One morning the villagers of the most remote settlement in the Norwegian Realm found that their bishop had passed away in a peaceful sleep. They mourned his passing and buried him behind the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas. It was not a grandiose temple like in Europe, but just a simple church of red sandstone quarried from a neighbouring hillside. Many in the Norwegian Realm believed the inhabitants of the Norse settlement in Greenland had already fallen from the true faith and returned to paganism, but it was wrong. The Norse settlers still gathered in the cathedral to worship at an old altar cloth but without sacramental wine and bread.
While last time a royal freighter arrived from Norway to collect taxes was less than a decade ago, the Greenlanders still had a means to contact their mother country, so they sent a request for a new bishop to Norway, which arrived in August of 1379 at the king’s court. Håkon was at this time at Marstrand near Tænsberg to appoint a new Earl to the vacant position in Earldom of the Northern Isles. This request from the Greenlanders prodding at a forgotten memory as he remembered his father had sent an expedition to Greenland to inspect its settlements back in 1354, and he planned to follow up with another expedition but then the revolt of his brother Erik, Hanseatic Wars and the Norwegian-Swedish war happened.
He returned home to Akershus Castle at Oslo and looked through his records. While there have not been any followup expeditions, according to the records, one James Knox had on behalf of the English king Edward III led an expedition in the region by the early 1360s. The Scotsman had traveled further than Greenland and even wrote an account of the expedition. According to the record, James Knox had also detailed a report to him in 1364 and a copy of the travelogue was stored at the Saint Hallvard’s Cathedral, but this had slipped from his mind. Indeed at this time his focus was in reconquering the Swedish crown. Now his curiosity was waked and he sent a request to the Cathedral for the travelogue ‘Inventio Fortunata’[1].
The travelogue was obviously a report mainly to highlight the commercial possibilities at Greenland, Markland and Vinland. Markland and Vinland could provide timbers as tall as sail masts, and furs that could keep you warm in bad winters. The sea there was full of cod that can be taken not only with net but with fishing-baskets.
This was an opportunity that Håkon could not let go. His administration had been broken down as almost all of the Norwegian magnates and clergy had perished in the wake of the Black Death. His remaining peasants could only just produce enough grain to sustain themselves. The Hanseatic League had established a monopoly on the Norwegian economy and ruined the Norwegian and Islandic fishery. The Republic of Novgorod had blocked the Norwegian expansion into the Pola Peninsula and the fur market. Finally he was forced to concentrate the few magnates and clergy left in Southern Norway to restore order while leaving the rest of the Norwegian realm to fend for themselves. Even the king’s household was forced to borrow money for such basic things as food and drink. On the whole, his finance was in dire need of new revenue.
However it had been a stable decade in Norway since the end of the Second Hanseatic War[2], so Håkon had just enough to financiering a new royal freighter to replace this previous one as well as send this promised followup expedition to Greenland. It was a gambit but he had nothing to lose at this point. He asked his newly appointed Earl of the Northern Isles, Henry Sinclair, to lead this expedition to survey Greenland and beyond as the Earl was an experienced sailor.
Greenland - the Arctic Colony
Armed with a royal charter and a new cog, Henry Sinclair, the german bishop Henricous and his expedition sailed from Orkney in late april of 1380 and arrived in Greenland roughly three weeks later. The Norse settlement in southern Greenland mainly consists of three large hamlets, Brattahild, Gardar and Hvalsey. Henricous went to Gardar, the seat of his new bishopric and Henrik Sinclair visited Brattahlid which was home to the local Thing. The Earl was invited by one of the Aldermen to his home for dinner.
The Alderman explained that the Norse settlements used to be much bigger than it was now. At its peak, Greenland had three settlements - Vesterbygd, Mellembygd, Østerbygd - along the coast home to about five thousand souls and several sæsonsal camps at Helluland, Markland and Vinland. Now they only have Østerbygd, home to a few hundred families and two seasonal camps. They had abandoned the Mellembygd one century ago and the Vesterbygd just thirty years ago as the winter had become longer, cooler and more humid lately. The springs had become short making it harder to harvest winter fodder for their livestock and their communal hunt of migratory seals and walrus had become more dangerous due to more frequent storms.
This made their subsistence on pastures and communal hunting extremely difficult, which forced them to adapt in an attempt to keep up with the new demands caused by the changing climate. They began to focus less on sustaining themselves on livestock and more on seafood and local seals. However, even with these attempts, the lack of trade with Norway was also a strain on their resources. They needed iron and timber, but the European market had become less interesting in their walrus and narwhal tusks making trade much more challenging. Even their favourite hunting ground for walruses, narwhals and ice bears at Bear Island in the north had begun to become inaccessible in the warmer summer months. The settlement was suffering from poverty and many of their youngs had already begun to emigrating to Iceland or Norway as they no longer thought they had a future in this godforsaken frozen wasteland.[3]
They were deep engaged in their discussion, that darkness soon fell on them as it was still early May. The Alderman brought front an oil lamp of soapstone with some dried moss as a wick. He lit it up the oil along the edge of the lamp, providing a pleasant light. The Earl was however surprised that such expensive luxury exists in this faraway and poor settlement.
The Alderman told that he had received it from the local Skrællings called themselves as Inuits, who had begun to migrate into their land from the frozen north in recent time. This lamp called quilliq was the single most important fixture of the Inuit household that when the family moved, the lamp went along with it. The Inuits were also quite talented whalers and the lamp oil was a common resource around here, obtained from seals or whales, and they had taught the Norsemen how to extract the oil from the whale blubber. Henry Sinclair thanked for the dinner and returned to his ship as he mused on the possibilities for whaling as an industry.
Vinland - Land of Wine and Honey
Henry Sinclair embarked on his next part of the expedition and recruited some Greenlanders as guide. They sailed west to Helluland, and as the name suggested, it was an inhospitable land of rock and ice. However the Greenlanders told the Earl they used to have a trade post in the southernmost tip of the Helluland called Nanook. This place was a good hunting ground for ice bears, seals, walruses and whales - especially after they lost access to the Bear Island in the North.
After a brief stay at Nanook, they sailed past the strait between Helluland and Markland. Then they sailed along a stretch of coastline known to the Greenlanders as Wonderstrand. A dozens of small Inuit and Innu villages dotting the coastline and the Greenlanders used to trade with these tribes in the region for furs. The region was also extremely rich in high-quality timber. Then they reached a headland named Kajarnes roughly past two thirds of the Wonderstrand. This headland forms part of an estuary of a large river of the same name. Kajarnes was rich in fur, timber and fish according to the Greenlanders.
Soon enough they reached Vinland after two weeks of travel and arrived at Leifsbygd, named after the explorer who colonized Greenland, in the northernmost tip of Vinland. Like Nanook, Leifsbygd was a trade station used as a boat repair facility and as an exploration base and winter camp for expeditions heading southward into the Gulf of Straumfjord. Both Leifsbygd and Nanook were the only remaining trade stations still in use by the Greenlanders. They continued on their last part of the expedition to Cape Cod, the eastmost tip of Vinland. According to the Greenlanders, the seas east of Cape Cod was the best place to fish for cod and true enough it was so thick by the shore that they hardly have been able to row a boat through them.
The Earl decided it was time to return home before winter arrived.
[1] Inventio Fortunata is a lost work containing a description of the North Pole as a magnetic island surrounded by a giant whirlpool and four continents. This work may also have been intended to highlight the commercial possibilities offered by the North Atlantic following the decline of Norwegian interest in its colonies. The content of this work as descriptive in the chapter is fiction.
[2] In OTL, Håkon bankrupted his kingdom when he paid the Hanseatic League to stay neutral as he fought to put his son on the Danish crown. As Chrisoffer, Duke of Lolland, had survived, he was the natural heir to the Danish crown, and hence there was no need for Håkon to become involved in the Danish succession.
[3] Correct research suggests that the Norse Greenlander were unable to maintain their settlements because of economic and climatic change happening at the same time. Another reason was after Norway became a lesser partner in a personal union with Denmark, the Norwegian foreign policy had been moved to North German, Sweden and Baltic Sea. The Danish kings were absolutely not interested in some useless frozen rocks in the north. Nor do they need the Grand Banks at Vinland when they have the Skånemarket - home to the greatest herring market in the Baltic Sea.
King Håkon VI was 40 year old when he died. It had been speculated that he died of stress. He had witnessed how the Black Death had wreaked havoc in his kingdom, the almost constant warfare and the straining conflict with his cousin, Albert of Mecklenburg, and the considerable financial difficulties. However I believe he would survive a few years due to butterflies such as a better result in the Hanseatic Wars and not being involved in the Danish succession.
