Colder Connections

 

As he plied his loathsome trade in the summer of 1751, the slave-ship captain Henry Ellis paused to engage in a little scientific exploration. En route to Jamaica, in the vicinity of latitude 25 North, Ellis lowered into the ocean a sealed bucket with controllable valves, able to take and hold samples of seawater from multiple depths. To the probe’s designer Ellis reported his success in taking samples from exceptional depths, up to a mile below the surface. His findings surprised him: from a surface temperature of about 25 Celsius, the seawater rapidly chilled with increasing depth, falling to a low of 5-10 C, then rising again below 1300 meters to a maximum of 12 degrees Celsius. The deep, cold water also proved more salty than expected. A practical man - slavers weren’t idealists - Captain Ellis used the chilled water samples to refrigerate his supply of wine.

 

Slaver Ellis wasn’t conducting oceanographic investigations for a laugh. He considered himself a natural philosopher, having served as de facto science officer on an expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1746-47. After his return Ellis published a book on the voyage, describing the explorers’ reconnaissance of Greenland, trade with the Inuit, and eventual failure to find an ice-free channel beyond Hudson Bay. The voyage and book ingratiated Ellis with a number of scientifically-inclined noblemen, who doubtless helped him raise the capital for his trade in human beings. One high-born friend, Lord Halifax, later appointed Ellis royal governor of Georgia, a colony that had recently legalized slavery. Ellis helped negotiate a stable peace settlement with the neighboring Muskogee Creeks, doubtless thinking himself a humanitarian for doing so. (See Julie Sweet, Negotiating For Georgia (2005), 188 on his governorship.) Illness drove the governor from Savannah after a year, but Ellis eventually returned to American office in Halifax, as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.

Detail from Ellis’s 1746-47 voyage

 

The results of Captain E’s deep-sea experiment remained little-known until the 1790s, when Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, theorized that the mass of cold, salty water Ellis discovered was a current of cold seawater, analogous to the Gulf Stream nearer the surface. In the twentieth century, oceanographers concluded that both warm and cold Atlantic currents comprised a great conveyor-belt extending from the Antarctic to the Arctic, powered by heat and the transfer of salts - the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In our own time, climate scientists have expressed concern that the accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, the flow of low-salinity water into the polar zones of the AMOC, and the disruption of thermohaline circulation will shut down the whole circuit. Since the warming Gulf Stream is part of the AMOC, this will spell pretty bad news for Europe. For parts of North America, too: the Gulf Stream deflects a substantial volume of seawater from the East Coast, and its dissipation will cause the relative sea level to rise, contributing to the inundation of low-lying communities.

 

Careful readers will note that the Atlantic Overturning currents also tie together many of Henry Ellis’s ports of call and places of residence: Greenland, whose melting ice caps now threaten to shut down the Gulf Stream, and the coastal cities of Savannah and Halifax, which are likely to experience considerable flooding if the Atlantic basin sloshes slightly westward. Ellis himself lacked the notional birds-eye view needed to make these connections, or to observe that he had helped make the Atlantic both a web of human-made connections and an avenue of human misery. If he’d made these observations, though, I doubt that they would have changed his behavior. One didn’t rise to high rank in the British Empire on the strength of humane sentiments.

Pacific America and the Wider World before 1700

Scholars tend to take for granted the profound isolation of the pre-Columbian New World from the Old. After the last migrations across the Bering Strait, circa 1000 BCE, and apart from sporadic contact between the Norse and the Inuit after 1000 CE, the peoples of the Americas lived lives wholly separate from those of the rest of humanity. Or so we usually think. Actually, the corridor that ancestral Native Americans used to colonize the Western Hemisphere never completely closed. Rising sea levels inundated the Bering land bridge, but several groups of migrants (Athabascan, Inuit, Aleut) crossed the strait by boat, and no practical barrier subsequently prohibited other northeastern Asians from traveling to Alaska and points south, or prevented Native Americans from communicating with Siberia.

Archaeologists from Purdue University have now confirmed that cross-Bering communication did occur in the relatively recent past. H. Cory Cooper reports that Inuit of the Thule Culture buried artifacts of bronze, an alloy no New World culture ever produced, on Cape Espenberg, Alaska. The bronze artifacts were interred between 1200 and 1500 CE, but their creators made them much earlier, perhaps a thousand years earlier, in northern China. They passed hand to hand from their place of manufacture to Siberia and America. The Thule Inuit incorporated the Chinese bronze wares into a toolkit that already included beaten-copper points, like fish hooks and needles. They surely regarded the bronze beads and buckles they had received in trade as exotic, but did not consider metal itself foreign and weird. It is instead modern scholars who should consider these tools usefully strange: they prove that medieval-era Inuit were either trading with Native Siberian travelers or crossing into the Chukchi Peninsula to do so themselves.

An additional conduit that brought both metal wares and people to Pacific America has been known for some time, though I myself discovered it only recently in the notes to Paul Mapp's Elusive West (North Carolina, 2010). During the Tokugawa regime in Japan, when the shogunate prohibited nearly all foreign contact, a large (60-plus) number of coastal cargo ships lost their rudders or masts in storms and blew out to sea. The Kuroshio and North Pacific currents carried them north or east to regions inhabited by Native Americans, but within the ambit of record-keeping Europeans. These ships had small crews and usually carried cargoes of rice and other foodstuffs, which allowed at least some of their crew members to survive long periods at sea if they could acquire (through rainfall) enough drinking water.

Charles Brooks studied over thirty of these "sea drifters" from the period 1600-1870. Half were rescued at sea by European mariners, but the others washed up on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Aleutian Islands, Hawaii, and northwestern North America. Mike Dash, in a 2010 blog post on the storm-tossed Japanese mariners, provides some remarkable stories of Japanese sailors who peregrinated about the Atlantic and Pacific for years before finally returning home. It seems likely, however, that some of the sea drifters crossed the Pacific unrecorded by Europeans, leaving their bodies (live or dead) and the cargo and fittings of their ships in the hands of Aleutians, Tlingits, and other coastal Native American groups. Dash suspects that some of these crossings predate the start of Brooks's study in 1600.

Add to these discoveries the likelihood of contact between South America and Polynesia, evidenced by the spread of sweet potatoes, and we can see that there was a nascent "Pacific World" of sorts before the nineteenth century. While we generally consider Indian-European contact to have begun on the eastern coast of North America, it appears that, thanks to Inuit and Japanese and Polynesian mariners, pre-Columbian western North America was less isolated from the wider world than the Atlantic seaboard.

(Above image of Japanese junk via https://thelosttreasurechest.wordpress.com/ship-gallery/japanese-junk/)

Everything's Relaxed and Groovy on Helluland

I've always assumed the relationship between the Norse colonists of medieval Greenland and Newfoundland and the local Native American (Indian and Inuit) population was stand-offish at best and violent more often than not. Alfred Crosby (Ecological Imperialism (1986), 48-52) noted routine skirmishing between Norsemen and Beothuks on Newfoundland and repeated Inuit raids on Greenland settlements. Jared Diamond (Collapse (2005)) argued that the Greenlanders' hostility toward the Inuit and their cultural isolationism helped doom their colonies, since it prevented them from copying the Inuit Arctic toolkit (parkas, kayaks, toggle harpoons) and learning their neighbors' survival skills. Something about this story, however, never quite rang true: the medieval Norse were as much traders as warriors, and it seems unlikely that their remote Arctic colonies would have survived for more than four centuries in a state of constant warfare with more numerous neighbors. Within the last decade, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland, formerly of the Canadian Museum of Civilization and now of the University of Aberdeen, has confirmed that the standard account of Norse-Native relations is flawed, and has usefully complicated the narrative of Norse American colonization.

In 1999, studying fibers found in an early 14th-century Dorset-culture (Paleo-Inuit) site on Baffin Island, Sutherland determined that the remains were yarn woven by Greenland Norse. A follow-up study of artifacts from four Dorset-culture sites on Baffin Island (or Helluland, as the Norse called it) and Labrador revealed wooden spindles, whetstones, and tally sticks of the kind used by Norse traders, and Dorset carvings of what appear to be Europeans. These led her and a Canadian team to a Dorset village site in Baffin Island's Tanfield Valley, where they located what is almost certainly a Norse trading post: a large structure with a stone-lined drain, a latrine that still stank after centuries, remnants of augur holes, and scraps of fur from black rats, which apparently accompanied the Norse voyagers. Sutherland has not yet determined how long the site was occupied, but believes the Norse and Dorset Inuit conducted a lively commerce, swapping walrus ivory and fox furs for wooden artifacts and metal. However poor the Greenland Norse relationship with other Native Americans may have been, it is now evident that at least one nearby indigenous culture was more than happy to trade peacefully with them. They had, if you will forgive the expression, taken a liking to a Viking.

(The National Geographic story on Sutherland's excavation mentions, incidentally, that medieval Norse mariners made it as far as Ellesmere Island, where evidence of a Norse shipwreck was found in the late 1970s. Ellesmere Island is NORTH of Baffin Island; its northern shore fronts the Arctic Ocean. Either the sailors were brave or drunk.)

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(Image above is of Norse tally stick fragments in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History; original can be found here.)

Northwest Passages

Alert reader Chantal Hachem noted that my account of the eccentricities of the nineteenth-century Royal Navy reminded her of a British Arctic explorer whose crewmen went mad eating rations from lead-lined food cans. That explorer, Sir John Franklin, was lost sometime between 1845 and 1848 during his search for the Northwest Passage, the all-water route from Europe to Asia by way of northern Canada which eluded so many European explorers. Franklin's story, recounted in Fergus Fleming's Barrow's Boys (Grove Press, 2001), is a harrowing and tragic one - tragic because the Northwest Passage turned out to be wishful thinking, as the permanent Arctic ice pack blocked the waterways through the northern Canadian islands. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, first European to traverse the Passage (1903-5), took more than two years to do so, as his ship became locked in the ice for two consecutive winters. Until recently the only large vessels capable of "sailing" all the way through the Northwest Passage in one season were nuclear submarines, which could travel under the ice.

But times change. One of the most important consequences of global warming is the shrinking of the permanent Arctic ice pack, which, among other effects, has opened the Northwest Passage to surface ships for at least part of the year. Last fall, a civilian passenger ship arrived in Barrow - the northernmost town in the United States, and previously a synonym for "remote Arctic wasteland" - and discharged 400 German tourists who, I am sure, completely flummoxed the Inupiat inhabitants of the community. In consequence, the US Coast Guard began patrols into the Beaufort Sea, and this summer it opened temporary bases in two Arctic Ocean villages, including Barrow. Meanwhile, the governments of the United States, Canada, and Russia have begun discussions - heated arguments, actually - about ownership of the Northwest Passage (and its Russian equivalent, the Northeast Passage) and of the large oil and gas deposits believed to lie beneath the Arctic Ocean. I don't know whether Franklin would be pleased or astonished.

Cultural Exchange

Here's a brief anecdote from the first voyage of John Davis, the 16th-century English explorer to whom I referred in my post of May 31st: when Davis first landed on the coast of Greenland in late July 1585, he encountered a large party of Inuit, who approached Davis's ship in ten canoes. Rather than attacking or kidnapping the Greenlanders (that would occur on his second voyage), Davis instead urged his crewmen to use their "best policy to gain their friendship." That policy included music: as the canoemen approached, Davis and his officers "caused our musicians to play, ourselves dancing and making many signs of friendship." For the rest of the day, the two groups of strangers pantomimed one another's gestures, shook hands, and exchanged gifts of clothing. The next day (30 July 1585), one of the Inuit returned Davis's initial favor: he climbed a rock, displayed "a thing like a timbrel, which he did beat upon with a stick, making a noise like a small drum," and danced. (Albert Markham, ed., Voyages and Works of John Davis, Navigator [London, 1880], 7-8.) Regrettably, we have no record of any subsequent attempts to create an Elizabethan/Eskimo fusion musical style.

Voyagers to the East, Part XX

For the previous entry in this series, click here.

The Inuit (once commonly referred to as Eskimos) were among the last Native Americans to settle in North America, and among the first to encounter Europeans. Arctic hunters of the Dorset and Thule cultures arrived in Alaska by 1000 BC, and migrated thence into northern Canada, reaching Greenland by 1100 AD. There the Inuit encountered the first European settlers in the New World: Norse colonists from Iceland, who had begun colonizing Greenland in 986 AD. The subsequent relationship between Norse and Inuit was not a friendly one. The two peoples did trade with one another - Norse artifacts have been found at Inuit sites off Ellesmere Island - but also fought with one another and competed for resources. The Norse eventually lost this contest: the Little Ice Age cut them off from Iceland and Europe, and as the climate cooled the Inuit proved better able to exploit the island's animal resources. Sometime before 1480, the last Norsemen in Greenland died out. (Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1800 [Cambridge, 1986], 45-54; Eric Wahlgren, The Vikings and America [London, 1986], 16-27).

European contact with the Inuit resumed about 50 years later, but Euro-Inuit relations didn't grow any friendlier. This may have had something to do with Europeans' desire to bring Eskimo captives back to Europe as trophies. In 1536, Englishmen tried to kidnap a party of Native American - probably Inuit - hunters off the Labrador coast. In 1567, French mariners brought an Inuit woman and her daughter to the Netherlands, while Martin Frobisher took another four Inuit captives to England in 1576-77. In 1586 English explorer John Davis captured two Inuit and Inuk men in Greenland, but they probably died before Davis returned to Europe.

Early in the next century, King Christian IV of Denmark commissioned an exploratory voyage to Greenland to determine the fate of the Norse settlements there and revive the Norse-Danish claim to the island. In 1605 three Danish ships under the command of Scottish mariner John Cunningham sailed for Greenland. The vessels successfully crossed the Atlantic, and one, the Loven, traded with the Inuit on Greenland's southwest coast before seizing two men and their kayaks. The Inuit captives violently resisted their imprisonment at first but eventually accepted their fate; perhaps they hoped to make a later escape. In Copenhagen the prisoners were paraded before the King and Queen and participated in a kayak race against a 16-oared Danish vessel. (The race ended in a tie.) Their subsequent fate is unknown.

Cunningham's other two vessels, the Trost and Katten, proceeded up the Greenland coast, skirmished with 30 Eskimos, and captured 3, whom the mariners also displayed in Denmark (after the Inuit prisoners made a failed escape attempt). These captives also participated in kayaking displays - the Spanish ambassador to the Danish court gave them a large cash award for their virtuosity - and purchased much "fashionable clothing" for themselves, including swords and plumed hats. (Some Danish observers referred to the re-costumed Inuit as the "Greenland grandees.") A subsequent Danish expedition tried to take all three captives back to Greenland, but at least two died en route.

The Danes believed that Cunningham's Inuit captives were descendants of the lost Norse colony on Greenland, and they continued their efforts to bring Eskimos - their own purported ethnic relatives - to Europe. There were six Danish and Dutch voyages to Greenland between 1607 and 1654, which brought thirty more Inuit back to Denmark and the Netherlands. Some of the travelers may have been children brought to Denmark for education, as authorized by Christian IV in the 1636 charter of the Danish Greenland Company. The most famous of these captives were an Inuit man, two women, and a girl whom David Daniel captured near Godthaab in 1654. Daniel brought the Greenlanders to Bergen, where they were painted by Salomon van Haven, becoming the first Inuit so represented. (Wendell Oswalt, Eskimos and Explorers [2nd. edition, Lincoln, 1999], 41-43.) The painting can be viewed below:

(The caption on the sign reads "In their small leather ships the Greenlanders sail hither and thither on the ocean; from animals and birds they get their clothes. The cold land of Midnight. Bergen, September 28th, 1654." [Oswalt, 75-76.] Original image from http://achac.com/zoos-humains/erste-kontakte-erste-exponate-von-1492-bis-ins-18-jahrhundert/)

For the next entry in this series, click here.