be preserved in this way came from the extraordinarily well-preserved bodies of two members of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1845, exhumed from permafrost on Beechey Island in 1984. For the Norse, ship burials were a well-established funerary rite. The burning of a ship is famously described by the tenth- century Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan, who witnessed the funeral of a Rus chieftain on the river Volga in which a woman joined her lord on the pyre. Snorri Sturluson gives us another account in which a burning ship filled with weapons and bodies was cast out to sea after a battle, carrying with it the mortally wounded Viking lord who had supervised the construction of his own funerary pyre.
The image of the ship in the ice is drawn from the spectacular Gokstad and Oseberg ship burials in Norway, though Harald’s fictional ship would have been a more practical design. According to Snorri Sturluson, the two ships in which Harald escaped from Constantinople were “Varangian galleys,” oared longships (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 15). The best evidence for Viking ship types comes from almost exactly the date of the fictional voyage in this novel, from a group of vessels sunk in the 1070s near Skuldelev, in Denmark, to restrict the entrance to Roskilde Fjord. One was a robust, deep-hulled vessel suitable for open ocean sailing. The feasibility of Norse voyages to the Americas has been amply demonstrated by modern experiments, including the sailing of replica ships to L’Anse aux Meadows to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the arrival of Leif Eiriksson in the New World.
The northernmost Viking settlement in Greenland was Vestribyg?, the “western settlement,” located some five hundred miles south of the Ilulissat icefjord. However, the region of the icefjord and farther north, Nor?rseta, was frequented by the Norse and vital to their economy. The only runestone found in Greenland comes from the island of Kingigtorssuaq, almost four hundred miles north of the icefjord, and can be seen today in the museum at nearby Upernavik. It was placed in a cairn by three Norse adventurers-Erling, Bjarne and Eindride-probably in the early fourteenth century. My own explorations along this coast suggest that remote sites may contain further evidence of Norse activity. It is an extraordinary fact that Norse hunters in this extreme environment-seeking walrus ivory, whale, polar bear hides and narwhal tusk, the “unicorn horn” seen on medieval maps-helped to pay for the Crusades, through a tax imposed after the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar, “The Crusader,” established an episcopal see in Greenland in 1124. The Church exerted a tenacious hold over the Greenlanders, and the impossibility of paying Church taxes may well have been a factor in the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland by the fifteenth century.
There can be little doubt that Norse explorers sailed around Baffin Bay and into Lancaster Sound, the beginning of the Northwest Passage to the Beaufort Sea and the Pacific Ocean. A scattering of Norse artefacts has been found across the Canadian Arctic, some undoubtedly taken by Inuit from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland but others reflecting Norse contact and exploration. No Viking ship has yet been found in these waters, but an extraordinary discovery close to the polar ice cap may suggest a shipwreck. At tiny Scraeling Island, a barren rock off Ellesmere Island-some eight hundred miles north of Ilulissat-an Inuit site has yielded more than fifty Norse artefacts, including woollen cloth, fragments of chain mail, ship rivets, knife and spear blades, a carpenter’s plane, fragments of wooden barrel and a gaming piece. Radiocarbon analysis suggests a date towards the end of the Norse period in Greenland, similar to the Kingigtorssuaq runestone. A comparison can be made with Franklin’s overwintering site at Beechey Island during his attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1845. Despite the “Little Ice Age” of the medieval period, analysis of ice cores from Greenland suggests that there were warm spells- one in the early fourteenth century-when the waters between the islands of the Canadian Arctic may have been clear. The possibility must remain open that the Vikings discovered the Northwest Passage, backtracking along the route taken by the first Inuit hunters, and that the last Norse to abandon Greenland went this way.
What is certain is that the Vikings sailed over a thousand miles southwest from Greenland to establish the first known European settlement on the shores of North America, at a place they called Vinland-perhaps “Land of Meadows” rather than “Land of Vines,” as has commonly been assumed-almost five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Their main interest was probably timber, which was almost completely lacking in Greenland. The site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, identified by many as Leifsbu?ir in the Norse sagas, is one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time. “Great Sacred Isle” may have been a navigational way- marker-there are cairns on the mainland that may be Norse, and the story of the keel set up on the cape at Kjalarnes comes from Erik’s Saga-though no evidence has yet been found. Today the site at L’Anse aux Meadows is maintained by Parks Canada, and you can visit the reconstructed longhouse next to the site of three dwellings and a smithy excavated during the 1960s. The evidence indicates a short-lived settlement established about AD 1000. The story of Freydis and her murderous rampage comes from Erik’s Saga and the Greenlanders’ Saga, the two Viking written sources on Vinland, and it could be that the pall cast by this event dissuaded the Norse from continuing the settlement, along with the threat of attack from Scraelings-“wretches,” the native Indians-and the easier availability of timber along the coast of Labrador to the north.
The only authenticated Norse artefact discovered in the Americas south of L’Anse aux Meadows is a worn silver coin excavated from an Indian site beside Penobscot Bay in Maine. It has been identified as a Norwegian coin of King Olaf, Harald Hardrada’s son and successor who had been with him in England in 1066, and it may date to the very year of the fictional voyage in this novel. No Viking coins have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows or in Greenland, and how this coin came to be lost almost a thousand miles beyond the farthest known Viking settlement is a mystery.
There is no evidence that seafarers from across the Atlantic reached the shores of the Yucatan in Mexico before the Spanish in the early sixteenth century. However, the Maya prophet Chilam Balam, “Jaguar Prophet,” is said to have foretold the arrival of “bearded men, the men of the east.” The Books of Chilam Balam were mainly written down after the Spanish conquest, leading some to speculate that the prophecy was a later embellishment, but the possibility remains that it was genuine and based on a memory of foreigners who had arrived before the Spanish. Only one group of “bearded men, men of the east” are known to have visited the New World before the fifteenth century, and they were the Norse; and the evidence suggests that Norse exploration west and south of Greenland reached its greatest extent during the eleventh century.
The fictional jungle temple with its wall-painting is based on a remarkable discovery in 1946 by two American adventurers in the Yucatan, at a place which became known as Bonampak, Maya for “painted walls.” Inside an overgrown corbelled building they found a narrative wall-painting of extraordinary power, showing a jungle battle, the torture and execution of prisoners and victory celebrations, including white-robed Maya ladies drawing blood from their own tongues. The painting dates from the height of the Maya period, about AD 800, but another painting, in the Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza, dates from the time when the Toltecs swept into power in the eleventh century. It shows canoe-borne Toltec warriors reconnoitering the Maya coast, a great pitched battle on land and the heart-sacrifice of the captured Maya leaders.
If you visit the ruins of Chichen Itza today, you are likely to be told that the stories of human sacrifice were exaggerated by the Spanish or relate only to the Toltecs, not the Maya, whose descendants still occupy the Yucatan. You can reach your own conclusion at the Tzompantli, the Platform of the Skulls, where you can look past the sculpted rows of decapitated heads towards the sacrificial altar on the Temple of the Warriors and then gaze down the ceremonial way to the Sacred Cenote, the Well of Sacrifice. Many of the depictions of torture and execution in Maya and Aztec art pre-date the arrival of the Spanish, and the latest techniques of forensic science are, almost literally, adding flesh to the picture: archaeologists in Mexico have discovered that the floors of Aztec temples are soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.
In the Yucatan, the most telling evidence comes from underwater archaeology. The Well of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza, dredged between 1904 and 1911 and excavated by divers in the 1960s, contained hundreds of human skeletons-men, women and children-as well as a treasure trove of artefacts: gold discs, carved jade pendants, a human skull made into an incense burner, a sacrificial knife, numerous votive wooden figurines and other offerings. The story is similar at other cenotes in the Yucatan, including several in the ring of sinkholes that formed over a huge meteorite impact site close to the north coast. Many of these cenotes remain unexcavated and are vulnerable to looters. The fictional cenote in this book is based on my own experience exploring these sites, and especially diving in the spectacular caverns and passageways of Dos Ojos, “Bat Cave,” near the Maya coastal stronghold of Tulum.
