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Today it is little disputed that the Norse reached North
America long before Columbus. Whether they were the first
Europeans to do so, whether they found this continent on their
own, or merely followed Irish monks vainly seeking meditative
peace is still the subject of argument.
Helge Ingstad’s 1961 discovery of a Norse settlement outside
L’Anse aux Meadows at Newfoundland’s northern tip gave the
long-standing speculation regarding the location of Vinland a
benchmark on the ground. Nevertheless, the Vinland of the
extant sagas and the L’Anse aux Meadows site are not easily
reconciled and a cottage industry remains active advocating
other sites anywhere from Florida to, incredibly, Ungava Bay
on the south side of Hudson Strait west of Labrador and even
the western shore of Hudson Bay.
Without new and conclusive documentary evidence we will
probably never know Vinland’s true location or extent. The
ravages of four centuries of coastal development careless of
archeological niceties have probably long-since destroyed any
evidence on the ground. Unless, of course, it really was
north of L’Anse aux Meadows.
Personally, I think advocates of a northern Vinland are, to
tell an old joke, looking for it ‘where the light is better’
rather than where it was lost. Vinland’s most likely location
was on the eastern seaboard somewhere between Cape Cod and
Prince Edward Island, and the best explanation for the site at
L’Anse aux Meadows is that it represents a waystation not
mentioned in either of the surviving sagas (or to credit
another possibility, mentioned in a way we can no longer
interpret properly).
Disregarding the ‘Vinland industry’ that has wandering
Norsemen as far west as Alaska and as far south as the Gulf of
Mexico, there is substantial documentary and physical evidence
that Norse Greenlanders did opportunistically exploit the
proximity of the continent for trade goods such as ivory and
falcons and for the timber so sadly lacking on their own great
island. It also seems reasonable to believe that the Canadian
north, untroubled by the pervasive coastal development of the
south, still hides important evidence of the unrecorded
travels of these ordinary hunters and traders. Their graves
and campsites may never be found, but in the arctic
backcountry of northern Quebec a more substantial token of
their commerce may have already been uncovered along the
Payne. And like the L’Anse aux Meadows site far to the south,
despite its remote location the Payne Lake site may represent
only a waystation, not the Norsemen’s ultimate
destination.
The interior of Ungava is a land of modest hills, thousands of
small ponds and lakes, and billions of mosquitoes. Several of
the larger lakes communicate with the sea, and by exploiting
these waterways, it is possible to cross the peninsula by
small boat. One of these inland waterways reaches the centre
of the peninsula at 55-mile-long Payne Lake by way of the
Arnaud River from Payne Bay, the northernmost of two
substantial inlets on Ungava Bay’s west coast (the other is
Leaf Bay). In 1964 and 1965 Thomas Lee excavated a series of
structures on the south shore of the lake. By Lee’s
interpretation, among the structures were the remains of two
buildings built of heavy stone blocks and with square corners,
one 16 x 12 feet and the other 16 x 46 feet with ‘a European
style wall fireplace’ that reminded him of a church. He also
found structures he described as a stone dam 37 feet long and
adjacent to it, a stone causeway 27 feet long and 8 feet wide.
Shoreline structures on the Arnaud River and Payne Bay - the
so-called ‘Thor’s Hammer’ and the great ‘beacon cairns’ on the
nearby coast of Ungava Bay - further fueled his claim that
the Greenlanders migrated to northern Quebec in the 14th
century. This notion is unsupportable, and in Lee’s later
years he was isolated from the archaeological community. Now,
Thomas Lee was a large man with an even larger wounded pride,
and he gave little reason for anyone to reconsider his work;
yet his field work was good and we still lack a satisfying
explanation for what he found.
In the Greenlander’s eyes L’Anse aux Meadows must have
compared very favorably with their native settlements in all
regards save the remoteness of its location and possibly
aboriginal friction. A permanent settlement is at least
conceivable there. The same cannot be said for central Ungava.
If Lee’s discoveries are indeed Norse they represent
considerable energy expended in one of the least attractive
locations in North America.
Taking a page from those ‘Johnnies-come-lately’ the traders
of the Hudson’s Bay Company who faced similar conditions in
similarly unattractive places, one possibility is trade. It
could be that the Payne Lake remains are those of a trading
post that once served a more widespread commerce pushing west
into Hudson Bay.
Would the annual ejection of ice from the Hudson Bay system,
the strong outflow in Hudson Strait, or the local prevailing
winds separately or in combination present a significant
problem of navigation to a Norse knorr westbound in Hudson
Strait in a typical year? If so, there might have been a
compelling reason for hypothetical Norse traders to pioneer
and exploit a trans-Ungava trade route passing through Payne
Lake.
Could the significant investment in infrastructure at Payne
Lake and elsewhere that a trans-Ungava trade route would have
required be justified by any reasonable estimate of the trade
it might have carried? It can be safely said on the basis of
the Lee sites that, if such a trade route did exist, it would
have had an eastern terminus a Payne Bay.
I believe Payne Bay was not only accessible to the Norse, but
was visited routinely (if not frequently). The reasons are
less clear, but the ivory trade and the unique opportunity for
the Norse to leverage their ability to transport timber may
have motivated them. Neither would seem to require a trading
post in the interior, however, so the mystery at Payne Lake
remains.
George
Sollish is an amateur historian with a keen interest in the
mysterious travels of the Norse in northern Quebec. He lives
in Syracuse NY. |
