Conference turris::scandia

    The first recorded contact with the indigenous "indians" came in
    the year following Leif's first landing at Vinland.
    
    The sagas also recount that relations became increasingly 
    strained, and some bloodshed ensued.  The name the Vikings gave
    to the indigenous peoples ("Skraellingjer") was not complementary
    and may have referred to the "war whoops" these people employed.
    There was much misunderstanding of purpose and harrassment on 
    both sides.  Arguements tended to focus on bad faith bargaining,
    especially over weapons (which the Vikings at first refused to 
    exchange) and women [what else is new!?!].    

    Contact with Europeans in the intervening centuries was less 
    traumatic.  Climatic changes in the North Atlantic had destroyed 
    the viability of the Viking settlement in Greenland by the end of 
    the 13th century.  After that, contact between Europe and New 
    England involved mainly mutual fishing interests.  Thus, by the 
    time the Mayflower landed, the local tribemen had a more beinign 
    view of Europeans, and even had had diplomatic missions to England.
  
    Alas, first impressions are sometime prophetic, for the 
    suffering the Amerindians were to endure at the hands of "white
    men" would turn out to be many times greater than the minor
    skirmishes with the first vistors - the Vikings.

    Neil    

    Also from my son's history term paper: 
    
    One of the more famous finds, related to the viking presence in North
    America, is the Maine Penny.  This was a Viking coin, minted during
    the reign of Olaf Kyrri (the Gentle) 1067-1093, and discovered during
    an archeological excavation for Indian artifacts at Naskeag Point,
    between Penobscot and Blue Hill Bays.  The coin was probably given
    as an item of trade (as for furs). 
    
    Other Norse artifacts recovered from North American sites include:
    a sword, from Aillik in northern Ladrador; an axe, iron chisels
    and boat rivets, from Sops Arm, White Bay, Newfoundland; an axe
    with the maker's name inscribed, made in about 1000 A.D., from Tor
    Bay, Nova Scotia; the Moulton-Orleans axe, of Norse design, from
    Cape Cod.
    
    Additionally, from parts of North America as distant as Long Island
    and Minnesota have come boat hooks, mooring stones, and various
    weapons.
    
    Besides the sagas, documents from the latter part of the 
    middle ages include these references to New World contact:
    
    o Vatican records of bishops visiting Vinland
    
    o Cargo manifests listing turkeys (indigenous to N. America but
      not found elswhere)
    
    o Records in the Norwegian State Archives of Paul Knutson's missionary
      expedition to the western shore of the Great Lakes

A hilarious version of the story of Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid
can be found in the SF novel "The Technicolor Time-Machine" by (I
think) Harry Harrison.  Spoiler follows.


It seems this low-budget film studio makes use of a crazy professor's
time machine to go back and make an epic film about Thorfinn, using
real Vikings as actors, so as to save on sets, costumes, and (of
course) actors salaries.

So they find this guy, teach him enough English (they have an expert
in Old Norse along as translator/teacher) and talk him into making
the trip to Vinland so they can film it.  After they get there, it
turns out that this guy is the real Thorfinn Karlsefni, and the only
reason he made the trip was because the film producer paid him to do it.

(Gudrid is actually the bimbo 20th century actress taken along to
play the love interest.)

    It was, indeed, by Harry Harrison. It originally appeared in Analog
    magazine in the 60s (unsure of date) as 'The Time Machined Saga'.
    Darn good story and very funny.

Associated Press Mon 03-MAR-1986 17:25                                Vikings

    PARIS (AP) - Two groups announced plans Monday to celebrate the
    1,000th anniversary of the discovery of North America by the
    Vikings starting Oct. 9, Leif Ericsson Day.
    
    The groups are ``1,000 Years America,'' a French, Norwegian and
    Canadian organization that is producing a film series to mark the
    occasion, and the American-Scandinavian Foundation of New York.
    
    Organizers said the celebrations also will include a gala at the
    Kennedy Center in Washington, concerts, symposiums, a sailing race
    with Viking boats and an automobile rally.
    
    Film producer Jacques Fournier told a press luncheon that Viking
    sailor Bjarni Herjolfsson saw the coast of America when his ship
    was blown south while on his way to Greenland in the year 986. 
    
    Later Ericsson, a Norse explorer traveling from Norway to
    Greenland, is believed to have set foot on American soil and
    collected specimens of grapes, wheat and a species of wood not
    known in Europe.
    
    "The idea is not to cast doubt on Columbus, whose voyage still
    retains all its importance and prestige," Fournier said. "But he
    has had enough publicity. Now it's time to pay attention to Leif
    Ericsson."
    
    The Italian explorer Christopher Columbus is generally
    acknowledged to have discovered America when he landed on an island
    in the Bahamas in 1492.
    
    Fournier referred to a resolution passed by the U.S. Congress in
    1964 that requires the president to proclaim Oct. 9 each year as
    Leif Ericsson Day and said the idea behind the festivities was to
    make the proclamation more than a piece of administrative paper.
    
    Plans for the celebration took shape when Fournier and two
    colleagues, Serge Roux and Maurice Rollet, began working on a
    television series that tells the story of Ericsson and his father,
    Eric the Red, the Norse discoverer and colonizer of Greenland.
    
    Robin Moore, author of ``The French Connection,'' has written
    the script for the $17 million series. Filming is expected to begin
    in April at locations in Norway, Iceland and Canada.

    
    RE:  .7  "Mowat missives"
    
    Try your local public Library for the works of Farley Mowat. The
    title of his rather extensive work on the Norse settlements on
    Newfoundland is titled, I believe, "Westviking".
    
    His latest book, which I just picked up, but haven't read yet, is
    entitled "My Discovery of America", published by the Atlantic Monthly
    Press.  It is the story of how he was banned from speaking in the
    United States by the U.S. immigration authoritys, or the State Dept.
    or somebody.  The cover illustration is a cartoon of a hirsute Mowat,
    naked, save a strategically placed Maple Leaf.

    
    

    From the Bibliography of my son's Term paper "Viking Explorations
    of North America"
    
    Boorstin, Daniel J., The Discoverers, Random House, 1983.
    Cameron, Ian, Lodestone and Evening Star, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1965.
    Morison, Samuel Eliot, The European Discovery of North America
    Pohl, Fredrick J., Atlantic Crossings Before Columbus, W.W. Norton
         & Co., 1961.

	[Moved by moderator]
================================================================================
Note xxx.0         Leif the Lucky, found America ca 1000 A.D.         No replies
FSTVAX::ROYER "blue_demense..magic is music"         51 lines   6-OCT-1989 08:41
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 9th is Leif Erikson Day,  He found Vinland about 500 years before
Columbus sailed.

This is copied from the Morgensolen Nyhete October 1989 Issue.

  Leif, a Son of Erik the Red, went to Bjarni Herjulfsson, bought his ship and 
hired a crew for it so that in all they were 35 men.  They sailed out to sea 
and found first the land which Bjarni had seen last.  They went ashore.  NO
grass grew there and great glaciers were seen inland.  Then said Leif: "Now
it has gone better with us than with Bjarni, who came here and did not go 
ashore.  Now I will call this land Helluland."
  
  After that they sailed out on the sea and found another land.  This land
was flat and covered with woods, and there were extensive white sands, and
the beach was not steep.  Then said Leif:  "This land shall be named according 
to its nature and it shall be called 'Markland'. (Woodland)

  After that they were on the sea two days before they saw land.  They sailed
into the sound between the island and a cape which stretched northward from
the coast, and steered westward past the cape.  The water was so shallow there 
that the ship ran aground and stood dry at ebbtide.  At the next high tide they
took it up through the river into the lake, anchored, and carried their 
leather bags ashore.  They first built wooden huts, but later they decided to
remain there during the winter and they built then large houses.

  Salmon, larger than they had seen before, were plentiful in the river and
the lake.  The land seemed to them so good that there would be no need of 
storing fodder for the cattle for the winter; there came no frost in the 
winters, and the grass withered but little.

  It was found one night that one of their men was missing, and that was 
Tyrker Southman.  Leif reprimanded his men severely and prepared to go in
search of him with 12 men.  But when they were only a short distance from the
house, they were met by Tyrker, whom they received with great joy.  Leif saw
at once that his foster-father was not in his right senses.  Leif said to him,
"Why were you so late, foster-father, and why did you part from the others?"
At first he spoke in German for a long time, and rolled his eyes, and twisted
his mouth when they did not understand what he said.  After some time he spoke
in the Norse tongue: "I did not go much farther, and yet I have discovered
something new, I have found vines and Grapes."

  In the morning Leif said, "We will now divide our labors, and each day we
will either gather vines and grapes or cut trees to obtain a cargo for my ship."
This advice was followed.  It is said that their after-boat was filled with 
grapes.  When spring came, they made ready and sailed away,  And Leif gave the 
land a name in accordance with its products, and called it VINLAND.

Have a Happy Leif Erikson Day.  The above is excerpted from the earlier
Greenlander's Saga.

Dave

    Many years ago (I think in the late 50's) I had a book titled "The
    Vikings on Cape Cod" written by (you won't believe it) Fredrik Pohl.
    He used the exact geographical desciptions from the sagas and
    calculated that Leif & the boys wintered on Bass River on the Cape.
    He actually managed to organize a dig, found some "evidence" (though
    not really hard evidence) but was unable to continue with the dig
    as the property was part of a real-estate development for houses
    and they wanted to get on with the job.
    
    I regret that I don't have the book any more.  does anyone know
    anything about it? Anybody heard whether Fredrick Pohl did any later
    work on this topic?
    
    Mauritz
    

    Copied from lead article in _At the Bay Campus_, the University of
    Rhode Island, Grad, Sch. of Oceanography newletter for Alumni and
    friends:
                                                                         
    Leif Eiriksson and his Viking Crew sailed 5,300 miles across the
    Atlantic in seach of Vinland (a place where grapes grew in abundance)
    landing here 1,000 years ago. This month, the descendents of the
    historic crew, under the command of Ragnar Thorseth, will return via
    the same route used by Eiriksson. But this time, they'll be promoting
    global environmental responsibility.

    Captain Thorseth is sailing an exact replica of a Viking longship
    [Gaia] which was found preserved in the blue clay of the Norwegian
    coast. This voyage reflects the Norwegians' concern about world
    environmental problems and is jointly sponsored by the Norwegian and
    Icelandic governments and Royal Viking Lines.

    Thorseth has rowed across the North Sea, visited the North Pole, and
    sailed the Viking ship _Saga Siglar_ around the world. Modern-day
    _Gaia_, equipped with modern navigational equipment, is also carrying
    David Lomax, a BBC journalist who is filming a documentary entitled
    "The Hunters and the Homeseekers."

    _Gaia_ set sail on May 17 from Bergen and will stop in Iceland,
    Greenland, and Canada before coming to the United States with visits to
    Boston (Sept. 11), Newport and the Graduate School of Oceanography
    (Sept. 20-23), New York City (Sept. 23) and Washington, D.C. (Oct. 9)

    From: clarinews@clarinet.com (UPI)
    Newsgroups: clari.news.interest,clari.news.europe,clari.tw.science
    Subject: Danes claim mollusk discovery proves Vikings discovered America
    Date: Tue, 27 Oct 92 14:39:34 PST
 
	COPENHAGEN, Denmark (UPI) -- Danish scientists Tuesday said they have
found hard evidence, in the form of a small mollusk, to prove claims in
old Norse sagas that Vikings discovered the Americas 500 years before
Christopher Columbus.
	"There's no doubt. Columbus was 500 years late. The Vikings
discovered, landed on and traded with the American continent hundreds of
years previously," said Kaj Strand Petersen, scientific head of
Denmark's Geological Survey.
	Petersen, a group of archaeologists and scientists made their claim
following the discovery of large numbers of fossils of the Mya Arenaria
or American soft-shell clam in geological layers in Skagen, the
northwestern tip of Denmark.
	"We were studying the various layers and deposits around Skagen. One
of the mollusk samples played back at AD 1245," he added.
	Carbon 14 and accelerator mass spectrometry tests were used to date
the sample of the Mya Arenaria mussel. They are the most precise methods
available to scientists, and can date material to within a decade.
	Petersen said that Mya Arenaria has its natural habitat only on the
American east coast, from New York upwards. Zoologists have determined
that its larvae could not have spread spontaneously to Europe and it can
only have been brought to Europe by man.
	The Danish claims seem to verify accounts in handwritten Viking saga
texts of the discovery in AD 1000 by Leif The Happy of a country he
called Vinland or Wineland. But the evidence came as no surprise to saga
researchers.
	"We have known for ages that the Vikings discovered America. Apart
from the fact that we have the documentary evidence of the sagas,
archaeologists have also found settlements in the north that we are sure
could only be viking settlements," said Marianne Overgaard, researcher
at the Arnamagneanske Institute for saga research.
	"The Vikings left the Americas because they found the natives and
lifestyle inhospitable, but they were the first to colonize the place,"
she concluded.
	According to the sagas, the Norse navigator Leif Ericsson, son of
Eric the Red, set foot on America for the first time in the year AD
1000. The new discovery in Denmark suggests that Leif and the Vikings
who came after him not only provisioned wheat and local beverages, but
also clam.
	"Mya Arenaria probably survived in the bottom of the Viking
longboats where it had been kept in water to survive as food, and found
its new home in Europe when the Vikings washed out their vessels after
their long journey," said Petersen.
	Until this week's Danish discovery, Mya Arenaria was believed to have
been brought to Europe by English or French colonizers who brought the
American soft clam back to Europe around 1542 or 50 years after Columbus
reached the New World.
	"That myth is now definitively cracked," said Petersen.
	The Vinland Saga recounts that Leif Ericson was born in Iceland 970,
but moved to Greenland in 986. In 999 he visited the Norwegian King Olaf
Tryggvason, but on his way home his vessel was blown off course and he
landed near present-day Nova Scotia.
	From that area he is said to have explored the coastline further
south. Eirik's Saga says of the Viking expedition to America, "Leif set
sail when he was ready; he ran into prolonged difficulties at sea, and
finally came upon lands whose existence he had never suspected. There
were fields of wild wheat growing there, and vines, and among the trees
there were maples. They took some samples of all these things."
	On his return to Iceland where he died in 1020, the sagas say that
Leif The Happy's tales of rich fields and succulent vines inspired other
Viking expeditions to America from Greenland and Iceland in the
following years.

    From: oddms@eik.ii.uib.no (OddMagne Sekkingstad)
    Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
    Subject: Re: The Vikings!
    Date: 15 Dec 1993 03:25:14 GMT
    Organization: Institute of Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway
 
 
    The British researcher Dr. G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, ah studied all the
    details of Bjarne's account after they turned around and started the
    voyage home, and has offered the following interpretation:

    "After sailing one <<do"gr>> to the north, they reached a flat land
    that seems reminiscent of the area of Cape Cod on the American east
    coast. It is important to note in this context that a do"gr refers not
    to time, but to a distance of 144 nautic miles. They kept the land
    behind them on the port side, and continued on a northeasterly cource
    for two do"gr (288 nautical miles) across the Gulf of Maine. Here they
    discovered a new land (Nova Scotia), that was hilly and forested. The
    wind died down while they where sailing along this coast, and for a
    while they were compleatly dead in the water. The men wanted to sail
    toward the coast and go ashore. But Bjarne was not interested. He was
    not an explorer, and all he owned in this world -a cargo of wares from
    Norway- was stored in the hull of his ship. They had already lost a lot
    of time. The crew complained that they needed both water and wood for
    their on board hearth, but Bjarne said they didn't need either.

    Then the wind quickened. Unfortunately the saga doesn't specify how
    much time they spent sailing by the lands they saw; we are only told
    the distance between each. The ship was now in open ocean for 4 do'gr
    (576 nautical miles) before they reached a new land that is belived to
    have been Newfoundland. They apparently sailed the inner channel,
    because the description says that this was an "island land", as opposed
    to the two previous ones. There were mountains as well. But Greenland
    it was not, so Bjarne decided he did not whant to go ashore.

    They headed out to sea on a southwesterly wind that increased in
    strenght to a gale gale force storm. The ship was going so fast that
    Bjarne ordered the sail reefed. This was done with help of ropes sewn
    into the sail. For a while Bjarne was afraid they would lose rigging
    entirely, so this must have been quite a storm......"
 
    All in all Bjarne used something like two to three weeks after turning
    back from the American coast.
                                 
  -- 
  Odd-Magne