PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR
II
VIKINGS OR NORTHMEN.
The discoveries and conquests and colonies of the Norse Vikings, from the
White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the sea of
darkness round the little island of the known world that made up Christendom.
And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the only natural
beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam, Saracens controlled
the great trade-routes of the South and East. It was only on the West and North
that the coast was clear—of all but natural dangers.
In the Moslem Caliphate men were now busy in following up the old lines of
trade, the immemorial traditions of the East, or as in southern Africa,
extending the sphere of commercial activity and so of civilisation; men of
science were commenting on the ancient texts of Greeks and Latins, or adapting
them to enlarged knowledge.
But in Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical activity,
broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals of Charles the
Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred and his House, the
practical energy of Heathen enemies,—for the Northmen were not seriously
touched by Christianity till about the end of the first millennium,—was the
first sign of lasting resurrection. After the material came the spiritual
revival; the whole life of the Middle Ages awoke on the conversion of the
Northern nations and of Hungary; but in the abundant and brilliant energy of the
eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, we must recognise the
offspring of the irrepressible Norsemen as well as of the Irish and Frank and
English missionaries, who in the Dark Ages of Christendom were working out the
empire of Innocent III.
In exploration, especially, it was true that theory followed achievement.
Flavio Gioja, of Amalphi, did not apply the magnet to navigation—did not
"give sailors the use of the magnet"—till navigation itself had begun
to venture into the unknown Atlantic. The history of geographical advance in
the earlier Middle Ages is thus rather a chronicle of adventure than of
science.
But the Norse discoveries are not only the first, they are the leading
achievements of Western travel and enterprise in the true Unknown, between the
time of Constantine and the Crusades. The central fact of European expansion in
the Dark Ages (from the seventh to the eleventh century) is the advance of the
Vikings to the Arctic Continent and to America
about the year 1000. All that precedes this on the same line is doubtful and
unimportant. For, of the other voyages to the West in the sixth, the eighth,
the tenth centuries, which, on Columbus' success, turned into prior claims to
the finding of the New World, there is not one that deserves notice.
St. Brandon in 565, the Seven Spanish Bishops in 734, the Basques in 990
may or may not have sighted their islands of "Antillia," of
"Atlantis," of the "Seven Cities." They cannot be verified
or valued, any more than the journeys of the Enchanted Horse or the Third
Calendar. We only know for certain a few unimportant, half-accidental facts,
such as the visits of Irish hermits to Iceland and the Färoes during the eighth
century, and the traces of their cells and chapels—in bells and ruins and crosses—found
by the Northmen in the ninth.
It was in 787 that the Vikings first landed in England; by the opening of
the next century they were threatening the whole coast line of Christendom,
from Gallicia to the Elbe; in 874 they began to colonise Iceland; in 877 they
sighted Greenland; in 922 Rolf the Ganger won his "Normandy" from
Charles the Simple, by the Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte; as early as 840 was
founded the first Norse or Ostman kingdom in Ireland, and in 878 the Norse
earldom of the Orkneys, while about the same time the first Vikings seem to
have reached the White Sea and the extreme North of Europe.
This advance is almost as rapid as that of the early Saracens; within a
hundred years from the first disturbance of Danes
and Northmen by the growing, all-including power of the new national
kingdoms,—within three generations from Halfdan the Black,—first the flying
rebels, and then the royalists in pursuit of them, had reached the farthest
western and northern limits of the known world, from Finisterre in
"Spanland" to Cape Farewell in Greenland, from the North Cape in
Finland to the Northwest Capes of "Irland," from Novgorod or
"Holmgard" in Russia to "Valland," between the Garonne and
the Loire.
The chief lines of Northern advance were three—by the north-west,
south-west, and north-east, but each of these divided, after a time, with
important results.
The first sea-path, running by Caithness, Orkneys, Shetlands, and Färoes,
reached Iceland, Greenland, and at last Vinland on the North American Continent;
but from the settlements on the coasts and islands of northern Scotland, a
fresh wave of pirate colonists swept down south-west into the narrow seas of
St. George's Channel and beat upon the east and north and south of Ireland and
the western coasts of England and of "Bretland."
The second invasion ran along the North German coast, and on reaching the
Straits of Dover, fell upon both sides of the English Channel, according as the
resistance was stronger or weaker in Wessex or in Frankland. The advanced guard
reunited with Ostmen and Orkneyers in the Scilly Isles, and in Cornwall, and
pressed on to the plunder of the Bay of Biscay and its coasts. The most
restless of all were not long in finding out the
wealth of the Moslem Caliphate of Cordova, and trying to force their way up the
Douro and the Tagus.
The expansion on this side was not to stop till it had founded, from the
Norman colony on the Seine, a Norman kingdom of England, and a dominion in the
Two Sicilies, but this was the work of the eleventh century, the time of
organisation and settled empire.
On the third side of northern expansion, to east and north-east, there were
two separate roads from the first; one taking the Baltic for its track, and
dividing northwards to Finland, up the Gulf of Bothnia, eastwards to Russia and
Novgorod ("Gardariki" and "Holmgard"), the other coasting
along "Halogaland" to Biarmaland, along Lapland to Perm and the
Archangel of later time.
Of these three lines of movement by far the most vital to our subject is
the first, which is also the earliest; the second, to south and south-west,
hardly gives any direct results for our story; and the third, to east and
north, is mainly concerned with Russian history. While King Alfred was yet
unborn, Norse settlements had been permanently founded in the outlying points,
coasts, and islands of Scotland and Ireland, and in the years of his boyhood,
about 860, Nadodd the Fäeroe Jarl sighted Iceland, which had been touched at by
the Irish monks in 795 but was now to be first added as a lasting gain to
Europe, as a new country, "Snowland"—something more than a hermitage
for religious exiles from the world. Four years later (in 864) Gardar the Swede reached this new Ultima Thule, and re-named it from
himself "Gardar's Holm." Yet another Viking, Raven Floke, followed
the track of the first explorer in 867, before Iceland got its final name and
earliest colonisation from the Norsemen Ingolf and Leif and the sheep-farmers
of the Färoes in 874, the third year of Alfred's reign in Wessex.
Three years later, 877-8, at the very time of the farthest Danish advance
in England, when Guthrum had driven the English King into the Isle of Athelney,
the Norsemen reached their farthest point of northern advance in Europe;
Gunnbiorn sighted a new land to the north-west, which he called "White
Shirt," from its snow-fields, and which Red Eric a century later re-named
Greenland—"for there is nothing like a good name to attract
settlers." By this the Old World had come nearer than ever before to the
discovery of a new one.
Geographically, this side of the Arctic Continent falls to the share of
North America, and once its fiords had been made in their turn centres of
colonisation and of further progress, the actual reaching of Newfoundland and Cape
Cod was natural enough. The real voyage lay between Cape Farewell and the
European mainland; it was a stormy and dangerous passage from the Greenland
Bays to Labrador, but not a long one, and, as far as can be judged from scanty
records, neither so cold nor so icebound as at present.
But exploration had outrun settlement. It was not till 986, more than one
hundred years after Gunnbiorn's discovery, that Eric the Red, one of the chiefs of the Iceland colonists, led a band of
followers and friends into a permanent exile in the unknown land. The
beginnings of several villages were made in the next few years, and the first
American discoveries followed at once. About 989 one Bjarni Herjulfson,
following his father from Iceland to Eric's Fiord in Greenland, was driven west
by storms first to a flat, well-wooded country, then to a mountainous island,
covered with glaciers. He bore away with a fresh breeze and reached his home in
Eric's Fiord in four days.
But his report aroused great interest; the time had come, and the men, and
Norse rovers, who after so much in the past were ready to dare anything in the
future, eagerly volunteered to follow up the new route; Bjarni himself visiting
Norway and telling his story, was blamed for his slackness, and when he went
back to Greenland there was "much talk of finding unknown lands." In
the year 1000 Leif, a son of Red Eric, started with a definite purpose of
discovery. He bought Bjarni's ship, manned it with five and twenty men and put
out. First they came to the land Bjarni had sighted last, and went on shore.
There was no grass to be seen, but great snowy ridges far inland, "and all
the way from the coast to these mountains was one field of snow, and it seemed
to them a land of no profit,"—so they left, calling it Helluland, or
Slate-land, perhaps the Labrador of the sixteenth century.
They put to sea again and found another land, flat and wooded, with a white
sand shore, low-lying towards the sea. This, said Leif, we will call after its nature, Markland (Woodland). Thence driving for
two days before a north-east wind, they came to an island, where they landed to
wait for good weather. They tasted the dew on the grass and thought they had
never known anything so sweet. Sailing on again into a sound between the island
and a ness, they reached a place where a river came out of a lake; into this
they towed the ship and anchored, carrying their beds out on the shore and
setting up their tents, with a large hut in the middle, and made all ready for
wintering there.
There was no want of fish food—"the largest salmon in the lake they
had ever seen"—and the country seemed to them so good that they would need
no fodder for cattle in the winter. There was no frost; the grass seemed fresh
enough all the year round, and day and night were more equal than in Iceland or
in Greenland. The crew were divided in two parts: one worked at the huts and
the other explored the country, returning every night to the camp. From the
wild vines found by the foragers, the whole district was called Vinland, and
samples of these, enough to fill the stern boat, and of the trees and
"self-sown wheat" found in the fields were taken back to Eric's
Fiord. Thereafter Leif was called the Lucky, and got much wealth and fame, but
Thorwald Ericson, his brother, thought he had not explored enough, and
"determined to be talked about" even more than the first settler of
Vinland.
He put to sea with thirty men and came straight to Leif's Booths in
Vinland, where he stayed the winter. On the first signs of spring Thorwald ordered his vessel to be rigged, and sent his
longboat on ahead to explore.
All alike thought the land beautiful and well-wooded; they noticed that the
distance was small between the forest and the sea, that the beach was all of
white sand, and that there were many islands off the shore and very shallow
water; but they saw no trace of man or beast, except a wooden corn-barn on an
island far to the west. After coasting all the summer they came back in the
autumn to the booths.
The next spring Thorwald went eastwards, and "towards the north along
the land they drove upon a cape and broke their keel and stayed long to repair,
and called the place Keel-Ness (Kjalarness) from this." Then they sailed
away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded, till at one place
Thorwald drew up his ships to the land and laid out gangways to the shore,
saying, "I would gladly set up my farm here."
But now they came upon the first traces of other men; far off upon the
white sandy beach three specks were sighted—three skin boats of the Skrælings
or Esquimaux, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men captured and
killed eight of them, but one escaped "to where within the fiord were
several dwellings like little lumps on the ground." A heavy drowsiness now
fell upon the Norsemen, in the Saga, till a "sudden scream came to them,
and a countless host from up the fiord came in skin boats and laid themselves
alongside."
The Vikings put up their shield-wall along the
gunwale and kept off the arrows of the Esquimaux till they had shot them all
away, and "fled off as fast as they could," leaving Thorwald with a
mortal wound under the arm. He had time just to bid his men "carry him to
the point he had wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there
awhile, but with a cross at head and feet; and so died and was buried as he had
said." The place was called Crossness from the dead chief, but the crew
stayed all the winter and loaded the ship with vines and grapes, and in the
spring came back to Eric in Greenland.
And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious—not to be
undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that checked the
expansion of these Arctic colonies; at their best they were too small to do more
than hold their own against nature and the Skræling savages in their tiny
settlements along the coast, where the ice-fields have long since pushed man
slowly but surely into the sea, with his painfully won patches of hay and corn
and pasturage.
But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out; now
they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found, and found
disputed.
First a third son of Red Eric, Thorstein, bethought him to go to Vinland
for his brother Thorwald's body. He put to sea and lost all sight of land,
beating about in the ocean the whole summer, till he came back to Greenland in
the first week of winter. (1004-6.)
He was followed by the greatest of the Vinland sailors, Thorfinn Karlsefne,
who really took in hand the founding of a new settlement over the Western Sea.
He came from Norway to Iceland soon after Thorwald's death in 1004, passed on
to Greenland about 1005, "when, as before, much was talked about a Vinland
voyage," and in 1006 made ready to start with one hundred and sixty men
and five women, in three ships. They had with them all kinds of cattle, meaning
to settle in the land if they could, and they made an agreement, Karlsefne and
his people, that each should have an equal share in the gain. Leif lent them
his houses in Vinland, "for he would not give them outright," and
they sailed first to Helluland (Labrador), where they found a quantity of
foxes, then to Markland, well-stocked with forest animals, then to an island at
the mouth of a fiord, unknown before, covered with eyder ducks. They called the
new discoveries Stream Island and Stream Fiord, from the current that here ran
out into the sea, and sent off a party of eight men, in search of Vinland, in a
stern boat. This was driven by westerly gales back to Iceland, but Thorfinn,
with the rest, sailed south till he came to Leif Ericson's "river that
fell into the sea from a lake, with islands lying off the mouth of the stream,
low grounds covered with wheat growing wild, and rising grounds clad with
vines."
Here they settled, re-named the country "Hope, from the good hope they
had of it," and began to fell the wood, to pasture their cattle in the
upland, and to gather the grapes.
After the first winter the Skrælings came upon them, at first to traffic
with furs and sables against milk and dairy produce, and then to fight; for as
neither understood the other, and the natives tried to force their way into
Thorfinn's houses, and to get hold of his men's weapons, a quarrel was bound to
come.
Fearing this, Karlsefne put a fence round the settlement and made all ready
for battle, "and at this very time was a child born to him in the village,
called Snorre, of Gudrid his wife, the widow of Thorstein Eric-son, whom he had
brought with him." Then the Esquimaux came down upon them, "many more
than before, and there was a battle, and Thorfinn's men won the day and saved
the cattle," and their enemies fled into the forest.
Thorfinn stayed all the winter, but towards spring he grew tired of his
enterprise, and returned to Greenland, "taking much goods," vines,
wood for timber, and skin-wares, and so came back to Eric's Fiord in the summer
of 1008.
Thus ends the story of the last serious effort to colonise Vinland, and the
Saga, while giving no definite cause for this failure upon failure, seems to
show that even the trifling annoyance of the Skrælings was enough to turn the
scale. Natural difficulties were so immense, men were so few, that a pigmy
enemy had all the power of the last straw in a load, the odd man in a council.
The actual resistance of American natives to European colonists was never very
serious in any part of the continent, but the distance from the starting-point
and the difficulties of life in the new country
were able, even in the time of Raleigh and De Soto, to keep in check men who
far more readily founded and kept up European empires in the Indian seas.
So now, though on Thorfinn's return the "talk began to turn again upon
a Vinland voyage, as both gainful and honourable," and a daughter of Red
Eric, named Freydis, talked men over—especially two brothers, Helge and
Finnboge—to a fresh attempt in the country where all the House of Eric had
tried and failed; though Leif lent his booths as before, and sixty able-bodied
men, besides women, were found willing to go, the colony could never be firmly
planted. Freydis and her allies sailed in 1011, reached the settlement, which
was now for the third time recolonised, and wintered there;—but jealousies soon
broke up the camp, Helge and Finnboge were murdered with all their followers,
and the rest came back in 1013 to Greenland, "where Thorfinn Karlsefne was
just ready for sailing back to Norway, and it was common talk that never did a
richer ship leave Eric's Fiord than that which he steered." It was that
same Karlsefne who gave the fullest account of all his travels, concludes the
Saga, but whether Thorfinn ever returned to Vinland, whether there were any
more attempts to settle at Leif's Booths or elsewhere, whether the account we
have of these voyages is really an Eric Saga, only telling the deeds of Red
Eric and his House—for after Bjarni, almost every Vinland leader is of this
family—we cannot tell. We can only fancy that all these suggestions are
probable, by the side of the few additional facts
known to the Norse Skalds or Bards. The first of these is, that in 983-4, Are
Marson of Reykianes in Iceland was driven by storms far West to White Man's
Land, where he was followed by Bjarni Asbrandson in 999, and by Gudleif
Gudlangson in 1029. This was the tale of his friend Rafn, "the Limerick
trader," and of Are Frode, his great-great-grandson, who called the
unknown land Great Ireland. True or untrue, in
whatever way, this would be a later discovery than those of Eric and his sons,
if the news of it did not come into Iceland or Norway till after Thorfinn
Karlsefne's voyage, as is generally supposed. Again, the length of the voyage
is a difficulty, and the whole matter has a doubtful look—an attempt to start a
rival to the Eric Saga, by a far more brilliant success a few years earlier.
We seem to be on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of Viking
exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of Greenland and
Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century, and in the fairly
clear and continuous account of the two Greenland settlements of the western
and the eastern Bays.
We hear, for instance, of Bishop Eric going over from Eric's Fiord to
Vinland in 1121; of clergy from the Eastern Bay diocese of Gardar sailing to
lands in the West, far north of Vinland, in 1266; of the two Helgasons
discovering a country west of Iceland in 1285; of a voyage from Greenland to Markland in 1347 by a crew of seventeen men,
recorded in 1354.
Unless these are pure fabrications, they would seem to prove something of
constant intercourse between the mother and daughter colonies of north-west
Europe and north-east America, and something of a permanent Christian
settlement of Northmen in the New Continent is made probable by assuming such
intercourse. Between 981-1000, both Iceland and Greenland had become
"Catholic in name and Christian in surname"; in 1126 the line of
Bishops of Gardar begins with Arnold, and the clergy would hardly have ventured
on the Vinland voyage to convert Skrælings in an almost deserted country.
The later story of the Greenland colonies, interesting as it is, and
traceable to the year 1418, is not part of the expansion but of the contraction
of Europe and Christendom. And the voyages of the Zeni in 1380-95 to Greenland
and the Western islands Estotiland and Drogeo, belong to another part; they are
the last achievements of mediæval discovery before Henry of Portugal begins his
work, and form the natural end of an introduction to that work.
But it is curious to notice that just as the ice and the Esquimaux between
them were bringing to an end the last traces of Norse settlement in the Arctic
Continent, and just as all intercourse between Vinland, Greenland, Iceland, and
Norway entirely ceases—at any rate to record itself—the Portuguese sailors,
taking up the work of Eric and Leif and Thorfinn,
on another side, were rounding Cape Verde and nearing the southern point of
Africa, and so providing for the mind of Columbus suggestions which resulted in
the lasting discovery of the world that the Vikings had sighted and colonised,
but were not able to hold.
The Venetian, Welsh, and Arabic claims to have followed the Norsemen in
visits to America earlier than the voyage of 1492, belong rather to the minute
history of geographical controversy. It is a fairly certain fact that the
north-west line of Scandinavian migration reached about A.D. 1000 to Cape Cod
and the coasts of Labrador. It is equally certain that on this side the
Norsemen never made any further advance, lasting or recorded. Against all other
mediæval discoveries of a Western Continent, one only verdict can stand:—Not
Proven.
The other lines of Northern advance, though marked by equal daring and far
greater military exploits, have less of original discovery. There was fighting
in plenty, the giving and taking of hard knocks with every nation from
Archangel to Cordova and from Limerick to Constantinople; and the Vikings, as
they reached fresh ground, re-named most of the capes and coasts, the rivers
and islands and countries of Europe, of North Africa, of Western Asia. Iberia
became "Spanland"; Gallicia, "Jacobsland"; Gallia, "Frankland"; Britannia,
"England," "Scotland," "Bretland"; Hibernia,
"Irland"; Islam, outside "Spanland," passed into
"Serkland" or Saracenland. Greece was
"Grikland"; Russia, "Gardariki"; the Pillars of Hercules,
the Straits of Gibraltar, were "Norva's Sound," which later days
derived from the first Northman who passed through them. The city of
Constantine was the Great Town—"Miklagard"; Novgorod was
"Holmgard," the town of all others that most touched and influenced
the earlier, the Viking age, of Northern expansion. For was it not their own
proudest and strongest city-state, and "Who can stand before God, or the
Great Novgorod?" except the men who had built it, and would rush to sack
it if it turned against them?
But all this was only the passing of a more active race over ground which
had once been well known to Rome and to Christendom, even if much of this was
now being forgotten. It was only in upland Russia and in the farthest North
that the Norsemen sensibly enlarged the Western world to east or north-east, as
they did through their Iceland settlements on the north-west.
On the south and south-west no Vikings or Royalist followers of Vikings,
like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland, and as
pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work
was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking
down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they visited the Holy sites
"When sacred Hierosolyma they'd relievèdAnd fed their eyes on Jordan's holy floodWhich the dear body of Lord God had lavèd";
they fought as Varangian body-guards in the armies of the great Byzantines,
Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, Basil II. or Maniakes; but in all this they
discovered for themselves rather than for Europe.
But Russia, that is, Old Russia round Novgorod and Kiev, the White Sea, the
North Cape and Finland coasts, as well as the more outlying parts of Scotland
and Ireland, were first clearly known to Europe through the Northmen. The same
race did much to open up the modern Lithuania and Prussia, and the conversion
of the whole of Scandinavia, mother country and colonies alike, in the tenth
and eleventh centuries added our Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, with all the
Viking settlements, to the civilised world and church of Rome.
First, on the eastern side, it was in 862 that the Russians invited help
from their less dreaded neighbours around Upsala against their more vexatious
neighbours around Kiev, and in September of the same year Ruric arrived at
Novgorod and founded the Mediæval Kingdom of Russia, which in the tenth century
under Oleg, Igor, and Vladimir was first the plunderer, then the open enemy,
and finally the ally in faith and in arms of the Byzantine Empire.
All through this time and afterwards, till the time of the Tartar deluge,
the intercourse of Swedes, Danes, and Northmen with Gardariki was constant and
close, and not least in the time of the Vinland voyages, when Vladimir and
Jaroslav reigned at Novgorod, and the two Olafs, the son of Trygve and the
Saint, found refuge at their court before and after their hard rule in Norway.
Olaf Trygveson's uncle had grown old in exile at Novgorod when young Olaf
and his mother fled from Norway to join him there and were captured by Vikings
in the Baltic and kept six years in the Gulf of Riga before they got to
Holmgard (972).
In 1019 Ingigerd of Sweden was married to Jaroslav; ten years later St.
Olaf was driven from Norway by revolt, and flying into Russia, was offered a
Kingdom called Volgaria—the modern Casan, whose old metropolis of Vulghar was
known to the Arab travellers of the ninth century, and whose ruins can still be
seen. Olaf hesitated between this and a pilgrim's death in Jerusalem and at
last preferred to fight his way back to Norway.
The next King of the Norsemen, Magnus the Good, came from Novgorod by
Ladoga to Trondhjem, when Olaf's son Harold Hardrada fled back to his father's
refuge, to the court of Jaroslav; while Magnus had been in exile, men had asked
news of him from all the merchants that traded to Novgorod.
Last of these earlier kings, Harold Hardrada, during all the time of his
wild romance in East and South, before he went to Miklagard, and after his
flight, and all the time of his service in the Varangian Guard of the Empress Zoe, made Novgorod his home. His pilgrim relics
from Holy Land and his war spoils from Serkland—Africa and Sicily—were all sent
back to Jaroslav's care till their master could come and claim them, and when
he came at last, flying from Byzantine vengeance across the Black Sea into the
Sea of Azov and "all round the Eastern Realm" of Kiev, he found his
wealth untouched and Princess Elizabeth ready to be his wife and to help him
with Russian men and money to win back Norway and to die at Stamford Bridge for
the Crown of England (1066).
Harold is the type of all Vikings, of the Norse race in its greatest, most
restless energy. William the Conqueror, or Cnut the Great, or Robert Guiscard,
or Roger of Sicily, are all greater and stronger men, but there is no
"ganger," no rover, like the man who in fifty years, after fighting
in well-nigh every land of Christians or of the neighbours and enemies of
Christendom, yet hoped for time to sail off to the new-found countries and so
fulfil his oath and promise to perfect a life of unmatched adventure by
unmatched discovery. He had fought with wild beasts in the Arena of
Constantinople; he had bathed in the Jordan and cleared the Syrian roads of
robbers; he had stormed eighty castles in Africa; he had succoured the
Icelanders in famine and lived as a prince in Russia and Northumberland; by his
own songs he boasts that he had sailed all round Europe; but he fell, the
prototype of sea-kings like Drake or Magellan, without one discovery. Men of
his own nation and time had been before him everywhere, but he united in
himself the work and adventures, the conquests and discoveries of many. He was
the incarnation of Northern spirit, and it was through the lives and records of
such as he that Europe became filled with that new energy of thought and
action, that new life and knowledge, which was the ground and impulse of the
movement led by Henry the Navigator, by Columbus, and the Cabots.
Harold's wars kept him from becoming a great explorer, but Norse captains
who took service under peaceful kings did something of what he aimed at doing.
We must retrace our steps to the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan under King
Alfred about the year 890, about the time when a Norse King, Harold Fair-hair,
was first seen in the Scotch and Irish seas. Their discovery of the White Sea,
the North Cape, and the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland was followed up by many
Norsemen, such as Thorer Hund under St. Olaf, in the next one hundred and fifty
years, but Ohthere's voyage was the first and
chief of these adventures both in motive and result.
"He told his lord King Alfred that he dwelt northmost of all Northmen
on the land by the Western Sea and he wished to find how far the land lay right
north, or whether any man dwelt north of the waste. So he went right north near
the land;—for three days he left the waste land on the right and the wide sea on
the left, as far as the whale hunters ever
go"; and still he kept north three days more (to the North Cape of
Europe).
"Then the land bent right east, and with a west wind he sailed four
days till the land bent south, and he sailed by it five days more to a great
river—the Dwina—that lay up into the land, and where beyond the river it was
all inhabited"—the modern country of Perm and Archangel.
Here he trafficked with the people, the first he had met, except the Finn
hunters, since leaving his fiord. Besides his wish to see the country, he was
looking for walrus-ivory and hides.
The Finns and Biarma-men (men of Archangel), it seemed to him, spoke nearly
the same language, but between his home and this Biarmaland no human being
lived in any fixed dwelling, and all the Northman's land was long and narrow
and thinly peopled, decreasing in breadth as it stretched northward, from sixty
to three days' journey.
Again Alfred told how Ohthere, sailing south for a month from his house,
having Ireland on his right and coasting Norway all the time on his
left, came to Jutland, "where a great sea runs up into the land, so vast
that no man can see across it," whence in five days more he reached the
coast, "from which the English came to Britain."
Wulfstan, in the service of the same king, told him how he sailed in seven
days from Sleswick to Truso and the Vistula, having Wendland (or Pomerania and
Prussia) on his right all the way. He described "Witland near the Vistula
and Estland and Wendland and Estmere and the
Ilfing running from the Truso lake into Eastmere," but neither the king
nor his captains knew enough to contradict the old idea, found in Ptolemy and
Strabo, of Scandinavia as one vast island.
Thus it was for the satisfaction of their Saxon Lord that Wulfstan and
Ohthere, by their voyages along the coasts of Norway and Lapland, of Pomerania
and Prussia, round the White Sea and the Gulf of Riga and southern Finland,
added a more coherent view of north-east Europe, and specially of the Baltic Gulf,
to Western geography; but these Norse discoveries, though in the service of an
English king, were scarcely used save by Norsemen, and they must partly go to
the credit of Vikings, as well as of Alfred the Great. Thus in 965 King Harold
Grayskin of Norway "went and fought with the folk on the banks of the
Dwina," and plundered them, and in 1026 Thorer Hund joined himself to a
fleet sent by St. Olaf to the White Sea, pillaged the temple of the idol
Jomala, and destroyed his countrymen by treachery on their way home. Where two
expeditions are recorded they may well stand for twenty unknown and uneventful
ones, and the same must be equally granted as to the gradual advance of
knowledge through the unceasing attacks of the Norse kings and pirates on the lands
to the south of the Baltic, where lived the Wends.
Thus on the west and east, north-west and north-east, the Northmen could
and did make a definite advance into the unknown; even the south-west lines of
Northern invasion and settlement, though they hardly yield any general results
to discovery, certainly led to a more thorough inclusion of every part of the
British isles in the civilised West, through the Viking earldoms in Caithness,
in the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in Man and the Hebrides, and on the coast of
Ireland, where the Ostman colonies grew into kingdoms. From about 840, when the
first of these settlements was fairly and permanently started, to the eleventh
century, when a series of great defeats,—by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014, by
Godwine and Harold in England from 1042 to 1066, and by the Norman and Scottish
kings in the next generation,—practically destroyed the Norse dominion outside
the Orkneys,—for those two hundred years, Danes and Northmen not only pillaged
and colonised, but ruled and reorganised a good half of the British isles.
By the time of Alfred the Viking principalities were scattered up and down
the northern and western coasts of the greater of our two islands, and were
fringing three sides of the lesser. About a.d. 900 the pioneer of the Norse kings, Harold Fair-hair, pursued his traitors,
first to Shetlands and Orkneys, then to Caithness, the Hebrides, and Man. His
son Eric, who followed him, ranged the Northern seas from Archangel to
Bordeaux, and so Hakon the Good in 936 and other Norse princes in 946, 961,
965, above all, the two great Kings Olaf in 985-9 and 1009-14, fought and
triumphed through most of the world as known to the Northmen. Thus, Frankland,
England, Ireland, Scotland were brought into a closer unity through the common
danger, while as the sea-kings founded settled
states, and these grew by alliance, first with one another and then with their
older Christian victims, as the Norse kingdoms themselves became parts of Latin
Christendom, after Latin Christendom had itself been revived and re-awakened by
their attacks, the full value of the time of trial came out on both sides, to
conquered and to conquerors.
For the effects—formative, invigorative, provocative,—of the Northern
invasions had a most direct bearing on the expansion that was to come in the
next age even for those staid and sober Western countries, England and France
and Italy, which had long passed through their time of migration, and where the
Vikings could not, as in the far north-east and north-west, extend the area of
civilisation or geographical knowledge.
Lastly, the new start made by England in exploration, and trade, and even
in pilgrimage, is plainly the result—in action and reaction—of the Norse and
Danish attacks, waking up the old spirit of a kindred race, of elder cousins
that had sunk into lethargy and forgotten their seamanship.
But from the Peace of Wedmore (878) Alfred first of all began to build an
English navy able to meet and chase and run down the Viking keels; then established
a yearly pilgrimage and alms-giving at the Threshold of the Apostles in Rome;
then sent out various captains in his service to explore as much of the world
as was practicable for his new description of Europe. His crowning effort in
religious extension was in 883, when Sigehelm and
Athelstan bore Alfred's gifts and letters to Jerusalem and to India, to the
Christians of San Thomé; the corresponding triumph of the King's scientific
exploration, the discoveries in the White Sea and the Baltic, seem to have
happened nearer the end of the reign, somewhere before 895.
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