes that a course could be set in the first place. These men invented sailing centuries before the art of navigation was anything more than an educated guess. Just as the Icelandic dictionary has 156 entries describing wind, the early seafarers had their own word for getting lost at sea: hafvilla. Old texts don't tell us how Iceland's first settlers navigated without a compass. Did they use a quadrant and a sundial? If they did, this would have been challenging in a part of the world defined by long dark winters and cloudy skies. Stars? In summer, when most crossings to Iceland were made, the stars would have been hidden by the midnight sun.

This limited yet impressive degree of navigational ability was crucial to the course of history. Had Erik the Red and his father been unable to find Iceland-had they aimed just a few degrees too far south and missed the island completely-hundreds of years of settlement in Greenland and North America may have gone down differently. This balance, between pinpoint navigation and finding oneself unavoidably lost at sea, was the determining factor for much of the way Nordic history occurred. No two sailors had the same degree of success. As we shall see, Erik sailed straight to his destination, Leif followed someone who was lost, and Gudrid was shipwrecked midocean: each a random stroke of maritime luck, each crucial for what came next.

Iceland is the only country in Europe that remembers its beginnings as a nation, as noted by author Magnus Magnusson, as the founding is "enshrined in the works of her early historians." The remote North Atlantic island had existed for millions of years, serving merely as a festive bird colony for its only terrestrial mammal, the Arctic fox, when humans suddenly figured out a way to get there. Half the size of the United Kingdom and the same size as the state of Ohio, Iceland was the last major territory to be settled in the Northern Hemisphere. When New Zealand was settled by the Maori population some centuries later, the entire world was occupied by humans, minus a few small islands (Cape Verde, for example) and places of extreme weather conditions (Svalbard).

First, the country was visited by three explorers, arriving one after the other, who had each come to Iceland mostly out of curiosity and the desire to verify one another's boasts about finding a vast empty island. Fl—ki Vilgerdarson, the third explorer to arrive, allegedly gave Iceland its name while standing on top of a mountain overlooking the wide Breida Fjord, packed with sea ice. Other proposed early names included Snowland, Gardar's Isle, and Thule.

But those explorers showed up, looked around, and then left. The real day number one in Iceland's history-the beginning of actual settlement-was a summer afternoon in AD 874, when Norwegian farmer Ing—lfur Arnarson, his family and slaves in tow, walked from Cape Ingolfshofdi to modern day Reykjav’k (Rayk-ya-veek) in the Southwest. Iceland's first history book, The Book of Settlements, tells the story of Ing—lfur, and then goes on to detail the names and farm holdings of the thousands of settlers who came after him. This was a kind of Viking VIP list written by the country's first nerd, Ari the Learned, to highlight the country's respectable genealogy-to show that it was populated by more than slaves and murderers. Iceland, as Ari explains in 102 chapters, was the land of brave Norwegians.

But in a brief aside in the prelude, thrown out like a hand grenade for modern scholars to toss around, Ari mentions that prior to Norwegian settlement "there were those men" called Papar-Irish monks. Ari repeats the story in the later Book of the Icelanders, claiming that the monks abandoned Iceland because they didn't want to live alongside Norse heathens, leaving behind "Irish books and bells and canes."

Historians and archaeologists have tried hard to verify Ari's testimony, but as of today the jury remains out. Certain old place-names, such as Papar Island in the East, do suggest that early settlers believed certain areas had initially been occupied by the mysterious monks. And in the early twentieth century, three silver coins dating back to Roman times were discovered at three different locations on the southeastern corner of Iceland, a place that would serve as the most convenient landing spot for an Irish ship What's more, some English texts, penned by an Irish monk half a century before Iceland's settlement, speak of a religious community on a northern island called Thule, which had eternal summer light.

But critics of the pre-Viking settlement theory suggest that the word Papar had more than one meaning, in this case referring to uneven landscapes. They dismiss the coin findings, saying it only proves that old coins indeed travel-just check your own sofa cushions. And the description of Thule, the skeptics argue, could easily refer to the Faroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, Saaremaa (an Estonian island), Greenland, or Smala, Norway, where residents claim to inhabit the mysterious northern land. But one element of the monk notion is certainly no myth: Icelanders have significant Irish heritage. In 2018, scientists at the Reykjav’k-based genetic company deCODE were able to sequence the genome of twenty-five ancient Icelanders, preserved at the National Museum, and compare them with those of Celtic Britons and Scandinavian populations. According to the results, the early settlers were of 57 percent Norse origin; the rest were of Celtic and "mixed" origin. The mixing is believed to have taken place in Britain and Ireland, and women of the time were more likely than men to have Celtic Britons' origin. This could mean that some Vikings stopped over in Ireland on their way to Iceland, where they may have kidnapped women for a voyage west. One British tabloid interpreted the results in a headline that read: viking sex tourists lived happily ever after with britons.

It's impossible to tell from gene sequencing alone, however, whether a part of the early Icelandic population consisted of Irish people who couldn't outrun the Vikings. It's fully possible that Irish women were in fact charmed by the roaming Scandinavians who had mastered the art of sailing the northern seas. For one, they had steep personal hygiene standards, based on excavations of burial sites that have turned up tweezers, razors, combs, and ear cleaners made from animal bones and antlers. They spoke Old Norse, arrived with their own cultural habits, and perhaps most important in pagan Ireland, did not believe in Jesus.