County News
Inland saga
Searching for the Vikings of the Bay of Quinte
Imagine. A millennium ago, Prince Edward County and the Bay of Quinte. The forests and grasslands along the shoreline were entirely inhabited by tribes of the Mohawk nation. Europeans had yet to set foot on what we now call Canada.
From far across the ocean, the ambitious explorers of Norway and Sweden built ships that would withstand a transoceanic journey. This would be much more dangerous than their previous efforts, following the European coastline to explore and inhabit locations as close as the British Isles and as far as Turkey.
Archaeologists have had proof for decades the Vikings made their way to Canada, with the remnants of a temporary Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. More recently, satellite imaging technology has aided scientists in discovering a second settlement further west, along the Nova Scotia coast.
But journalist and history buff Andrew King has stumbled across a different theory, one that persists in anecdotes and clues brought forward from Italian sociologists, Mohawk storytellers and inconspicuous museums in New York State.
“I came across an old book, and it’s called The Canadian Journal of Industry, Science and Art. And there’s an article in this book about the mysterious mounds of the Bay of Quinte,” says King. “It’s from 1860. It goes on and on about this guy who came across these mysterious burial mounds, and he’s an archaeologist who says they’re not of native origin, and they’re of some distant, ancient race.”
King has been working lately to compile evidence that a legendary but undiscovered Viking settlement known as Vinland, described in the Viking sagas, might be the present-day Bay of Quinte.
His journey began with the discovery of the Nova Scotian settlement. King, who is originally from the Bay of Quinte, wrote about the discovery on his blog, one that normally focuses on history in Ontario. In response, a man from Norway contacted King, pointing him to an article published in 1960 by Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
Gini posited that anecdotal evidence from Viking tales of Vinland would suggest the settlement was on the northern shore of Lake Ontario and that it was a place full of wild grapes.
This led to other links. Artefacts found in and around Ontario, including Norse metallurgy on a shore due south of Prince Edward County in New York State. Burial mounds matching the ones created by Vikings in Norway.
And then there is the butternut—a tree that at the time grew plentiful in the County. At the Viking settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows, butternut trees, along with Viking artefacts using butternut wood were found. And yet, that tree is not native to Newfoundland.
Vinland, archaeologists suggest, is where the tree originated, and that Viking explorers brought it back to their North Atlantic camp after exploring the Gulf of St. Lawrence and areas further inland.
There are also the stories. In the 1920s, a man named Wallace Havelock Robb was welcomed into the Mohawks of Tyendinaga, who told him stories of a blond, blue-eyed boy who was captured, generations ago, and brought into the tribe.
The boy taught his captors how to make stronger ropes, craft metal, and make the glue used for building longships. Then years later, he built his own, and with his bride, sailed away, never to be seen again. When Robb later put the stories into Thunderbird, a history of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quite, he referred to the boy as a Viking lad. The book was published 20 years before evidence of Vikings was discovered in Canada.
King says pursuing this history is important to him because so little of it is taught in school, and so little of it is available to excite young imaginations about this history of this country.
“I find that our local history is just glossed over. In school, they just talk about the native population, then the French, then the British, and then that’s it. I guess nothing happens here,” says King. “But to think that something as unique as Norse explorers coming down the St. Lawrence into Lake Ontario and possibly the Bay of Quinte? That’s pretty exciting stuff and I don’t think anyone has looked into that for years.”
The theory has been around for a long time that Lake Ontario is home to Vinland, but no archaeologist has found evidence of it, and none is actively pursuing that evidence.
Still, enraptured by the whimsy of a Viking history, King hopes people open their minds and their eyes. And maybe, as some explorer wanders along the shores of the County and the Bay of Quinte, that evidence might turn up.
“I’m definitely fascinated, but I’m not a professional. I’m just doing it out of interest,” says King. “But I just want to get the word out, because there’s probably things out there. Prince Edward County is a large area of land, and most of it is unexplored or uninhabited, so who knows what’s out there.”
To learn more about King’s research, you can follow his blog at ottawarewind.com.
The obsession with written documentation as being primary evidence is just the bias of historians. One might better see history as just the tip of the ice-berg as writing was not within the capability of many possible ‘explorers’ – for example the aboriginal who appeared off the coast of Europe in a kayak in the 16th century and of whom little more than his appearance has been written. The notion of exploration as a single/simple narrative is clearly gross over-simplification. Even the Vikings – who were a teutonic minority in Scandanavia – recognized a larger cohort including Vikings and northern Gaels that largely occupied and travelled vast areas of the north Atlantic. Aboriginals in the central Canadian Arctic used iron including meteoritic iron from Greenland and smelted iron from Iceland and Norway indicating that a substantial amount of trade and commerce extended across much of the north including both sides of the Atlantic. Even Christoforo Colon had previously sailed to the North Sea and had some intercourse with Northmen seamen so he had some rudimentary knowledge of land to the west.
In order to put things in perspective, one should consider the density of archaeological evidence of Vikings in Norway and Sweden as compared to Russia and Scotland where they were less numerous and Turkey where they are mostly known from written accounts (and immortalized in the name Russia): sparse evidence in areas of extensive occupation translates into sparser evidence in areas of smaller occupation.
This is an interesting story. Twenty-six generations ago my ancestors, Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, moved to North America for about 5 years in 1005AD. They tried to settle and ended up returning to Iceland. They had the first recorded European descent child in North America and our family descends from the child they had when they returned to Iceland.
Our expedition team, Fara Heim, has been actively searching from Hudson Bay back to Ungava Bay for signs of pre-Columbina exploration by our ancestors. We believe that two artifacts are key indicators: rectangular foundations and metal (weapons or ship rivets). The Icelanders and Greenlanders were totally outnumbered by the people that were already living in North America. The exciting thing is to learn about oral tradition and see if any DNA can be found. Oral tradition, like the story recounted above, is a great opportunity to see if there is a connection to our family. Over 3000 people disappeared from the Greenland Viking colony and they probably moved to North America.
Oral tradition can help point to potential artifacts. DNA analysis is getting so inexpensive and fast now that if any connection happened there would be sign. What a great opportunity to write new pages to history.