Arctic Obsession - Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

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by the sun and stars, Leif headed in the direction indicated by his friend and in time a barren country came into view, largely covered by glaciers, “but from the sea to the glaciers was, as it were, a single slab of rock.” The ice-bound land bore little resemblance to Bjarni’s description, for it was neither mountainous nor forested. This disappointing place Leif called Helluland, or “the Land of Flat Rocks,” reckoned to be the southern reaches of Baffin Island. Three more days of sailing brought him to a place that “was flat and covered with forest, with extensive white sands wherever they went and shelving gently to the sea,” and this he named Markland, thought to be southern Labrador.

      Continuing south along the coastline, Leif finally came to a point of land with rolling grassland, spruce forests, and a stream “that glistened with salmon.” So pleasing was this discovery that he determined to winter at the spot, and with no small delight the party set about constructing houses and barns. As they were settling down, one of the crewmembers, thought to be a Hungarian or a German, came upon “wine berries” growing freely. It’s popularly believed that these were grapes, but caution must be exercised here for the Norse called most berries vinbery. Most likely the discovered were cranberries, but be that as it may, Leif called the place “Vinland.” And here the first European settlement in the New World came to be established, nearly four centuries before Columbus “sailed the ocean blue” to America. The life of Leif’s settlement was short-lived, for within two years the would-be colonists forsook the place and returned to Greenland. A further attempt was made by the Vikings to establish in the New World, but here again it was met by failure. The sagas tell us that in both cases fighting broke out with the hostile “Skærlings,” which simply proved too much for the Norse. Today the remains of Leif’s site have been preserved by the Canadian government at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northernmost point of Newfoundland nearly across from Labrador.

      At about the time that Erik and Leif were planting footprints in the Arctic regions of the New World, other Norsemen were pressing east and infiltrating the territory soon to become known as Russia. Othere’s penetration of the White Sea had been made nearly a century-and-a-half earlier. In the decades that followed, his countrymen arrived in numbers not only into Arctic regions, but into more southern areas below Kola and the White Sea. This was the land of the Slavs, a semi-Asiatic people scattered about in small settlements within an unframed world of endlessly stretching spaces, a harsh land of empty plains, miasmic marshes, forbidding forests, parching summers, and arctic snows. So focused were these people on coping with hostile nature that little energy remained for more refined activity or for the development of social organization. While the Latin and Teutonic peoples were developing dynamically in the west, the Slavs, as one historian put it, “slumbered in oriental seclusion … and pursued their way without Latin or scholasticism, without parliament or university, without literature or political debate, or a sustained challenge to religious belief.”[6] The Slavs were in Europe without being European.

      It was in this land, where abundant river systems offered ideal avenues for trade, that the Norse merchant-warriors focused their energies. Trading posts were established, the natives engaged, and with the passing of time a burgeoning commerce developed with Novgorod serving as the pivotal point. This city is one of Russia’s oldest and at its height, along with Kiev in the south, it was the richest. From this eastern-most outpost of north Europe’s Hanseatic League, goods were shipped to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean along the connecting river system, to places as far away as Sicily. Furs, amber, wax, honey, and slaves streamed south in return for spices, wines, silk, and gems, which were then forwarded on to northern European markets.

      Novgorod expanded rapidly from a prosperous commercial hub into a flourishing independent city-state that reached far out into neighbouring territories. By the thirteenth century, its expansionist-minded merchants found themselves hemmed in. To the west the threatening Swedes and the Teutonic knights were well entrenched. To the south and east, the fierce Mongols had established themselves — Genghis Khan’s “Golden Horde” in the world’s largest empire ever. The only direction remaining for Novgorodians to expand was north into the Arctic.

      Thus it was that a migration of sorts got under way with merchants, peasants, and churchmen leaving the city to plant themselves on the shores of the White Sea or along the banks of the numerous rivers flowing into it. For the most part these pioneers were experienced rivermen and now they adeptly navigated the waterways pushing ever north and creating settlements. By late fourteenth century, most of the Arctic regions west of the Urals had come under Novgorod’s control — a continuation of Russian expansion.

      Of Arctic coastal nations today, Russian territory extends along the longest global spread of any — nearly half the world, across ten time zones from the Norwegian border to the Bering Sea. Twenty percent of that immense country is situated in the Arctic with over 10 million Russians calling it home. It has always been the most populated of Arctic lands, not only with indigenous peoples, but with Europeans. The city of greater Murmansk at 68°30' N boasts a population of 850,000.

      The medieval pioneers arriving in those parts were inexperienced in the ways of the Arctic, but they managed masterfully, enduring all the adverse conditions the pitiless Arctic threw at them. Winter temperatures steadily reading -40°F were one thing, but psychologically, imagine the isolation: “As far as the eye could see in the gathering gloom, in every direction lay the barren steppe. There was not a tree nor a bush … only silence and desolation. The country seemed abandoned by God and man to the Arctic Spirit …” It was the early hunters and trappers who penetrated that “gathering gloom,” paving the way for others, and it was they who most forcefully coped with the early challenges of daily life — shelter, food, clothing, firewood, and transport. Lessons were learned through trial and error and one might well wonder why it took these hardies decades to adapt to the ways of the indigenous peoples, the Nanets, who for millennia had been surviving brilliantly in the same demanding conditions. All the while that the trappers and hunters suffered at their tasks, Novgorod merchants, comfortably ensconced in the warmth of their homes, toyed with bottom-lines and hatched fresh schemes for further development and deeper thrusts into the Arctic.

      The Arctic, however, did smile upon these arrivals, and she showered them with rich rewards of luxuriant furs. The exceptional cold of the place is such that fur-bearing animals like ermine, marten, fox, and hare develop thicker coats than those of their southern cousins, therefore making them more desirable and valuable. In addition to furs, walrus tusks were harvested, as well as polar bear skins and the occasional nugget of some esoteric mineral, all in high demand in the parlours of Novgorod, Moscow, and throughout Europe.

      * * *

      With the impetus of Columbus’s discovery in 1492, the “Age of Exploration” quickly got under way. No seafaring nation of importance failed to dispatch one explorer or another to seek out fresh channels to fabled Cathay (China) or Cipango (Japan), or to claim new lands. Relying mostly on the talents of Genoese navigators, Spain and Portugal grabbed the early initiative and before long the two countries had claimed vast areas of South America and Africa. And it was upon these two countries that Pope Alexander VI lavished his munificence in 1494. With a stroke of a pen on a primitive map, he divided the world into two parts, allocating the western hemisphere to Spain and the eastern hemisphere to Portugal — the Line of Demarcation. To these kingdoms now fell the onus of bringing Christianity to the indigenous of lands discovered and uncovered, but in return the two countries were accorded exclusive rights to trade and commercial development in their respective parts. With their advanced fleets and determination of purpose, the Spanish rapidly established supremacy over South America and the Portuguese over Africa — as the navies of the two patrolled the coasts guarding Vatican-granted monopolies.

      Aspiring maritime nations of Northern Europe — England, France, Holland, and Denmark — found themselves locked out from trade as well as exploration in southern regions. If a trade route to the east was to be had, it could only be via a northern passage. The sixteenth-century historian Richard Hakluyt declared, “Beside the portion of land pertaining to the Spaniards … there yet remaineth another portion of that main land reaching toward the northeast, thought to be as large as the other, and not yet known … neither inhabited by any Christian man …”

      Thus a fresh chapter in

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