Travelling Hopefully - Norse Interloper Edition

St Anthony is a small town in the northeast of Newfoundland and it’s where my holiday really began everything preceding merely being a sleep deprived prelude.  St Anthony is served by a bijou airportette which is marginally closer to St Anthony than St Johns which I had left just over an hour earlier.  Fortunately there was somebody waiting to pick me up and drive me through the wilderness to my hotel.  I gargled incoherently at the receptionist and she threw a key at me and backed away slowly.

The next day eight hours of restful sleep was enough to inform me that I needed more than eight hours of restful sleep.  After breakfast I was met by a cheerful individual named Ed who would be Virgil to my Dante and my pipeline to all things cetacean.  But first, Vikings!  Or at least somewhere Vikings used to be.  Or at the very least somewhere they stopped off on their way to somewhere more interesting.

L’anse aux Meadows  is a UNESCO world heritage site.  It’s called L’anse aux Meadows because very few tourists would come to visit Peatbog by the Sea.  One of the people who did visit Peatbog  by the Sea was Leif Erickson.  He and his crew were on a voyage of discovery, specifically they were trying to discover resources they could haul back home.  Home was Greenland and it had a problem.  Some time earlier Leif’s father, Erik Leifsdad had suckered a bunch of people into moving from Iceland to Greenland.  On paper that sounds sensible, in reality not so much.  The principal problem with Greenland (and Iceland too for that matter) was a distinct lack of trees.  For a people utterly dependent on seafaring the lack of harvestable timber was a disaster.  When a merchant turned up in Greenland with some crazy story of being blown off course and encountering a land covered in trees that was enough for Leif to kit out a longship and head points west.

Well, Leif found the trees all right on the coast of Labrador but rather than call it a day he sailed south eventually pitched up at Peatbog by the Sea.  The reasons appear to have been a mixture of profit and strategy.  Peatbog by the Sea was well placed to control a number of shipping lanes including those to the vital Labrador forests but it also seems Leif wanted more.  The timber was the bread but he wanted a little jam too.  He named the region Vinland, the Land of Grapes.   No grapes grew in the area but they did grow further south and this was a useful staging post.

Incidentally the name Peatbog by the Sea may sound unappealing to us but it’s unlikely the Vikings would have agreed.  To them it meant peat (a building material), bog iron (useful for ship repairs) fresh water and, by extrapolation, fish.  Building a base here suddenly doesn’t seem so silly after all.  And a base is all it was.  It was never a colony or a permanent settlement, just a place the Vikings could sail into, overwinter, conduct ship repairs and trade with the locals.

I didn’t know any of the above going in so I was a little surprised at the small size of the settlement, just two or three longhouses and some ancillary buildings.  You can’t actually see the buildings because the Vikings burnt them down when they left.  Archaeologists dug up the remains but when they were finished doing whatever it is archaeologists do they buried them again.  Apparently to preserve the site in case they want to dig it up again one day.

There is however a replica longhouse so that visitors can see how Vikings would have lived if they had been subject to modern Canadian health and safety laws.  The doorways to a longhouse were only four feet high (for obvious, head chopping reasons) but the replica has six foot high entrances so that people don’t bang their head.  Also the fire inside is fueled by propane after the original (and much more authentic) wood fire was implicated in an unfortunate replica burning down incident.  All of which may go some way to explaining why the Vikings were much feared sea warriors and the Canadians aren’t.