Vikings in America by Graeme Davis

Author:Graeme Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

6

Viking Hudson Bay

THE north-centre of the North American continent is a vast area running from the Canadian High Arctic through Hudson Bay, and south to the Great Lakes and Great Plains of North America. Within this enormous area is to be found some of the globe’s worst weather. Winters are particularly cold. Yet there is also enormous climatic variation, and during the summer season many locations have surprisingly warm weather. This is the third direction in which the Vikings penetrated. Today we are familiar with communication routes through Canada and the USA which run predominantly east–west, linking Atlantic with Pacific. However, the natural route into the heart of the continent made by the sea is from the Arctic through Hudson Bay. This was the route used by many nineteenth-century migrants to the American Midwest, and it was the route accessible to the Vikings.

Popular views of this part of the globe emphasise the winter cold. The misfortunes of so many nineteenth-century expeditions to the area encouraged the stories, which are an aspect of the climate, but by no means the whole story. British popular opinion on the Arctic was first captivated and then shocked by the story of the Franklin Expedition, and American views in many respects followed those of Britain.1 For the Franklin Expedition should not have failed. Setting out in 1848 the expedition aimed to glorify the British Empire by discovering a passage by sea around the north of America to the Pacific and the Far East. It was considered the best-equipped expedition of its age, and with two specially strengthened ships travelling together, success was confidently predicted. The ships, the Erebus and the Terror, crossed the Atlantic, put in briefly on the west coast of Greenland, and then vanished into the labyrinth of the Northwest Passage. Only after a wait of three years did search parties set out to seek the fate of the expedition, and found a harrowing tale of ships trapped for two successive winters in the ice, and finally a grim, corpse-strewn march south as the survivors made a last effort to escape. All died.

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