Erikson, Eskimos & Columbus: Medieval European Knowledge of America

By James Robert Enterline

This revealing analysis of Medieval cartography and native American travel upends conventional narratives about discovering the New World.

For generations, American schools have taught children that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. But evidence shows that Leif Erikson set foot on the continent centuries earlier. As debate continues over which explorer deserves the credit, early maps of North America suggest that we may be asking the wrong questions. How did medieval Europeans have such specific geographic knowledge of North America, a land even their most daring adventurers had not yet discovered?

In Erikson, Eskimos, and Columbus, James Robert Enterline presents new evidence that traces this knowledge to the cartographic skills of indigenous people of the high Arctic, who, he contends, provided the basis for medieval maps of large parts of North America. Drawing on an exhaustive chronological survey of pre-Columbian maps, including the controversial Yale Vinland Map, this book boldly challenges conventional accounts of Europe’s discovery of the New World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780801875472

Book preview

ILLUSTRATIONS

Front map North polar map

1. Native Eskimo map of Southampton Island and aerial survey map

2. Seward Peninsula, Kotzebue Sound area, Alaska

3. Seward Peninsula and Claudius Clavus’s 1427 map of Scandinavia

4. Sideways view of Foxe Basin and Southampton Island area

5. Canadian Arctic coast and Arctic Archipelago

6. Transformation of Vinland Map with Greenland scale corrected

7. Outline map of Baffin Island, west of Greenland

8. Hypothetical regional maps of Baffin Island

9. Incorrect placement of accurate regional maps to simulate Vinilanda Insula

10. Geographic north compared with current magnetic north

11. World map of Claudius Ptolemy, A.D. 168

12. Anglo-Saxon Map, ca. A.D. 1000

13. Reconstruction of Adam of Bremen’s conceptions, A.D. 1076

14. Misattribution to Heinrich of Mainz, early 1200s

15. Views of Eid pass from Greenland cathedral ruin

16. Svartenhuk neighborhood of Greenland 108

17. Psalter Map, ca. 1250–1300

18. Hereford map northwest region closeup, 1280

19. Mariners’ chart by Giovanni Carignano, ca. 1300

20. Scandinavia by Petrus Vesconte, 1320

21. Vesconte’s map in Sanudo’s book, Oxford MS, ca. 1320

22. Vesconte’s (or Paulino’s) map in Sanudo’s book, Paris MS, ca. 1320

23. The Northwest by Angelino Dalorto, 1325

24. Norse runestone found in cairn on island of Kingigtorssuaq 128

25. Medici (Laurentian) marine chart, 1351

26. Catalan map fragment in Istanbul, ca. 1380

27. Pierre D’Ailly’s Seventh Figure, 1410

28. Albertin de Virga’s 1415 world map

29. Detail of Figure

30. Two world maps by Duminicus Ducier, 1422, and a 1439 annotation

31. North Atlantic nautical chart, 1424

32. Claudius Clavus’s 1427 map of the North

33. Reconstruction from the Vienna-Klosterneuburg coordinate table Cosmography of 7 Climates, 1425–50

34. Reconstruction from the Vienna-Klosterneuburg coordinate table New Cosmography, 1425–50

35. Circular world map by Andrea Bianco, 1436, to accompany sailing charts

36. Vinland Map at Yale University, ca. 1440

37. World map by Andrea Walsperger, 1448

38. Vienna-Klosterneuburg Schyfkarte, before 1450

39. Catalan map in Florence, northern portion, 1440–1450

40. Catalan map in Modena, ca. 1450

41. Genoese map in Florence, 1457

42. Detail of disk-style world map by Fra Mauro, 1459

43. Nicholaus Germanus’s map of the North in the Zamoiski Codex, ca. 1467–74

44. Detail of Europe from Nicholaus Germanus’s world of ca. 1467–74

45. Scandinavia by Henricus Martellus, ca. 1480

46. Northwest Europe by Henricus Martellus, ca. 1481

47. World map by Nicholaus Germanus in Ulm Ptolemy, 1482

48. Reconstruction of Martin Behaim’s globe, 1492

49. Sketch map by Bartholomew Columbus, 1503

50. Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 world map

51. Cantino map, 1502

52. Giovanni Contarini’s planisphere, 1506

53. Old World hemisphere by Martin Waldseemüller, 1507

54. Johann Ruysch’s planisphere, 1507–8

55. Chart known as Kunstmann III, ca. 1509

56. World map from the Strassburg Ptolemy, 1513

57. Gored map of Northern Hemisphere by Johann Schöner, 1515

58. Western Hemisphere from Johann Schöner’s globe of 1520

59. Sketch showing Great Arctic Strait, ca. 1530

60. Western Hemisphere from Johann Schöner’s globe of 1533

61. Double cordiform planisphere by Orontius Finaeus, 1531

62. Western Hemisphere from Paris Gilt Globe, 1530

63. Stuttgart gores, 1530s 268

64. Cordiform planisphere by Orontius Finaeus, 1534–36

65. Scandinavia by Jacob Ziegler, 1532

66. Scandinavia by Olaus Magnus, 1539

67. The North by Nicolo Zeno, 1558 278

68. North Pole and Greenland-Grocland area, Gerard Mercator, 1569

69. Abraham Ortelius’s map of Tartary, 1570

70. Greenland and Vinland by Sigurdur Stefánsson, 1590

71. Vinland by Hans Poulson Resen, 1605

72. Mappamonde attributed to Christopher Columbus, ca. 1492

DIRECTORY TO THE CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

UNTIL NOW HISTORIANS HAVE ALMOST UNIVERSALLY BELIEVED that Columbus’s encounter with America was completely accidental. Those who ventured to think otherwise assumed that any prior knowledge he might have held about America would have sprung from Leif Erikson’s contact with Vinland. New evidence presented here suggests instead that Eskimo geographical information about a wider America made its way through the Greenland Norsemen into medieval European world maps. In Europe such continental foreknowledge was not immediately correctly perceived, but it gradually drew Europe’s attention westward and may have contributed to the birth of the Age of Discovery. This admittedly radical-sounding idea has grown step by step out of developments in recent decades.

On the eve of Columbus Day 1965, Yale University announced the acquisition of its now famous but controversial Vinland map, presumed at that time to depict Norse America in Canada. Yale’s press release called it the cartographic find of the century, and the map engendered two parallel disputes. The lay world saw it as an attack on a long-honored hero, Columbus. The scholarly world saw it as a completely anomalous document that thrust new problems into many branches of the study of history. Those disputes were not resolved when Yale announced tests in 1974 showing that the map’s ink appeared to contain twentieth-century pigments. The lay world’s unease regarding its hero continues regardless of that map’s authenticity, for there is other evidence establishing beyond any doubt that the Norsemen did encounter North America. While to some people, forgery seemed the obvious explanation and offered resolution of the scholarly dispute, that was not the only possible conclusion from the ink tests. This author in 1977 postulated a natural scenario for the map’s contemporary history that gave an innocent explanation of every known detail of the map’s ink, based on modern pigment contamination, and reinstated a case for the map’s credibility. Other researchers, in the 1980s, came to similar conclusions, minimizing the importance of the anachronistic ink pigments. Still others showed that the pigments might not be anachronistic at all, that they could appear in nature with the observed parameters. In 1995 Yale republished the map, the new press release stating that it stands once again vindicated. Controversy nevertheless continues on many fronts.

Even before the ink controversy, I was working at a resolution of those disputes, entertaining a possibility that the map could preserve genuine information. However, if genuine it probably represents something other than the Canadian seaboard and something other than Leif Erikson’s landfall. I will introduce evidence here to support that possibility. In answer to the scholarly problem of anomaly, I introduce evidence that the Yale Vinland Map is potentially just one member of a large group of pre-Columbian maps all apparently recording Norse contact with America or native Americans. But the Norsemen didn’t know they knew about America. In dozens of Old World maps the Arctic coast of Eurasia shows rich though incorrect detail; Europeans had never been to Arctic Eurasia, nor had they any cartographic knowledge of it. In the past, scholars have explained away these coastlines as fantasies. It occurred to me that many of these details do correspond exactly to features on the Arctic coast of North America instead of Eurasia.

Cartographic correspondence has been discredited by its misuse in some research that reached sensational, implausible conclusions. My approach has been more rigorous, conservative, and plausible. The cartographic examples to be shown are not cryptic but very clear when viewed in the appropriate framework. Post-Columbian maps that contain apparently fanciful coastlines have been increasingly understood by careful historical analysis, and I will do the same for pre-Columbian ones. In addition to the maps, I have sought to identify numerous travelers’ itineraries and geographical descriptions of pre-Columbian America, all providing mutual corroboration. While the Yale Vinland Map suffered for several decades from its uncertain origins, these other documents are of unquestioned provenance and have been catalogued in world-class libraries for centuries. However, historians seem to have overlooked or misunderstood them because, as I will suggest, the maps apparently incorporate a previously unrecognized geographical distortion that was unique to the pre-Columbian mind. That systematic distortion resulting from the misidentification of continents is analyzed herein. The thesis is elaborated in a chronological survey of geographical materials extending from the Norse Late Middle ages down through the post-Columbian Renaissance.

Did Columbus see these documents? Perhaps or perhaps not, but his conceptions of land in the west were inspired by scholars of the generations preceding his, who did see them. There is a way that ruffled feathers in the lay world may still be smoothed: I make an effort to see Columbus as more of a rationally motivated, carefully researching proto-scientist than the way his biographers have described him—strictly a luck-blessed, illogically motivated adventurer.

This work is the promised companion volume to my earlier book, Viking America. Neither is a prerequisite to the other, and each is written to be readable by itself. Nevertheless, issues ancillary to one are taken up in the other. (A few specific matters in the earlier book are reconsidered in the present one, as will become evident.) The prefatory comments made in Viking America apply here also. The polar map on the endpapers of that volume is repeated here at the beginning of the text. I refer to it throughout as the front map and recommend consulting it whenever the discussion enters unfamiliar regions. The more detailed local maps in Figures 2, 4, and 5 should also be noted.

This is not a history book, at least not in the strict sense of the usual deductive methodology of history from written texts. It is a prehistory book that subjects maps and documents, as artifacts, to the inductive methods of archaeology. It is based on the belief that reliable knowledge of the past can be culled from this artifactual record even if it is not spelled out in words. This work falls into place as part of the newly emerging cognitive archaeology. I will not enter into any controversy between new and past schools but will dip into both. In examining how information about America could have reached southern Europe, I have focused on the circumstances of the various documents’ creation and the lives of their creators. Known historical details will be augmented at times by scenarios grounded in a structuralist’s view of human nature. Interdisciplinary support ranging from psychology to physics will be brought to bear. However, the story so constructed is not held out as proven truth. Instead it is a plausible theory to be tested against independent evidence. The day-to-day purpose of science is not the establishment of universal, final explanations but the proposal of testable theories that can serve as stepping stones to still better theories. Nevertheless, the more nearly universal a hypothesis, the more testable it becomes and the more potential it has for spawning still further insights. The conclusions reached here are thus a part of the sciences, subject to adjustment by new evidence or even to being overthrown—or strengthened.

This book, as well as being divided into chapters, is also structured in two parts. The second part is a wide-ranging chronological survey of documentary evidence, namely, the scores of documents supporting the theory that Norse contacts in America had European repercussions. The attention to individual documents there is necessarily limited. Part I examines in greater detail a smaller number of documents. A casual reader might, after completing Part I, wish to read just the chapter summaries and the Conclusion.

MUCH HELPFUL ASSISTANCE in the research for this book deserves to be acknowledged. Obviously, none of these acknowledgments implies any of these individuals’ acceptance of the work’s validity, which may or may not be expressed independently. David Woodward read the full manuscript twice in widely separated versions, giving many useful suggestions and critiques. Earlier versions were also critiqued by Benjamin Olshin and the late Vincent Cassidy. Subtopics in Eskimo archaeology received constructive attention from Robert McGhee and John MacDonald. Lunchtime conversations over the years with Thomas Goldstein gave me ongoing encouragement, and his enduring question of motivation for the discoveries was always in my mind. This research would never have been completed, let alone started, without Alice Hudson, and before her Gerard Alexander, at the New York Public Library. Also importantly, several anonymous (to the author) publisher’s readers served to sharpen the arguments presented here. Last, and far from least, a highly intensive reading of a late version was given by Gregory McIntosh.

The greatest thanks to go my wife, Esther, to whom this book is dedicated. Many authors are thankful, as am I, for their wives’ emotional support and encouragement, but she went further than that. She made it possible for me to work without distraction in hundreds of ways, and she devoted her professional career as a psychologist to our material support for several periods during which I pursued nothing but this research.

ERIKSON, ESKIMOS

& COLUMBUS

Image not available.

Image not available.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen

and thinking what nobody has thought.

—Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

IN THE VIEW OF MANY WHO STUDY IT, the European discovery of America was purely a geographical event. It occurred, these people believe, when a certain lookout, weary after long sailing, cried, Land ho! He may have uttered those words in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Old Norse, Irish, or perhaps some other language. In fact, this scene arguably took place in several such tongues, leaving pedants to disagree over which was the discovery. Should they assign importance to priority of occurrence or to continuity of occupation? Or should they invoke some entirely different criterion to say which statue may bear the inscription The Discoverer?

More than either pedantry or ethnic pride is at issue, however; aside from the ideal search for Truth, there is a practical matter involved. Most American (and other) elementary schools use the discovery of America to instill certain ideals and heroic models into children’s minds. The American adults who landed on the Moon gauged their accomplishment by comparison with this earlier discovery. If our schools are going to continue promoting Columbus as the most widely held cultural hero in the West, then we should understand him with some certainty.

However, our schools should probably discontinue any such heroic promotion at all. This book holds that the very concept of a European discovery of America is clouded by a reciprocal concept of divulgence by native Americans encountering the Norsemen. Ethnic priorities become secondary to an intellectual development that ultimately involved all the peoples engaged in a protracted uncovering.

Serious thinkers already recognize that the discovery of America was a much more complicated happening than merely a landfall. Indeed, it took some decades after 1492, before most geographers realized that there was an America distinct from Asia. Until that time Europeans, with infrequent exceptions, presumed that any mainland on the other side of the ocean from Europe must be Asia. The many explorers who were active in those decades after 1492 are the ones who really deserve to be called the discoverers of America in the sense of discovery pronounced by Szent-Gyorgy in the epigraph to this book. Columbus, island hopping in the Caribbean, never set foot on new world mainland until at least 1498, probably 1502, and that only briefly and initially unknowingly. Even when he came to know that a new world was involved, his state of knowledge was vague, theoretical, and basically a misunderstanding that sprang from the traditional presumption of antipodes.

These statements may already be unsettling to some who have been indoctrinated with the heroic concept of Columbus. Those people may hear such statements as merely iconoclastic. Or they may come to his defense with the thought, But such explorers would never have gone there at all if it were not for Columbus. This thought may be so, but one must observe very closely whether it is summoned in defense of Columbus the man or Columbus the creed.

Nobody can ever deny that Columbus the man was important in the discovery of America. Columbus’s demonstration of the possibility of crossing the middle latitudes of the Ocean Sea remains a bold, epoch-making undertaking. But we also want to evaluate his situation rationally. First one must make a wholehearted attempt to see him as an ordinary human being, thinking and reasoning in familiar ways and driven by familiar, fathomable desires. If he does not end up seeming larger than life, that is no criticism of the man but a reevaluation of what we have done with our minds in the classroom.

Leif Erikson, too, was a discoverer of America. There is no longer any controversy among scholars about that. In his case the bias in teaching had been in the opposite direction. The saga of Leif’s voyage to Vinland ca. A.D. 1000 had always been introduced with an apologia, almost clandestinely, as a rumor that very well might not be true. Teachers felt it should nevertheless be mentioned for the sake of fairness and completeness. There are discovered ruins, now, to prove it—the Norsemen were in America.¹ Furthermore, their culture was not the barbaric way of life from earlier centuries depicted in popular media; its technology was similar to that of many small towns and rural areas in medieval Europe.

Nevertheless, Leif’s discovery was somehow premature; for some reason it led to no obvious repercussions in Europe. Columbus’s discovery was somehow more timely. What does that word timely mean? A standard answer is often couched in European political and economic developments of the late fifteenth century. Then-recent expeditions out into the ocean looking for islands are cited as important precursors. While such factors obviously were involved, they do not tell the whole story either. The Columbian discovery of America was not only an event in the expansion of Europe but also an event in intellectual history, the history of ideas, indeed, the history of science. That is the area in which I address the timeliness of the Columbian discovery.

The above-stated thought that later explorers would never have gone to America had Columbus not done so may be wrong. The idea of sailing westward for Asia was not unique to Columbus. Scholars know that some of his contemporaries and predecessors entertained the same idea and that a few of them actively pursued financial backing for a trip. The established attitude that Columbus had to battle was not concerning the sphericity of the earth. Contrary to what our schools have taught children, those with a practical concern in the matter had known ever since Greek times that the earth had to be round.² But they also knew something about its size. Many inferred from astronomical measurements that the distance one would have to sail westward from Europe to reach Asia was probably 12,000 miles or more. They knew that a ship would have to carry a year’s worth of provisions to attempt such a voyage safely. No crew or captain was willing to sail that long out of sight of land exposed to even the predictable dangers, and therefore the voyage was considered impossible. This was the establishment’s argument in Spain against Columbus, and they were right.

Yet somehow, during the fifteenth century an attitude began to proliferate holding that the earth was much smaller than indicated by astronomical measurements. Columbus believed Asian shores to be only one-quarter the above distance away, and similar arguments by various near contemporaries gave him courage. Even without Columbus, America would very likely have been discovered within a few years or decades. The project was in the air.

The question of timeliness now takes on a new interest. What does in the air mean? Structuralist psychologists, led by Jean Piaget’s examples, have begun to understand scientifically the concept of a body of knowledge and the modes of transition of knowledge from one state to another.³ One basic tenet is that people cannot assimilate or appreciate a new idea until they can connect it logically to some contemporary established knowledge—something already known.⁴ Thereby they accommodate to the new idea. The underlying question now seems even more confounding. Why did the completely incorrect idea—that the shores of Asia lay only a few thousand miles across the ocean—gain credence at this particular time? To what canonical knowledge or gestalt or idea structure was it attached?

When the seekers after Asia in the West tried to enlist financial backing for a voyage, they needed evidence to support their theory. One argument Columbus and his supporters used was that classical and medieval writings, including those of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Marco Polo, contained geographical references suggesting the near proximity of Asia. It seems possible however, as Samuel Eliot Morison thought, that such authorities were merely summoned up as afterthoughts⁵ employed in a wide-ranging attempt to buttress an argument they already believed in.* Something unique to their own era might better explain the timeliness of the ideas of Columbus and like thinkers. Something stronger than (erroneous) ancient authorities perhaps made them invest years at royal courts and risk their lives at sea defending an argument about the distance to Asia that many contemporary theoreticians rightly scoffed at.

Yet neither they nor later students of their ideas have been able quite satisfactorily to point out what carried them to such unjustified certainty. Motivation for belief (above all, profit) there was aplenty, but for certainty, none. Some have concluded that Columbus was probably mad.⁶ Many writers concentrating on Columbus’s motivation have completely overlooked the motivation of the others who proposed such voyages. Were they all mad? The problem has been so frustrating that some writers have turned to mysticism for an explanation.⁷ Jean Piaget, the founder of structural psychology and scientific epistemology, would have allowed no such easy escape. He stated flatly, The great man who seems to launch new movements is but a point of intersection or of synthesis, of ideas that were elaborated by continuous cooperation. Even if he is opposed to current opinions he responds to underlying needs which he himself has not created.⁸ While structuralism has been applied in certain inappropriate fields, and thereby discredited, current research is confirming and extending Piaget’s concept.⁹

In Viking America I suggested (as others had before me) one stimulus that could have given rise to belief in the nearness of Asia: vague and misunderstood but actual information concerning America.¹⁰ The present book shows evidence that residents of the Norse colonies on Greenland transmitted such information, in the form of maps, travelers’ descriptions, and living natives, to Europe during the century or so preceding Columbus. And in the recentness of those particular Norse contacts lies a possible explanation. A fourteenth-century resumption of westward exploration after centuries of neglect could explain the timeliness of the southern European ideas of the proximity of Asia in the West. While Leif Erikson’s eleventh-century contacts in Vinland ultimately resulted in abandonment of Vinland, those of the early Renaissance Greenlanders might have led toward the European Age of Discovery. And that resumption of the Norse exterior orientation, as we shall see, was itself a result of new contact with the native American people we call the Eskimos.* The discovery of America would be an involved joint accomplishment not solely attributable to any individual hero or ethnic group.

Numerous writers who surmised that Columbus had some kind of Norse information have been dismissed for giving no proof. The reader is specifically put on notice that I make no claims of final proof here regarding Columbus personally. I leave it to others to draw conclusions in that regard, perhaps after further research. But the evidence that such information was available in southern Europe in his time will be substantially increased, and we will see some tentative evidence that Columbus had access to it. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in his biography of Columbus, concluded that he had an illogical mind. While asserting that Columbus’s theory was dubious, Morison said, One can well imagine him explaining it, his eyes sparkling and his ruddy complexion flaming.¹¹ There were undoubtedly many factors contributing to his motivation besides rational ones.¹² Indeed, current writers on the subject have highlighted various aspects of that motivation that are nowadays considered politically incorrect. But we will see that a rational component to his motivation also becomes a possibility.

However, I do not think, as some media headlines suggested when Viking America was published, that Columbus secretly followed Viking maps. Nor do I claim that Columbus necessarily engaged in any kind of major deception (although others have shown evidence for such theories).¹³ The process of any information transfer from the Norse was likely much more subtle than conscious deception. Structuralist theoreticians acknowledge the possibility of unconscious response to vague influences.¹⁴ The new historicism researchers find many traces of unconscious behavior during the encounter with the New World.¹⁵ Louis DeVorsey has shown how in post-Columbian times native American information sources silently entered into European maps.¹⁶ G. Malcolm Lewis showed that similar information led to systematically misunderstood representations on European maps of America which motivated explorations even if they were ultimately dismissed as myths.¹⁷ Surely, that kind of vague influence could have affected the reactions of Columbus and his predecessors and contemporaries to any Norse-transmitted foreknowledge about America.

If the importance of the Norsemen and the Eskimos in European history is elevated by this book, it is not meant to be at the expense of Columbus or his bravery. Columbus also will be elevated, for he will become more understandable as a person. The man becomes an intelligent, rational participant in one of the greatest human accomplishments to date: the development of the scientific method. It is an auxiliary purpose of this book to examine evidence in that direction.

It will be obvious that this book contains radical ideas and uses radical procedures. In order to make a positive approach under these conditions, it will be useful to review (and preview) some fundamental considerations: the cultural milieu of the interaction between the Greenland Norsemen and the Eskimos, within both the European culture and the Eskimo culture; and the European intellectual milieu in which the Norse Greenland colonies matured, particularly with regard to geographical thought. This will introduce how maps looking like American lands could show up on medieval and Renaissance maps of Eurasia.* Such an idea, however, will immediately raise doubts in scholars who are skeptical about interpreting old maps by their shapes. This leads finally in this chapter to a section on method, to assure that we are proceeding with due caution.

I HAVE EXAMINED THE PHYSICAL DETAILS of the Norse contact with America, in Viking America.¹⁸ I suggested that there was a renewed contact after centuries of hiatus during Early Renaissance times, involving Eskimo contacts.† Some evidence suggests Norsemen made physical contacts westward into the Arctic Archipelago (see north of Canada on the front map) and perhaps into North America itself. But the cultural contacts will be our main interest here. The Norsemen lived in fully civilized communities that kept in touch with the European world. Their so-called Eastern Settlement was near the southern tip of Greenland’s west coast, and the Western Settlement was just a little farther up the west coast. Their summer hunting area, Nordrsetur, was above the Arctic Circle on the west coast. When fourteenth-century climatic changes forced a decline in their agricultural and herding settlements on Greenland, the Norsemen’s lifestyle became more nomadic and they lived increasingly by hunting. Written sources show that they soon encountered the Eskimos in Nordrsetur. (A brief eleventh-century encounter in Vinland seems not to have been sustained—at least no evidence suggests it was. Southern Greenland itself was not occupied by living Eskimos when the Norsemen first arrived.)

In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to believe that hostile interactions between the newly arriving Eskimos and the established Norsemen caused the eventual end of the Norsemen in Greenland and that there was little interaction otherwise. In the twentieth century, Gwyn Jones continued this idea, in concurrence with many European archaeologists. But Fridtjof Nansen and Helge Ingstad both rejected a fundamentally hostile interaction, and they have many followers in North America.¹⁹ Nansen and Ingstad both concluded that, even though individual incidents of hostility certainly did occur, the overall interaction was generally neutral and sometimes positive. Danish archaeologists now concur in rejecting the extermination hypothesis.²⁰ The thirteenth-century Eskimos that the Norsemen encountered were engaged in the culmination of a migration across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland. These Eskimos, members of the Thule culture, might have set examples for the Norsemen on how to live in the high Arctic winters and where to find hunting grounds.* In their turn, the Norsemen have been thought to have set examples for the Thules in many technologies (like baleen saws and coopered tubs) that the Thules incorporated into their daily life. The result was construed to be the emergence of a new Eskimo culture, the Inugsuk, recognized by the Scandinavian archaeologist Therkel Mathiassen and amplified by Erik Holtved and Junius Bird.²¹ Some archaeologists still consider any such cultural interaction between the Norse and Eskimos to be controversial.²² Nevertheless, the Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee, who is considered to be the dean of Canadian Arctic archaeology, sees evidence of positive cultural interaction. He believes it is likely that Eskimos and Norsemen had wide-ranging trade contacts and coexisted, sometimes amicably, for several generations in southern Greenland, leaving at least one shared historical tale in the folk record of each.²³ Norwegian linguist Knut Bergsland has cited Norse loan words for domestic plants and animals in the Greenland Eskimo dialect.²⁴ Danish National Museum archaeologist Jette Arneborg has given theoretical arguments that we should also expect to find cultural influences in the opposite direction, from the Eskimos to the Norsemen.²⁵ While no one has yet been able to demonstrate any in the archaeological record, we find some in this book.

I suggest that the Thule Eskimos occasionally shared their cumulative geographical knowledge of America, gained during the recent migration, with the Norsemen. There is no more pressing question about such a newly met people than, Where on Earth did you come from? Neither party has to be bilingual to pose the question or give an answer, as many explorers have demonstrated. The Eskimos’ geographical knowledge included the technique of drawing primitive maps—cartograms