The New Vikings
Goin' for the Four-Star in Newfoundland
by Irene Howard HighGrader Magazine Sept./Oct. 2000
On July 28, a flotilla of Viking ships from around the world, headed by the Icelandic longship Islendingur, entered Garden Cove at the tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula. Its arrival marked the official opening of an ambitious, new tourist development, the Norstead, a replica of a Viking village which features international re-enactors of Viking life and employs a sizable number of local people.
Premier Brian Tobin, along with dignitaries from Canada and the Nordic countries, was on hand to welcome the Islendingur, which had left Iceland in June and retraced the voyage of 1,000 years ago by Leif Eriksson, the first European visitor to these shores.
As the crew stepped ashore, young aboriginals from Labrador came over the hill and chanted and drummed and danced their welcome. Mi'kmaq Chief Misel Joe, speaking for the Innu, the Labrador aboriginals and the Mi'kmaq, impressive in feathered headdress, asked for a two-minute silence in memory of the extinct Beothuk people. He ended with a welcome of reconciliation and a plea to start history over again.
The crew came forward and shook hands with the three aboriginal leaders. Captain Gunner Eggertsson, direct descendant of Leif Eriksson, and Chief Misel Joe hugged one another. History had been acknowledged: Leif Eriksson had come upon a land already inhabited for 6,000 years. It was only fitting that the descendants of those early people should be the first to greet the Islendingur.
The sagas tell that Leif found a place called Vinland, but the exact location remained unknown. In 1960, Norwegian explorer George Decker acting on information from fisherman and writer Helge Ingstad was convinced he'd found Vinland at L'Anse Aux Meadows. Over the next few years, he and his wife archaeologist Anna Stine Ingstad, uncovered eight ancient building sites. Only a few artifacts were found, but they were unmistakably Norse, notably the spindle whorl and the iron pin for fastening a cloak.
Here Leif Eriksson and his little band of immigrants had built dwellings and workshops and settled for a time, hammering iron in the forge, grazing cattle on the meadows, harvesting the bountiful northern cod and drying it on the shore.
In 1968 L'Anse Aux Meadows was declared a UNESCO Heritage Site. Parks Canada made further excavations in the 1970s and then developed the area as a National Historic Park, constructing replicas of three of the buildings and an interpretation centre.

I visited L'Anse Aux Meadows in May, two months before the great celebration. At Viking Nest Bed and Breakfast I enjoyed bake apple and partridge berry jams, roast moose and fish and brewis ( salt cod cooked with hard tack)with host Thelma Hedderson. Her husband Alonzo was out on the west coast of the peninsula after lumpfish, one of the sources of roe for caviar. The season was limited to three weeks; formerly it was seven weeks but the weekly limit for roe had been cut too.
"The government's squeezin' and squeezin," observed Thelma.
My visit to L'Anse Aux Meadows was a kind of pilgrimage: of Scandinavian descent, I wanted in this commemorative year to stand where those first Norse immigrants had settled. I wanted to honour my Norse ancestors and also my own parents - much, much later Scandinavian immigrants.
And I did stand on the terrace above the shore where the building sites were unearthed. Whatever they looked like 1,000 years ago, today they're unremarkable depressions in the earth, neatly covered with protective turf, each with an identifying wood marker flat on the ground.
I looked down at "DWELLING, SHIP REPAIR AND IRON FORGING," and waited for a surge of feeling. Or maybe I'd hear the echo of hammer on steel. But there was only silence. It was like standing beside a grave, except that nobody was buried there.
The Norse settlers had packed up all their belongings and sailed away to carry on with their lives in their homeland. But a woman had left behind her spindle whorl; a man his iron pin.
There was life and warmth inside the turf-roofed replica dwelling, however, where three young Newfoundlanders, employed as interpreters, were acting their Viking roles.
Red-bearded "Ragnar" with sword and shield and "Thora" with spindle and spindle whorl just like the one in the glass museum case, posed for snapshots and talked amicably with a group of high school students who were sitting on a wide wooden bench in front of an open fire in the middle of the floor.
A stew with cabbage, potatoes and carrots was in preparation in a black iron pot suspended from the ceiling to hang over the fire by a heavy, iron hook. The air was a little smoky: not all of the smoke was escaping through the hole in the roof. Sheep skins hung on a line from the ceiling and were scattered on wide benches.
In another room, "Kål" explained how the Norse settlers had found bog iron in the area and smelted it in their smithy.
Then "Grimm" arrived with a package of caribou steaks from his freezer and "Thora" roasted them over the fire on a long-handled iron griddle.
Two kilometres away, down at the cove, construction on the Norstead was going on steadily to the screech of power saws.
Local fishermen were constructing a boat shed, chieftain's hall, workshop and stave church, all as Norse and authentic as archival research could make them: turf roofs with smoke holes, ceilings of long, thin fir poles laid side by side, walls of peat sod, two feet thick at the top and as much as eight feet at the bottom. The walls, however, have a gravel core for drainage and concrete foundations on bedrock, and the ceiling poles are bound together, not with strips of seal hide but with ordinary nails and wooden pegs. For these buildings are for public use and must comply with today's regulatory standards.
The boat shed, 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, did not yet have its turf roof: the ceiling poles had yet to be covered with turf. The sheer number of these poles, or "longers" claimed my attention. The longers had to be peeled, the bark stripped off with an axe, and a number of men were working at this. Thousands of longers had already been peeled and put in place on walls and ceilings, and more were needed for the boat shed and for the other buildings too. It was estimated that 18,000 longers in all would be used The ground around each building was littered with bark.
These workers had been fishermen before the collapse of the northern cod fishery. I knew, of course about the moratorium, but it wasn't until I stood in the rain at the Norstead, a glacial wind blowing off the pack ice and icebergs in the bay, and watched these men stripping longers that I understood the enormity of what had happened to the people in the outports of Newfoundland.
They had been dispossessed of the sea just as the Scottish crofters had been dispossessed in the Highland Clearances when their land was taken from them to graze sheep; dispossessed like the Acadians, for it was a tragic exile for Newfoundlanders to be expelled from the sea.
The moratorium on the northern cod was announced in July 1992 by the Federal fisheries minister John Crosbie. He broke the bad news at a news conference at the Radisson Hotel in Saint John's. According to one report, a small crowd of fishermen who had gathered there were, unknown to him, not allowed in the room. The doors were locked against them, and while John Crosbie was speaking, they hammered at the doors, demanding to be let in.
The people of the outports had been concerned about the fish stocks for some years because their catches were dwindling and the fish were getting smaller too, but the Department of Fisheries hadn't listened. True, the Department were counting fish and calculating biomass and writing reports, but they found reassuring numbers for maintaining high quotas for the Total Allowable Catch (TAC). Then too, the Federal government felt bound to establish quotas that would produce the requisite number of weeks of fishing to qualify fishermen for unemployment insurance.
It meant that the economy was supported at the expense of the cod, and that was the agony of it all, as every fisherman knew.
With the advent of the factory trawlers, capable of scooping up the resources of whole seabeds at a go, foreign overfishing became an urgent problem, one that Canadian diplomacy and Canadian surveillance could not solve, not even by Brian Tobin's dramatic initiative in the Turbot War with Spain.
All the while, the inshore fishery was also becoming depleted, with local fishermen adhering to the yearly TAC despite their uneasy knowledge that all was not well with the fish that gave them their livelihood.
The moratorium on northern cod delivered a blow that reverberated through their lives, not just throwing them out of work, but also taking them away from the sea and their boats and nets and gear and splitting sheds, their "salt stages"or sheds where they salted the cod, the "flakes" where they spread it out and dried it in the sun and wind.
It wrenched them loose from everything that had bound them to the northern cod for three centuries. Its life cycle was their life cycle: in April when the tiny capelin come in near the shore to spawn, the cod came after them in a feeding frenzy that signals the start of the fishing season.
Thelma Hedderson recalls how the men used to start getting their boats and gear ready in early March, and as they waited for the capelin and the time became shorter and shorter, they became more and more excited: "They got so tensed up it was a relief when they finally did leave to go fishing."
But now the capelin are scarcer, there's no feeding frenzy, there's no cod. Even cod for the table is regulated: this year, ten cod or other groundfish per day, excluding halibut, for two designated weekends, hook and line only, no jigging, the rules to be enforced by air surveillance, at-sea boardings and dockside inspection with a maximum fine of $100,000 for violation.
Fishermen had been eligible for unemployment insurance since 1965, and in Newfoundland it was built into the economy, all but controlling the length of the fishing season. But something more was needed now. Over the years the government put in place various assistance programs, as families in the little outports struggled to adjust to the reality of not fishing for a living.

The New Economy
In the little shack that served as lunch room at the Norstead site, supervisor Nat Patey, one-time art student and 30 years in the construction industry, wiped down the oilcloth on the table in a courteous gesture at making me comfortable and went to fetch me someone to interview.
Winston Colbourne was, as he himself said, "a very good guy to talk," and was practiced in the art of the interview, for the Vikings had become big news, 1,000 years after the event and the media had discovered L'Anse Aux Meadows.
His family had lived on nearby Colbourne Point for 60 years and although many in this community had moved away, he and his wife Liza were staying. So was his brother Clayton, 20 summers with Parks Canada at the Viking Historic Site and also a good talker.
Winston, commenting on the loss of the cod fisheries said, "It was heartbreaking there for a while."
He blames John Crosbie for not stopping the depredation of the cod stock by the factory freezer ships. He is now hoping that the Norstead will provided jobs for the area. As for himself, his take-home pay as a construction worker is $300 a week.
"I'm happy with it. I'm fifty-seven. Give me another three years and slowly I'll retire. I like camping. Lots of small brooks here inside of L'Anse Aux Meadows, so I'll do a lot of fishing for salmon and hunting moose, bird hunting. I'll be happy. All I want is to hold my own strength until I'm an old man."
Gayden Pynn and Allan Patey were peeling longers over by the boat shed. They'd both been fishermen, but they could turn their hands to anything. Gayden said, "I've been in construction, a truck driver and carpentry, labourer. I've been at most everything, but fishing was mostly my job. For to make ends meet, you just got to know everything and then try to get into something that will make you a dollar."
Delcie, his wife had worked at the fish plant at St. Anthony until it closed; so had Allan's wife, Florence.
Gayden had no use for politicians: "They give the people a lot of bull. They're like a bunch of kids when they get together." But the boat shed, he said, is "really beautiful. And I do like wood work. Log cabins and all that."
At the chieftain's hall, up on the roof, men were installing wooden frames, called shutters, around the smoke holes. Down below, Donald Bartlett, single, good-looking, told me about the doors made of fir slabs, the whole surface chipped with an axe: "No nails at all, just dowells. We designed the door and the shutters. I read quite a few books, so I had a pretty good idea. You need a good imagination. You don't need blueprints or anything. When you're working with wood, it sort of comes natural. Like an artist doing a painting."
He still had his boat, went out sometimes for lumpfish. And if the Vikings could come back and see these buildings? He laughs. "They'd probably be impressed."
Nat Patey had a different answer. He had fire in his eyes when he grimly replied, "They'd have tried harder." To save the fishery, that is. Tourists were taking the place of cod. Not that he had anything against tourists. They'd bring jobs to L'Anse Aux Meadows. But he couldn't help reflecting on what had been lost, including his own career as a wood sculptor.

Back at the Viking Nest, Thelma Hedderson was getting prepared for the arrival of the Islendingur. She had taken out a mortgage to finance her new Viking Village Bed and Breakfast, still under construction on the rocky headland overlooking Hay Cove. Yes, it would be ready by July 28; in fact it was already completely booked for the summer. But in May it was still all rafters and sawdust and new bathtubs stranded like beached whales between the partitions.
Yet she could see it all: "It's looking right out on the Atlantic Ocean and you can see the icebergs and the whales. There's a patio door in the bedrooms, you can go out on the deck and enjoy a coffee in the morning and we're offering room service. There's two rooms with whirlpool and all the rooms have bathrooms en suite." And then, laughing, jubilant, " I'm goin' for the four-star, girl."
That was the reason for all the bathtubs. The Newfoundland and Labrador Rating Council conforms to a national standard for accommodation services and it declares that four-star requires bathrooms en suite.

Viking Marriage
Bonnie Blake and Wayne Hynes - "Thora" and "Kål" - were married in the stave church on August 25. The two studied under the Heritage Interpreter Program at the College of the North Atlantic in St. Anthony and spent their summers in costume working at the Parks Canada Viking Historic Site. As well as studying Viking history and archaeological exploration, they've immersed themselves in Viking culture - learning to use a drop spindle, making dyes, fashioning tools from iron and wood.
For the wedding ceremony, Bonnie and Wayne wore Viking garb, and so did the bridesmaids, the mother of the bride, the children taking part, and even the United Church minister, who borrowed a costume for herself.
Bonnie and Wayne had designed the clothes, and her mother, Dorothy Blake, had sewn them. They'll make good future use of them, because they expect to be continuing their careers as historical interpreters.
During the service, Wayne placed a bridal wreath on Bonnie's head and they exchanged swords and rings. But Bonnie drew the line at the killing of a pig as part of the ceremony -- although they did feast on roast pig for the reception - two or three barbecued over a fire-pit, and lamb and crabs and mussels too. Everybody in L'Anse Aux Meadows was there.
Here at L'Anse Aux Meadows and nearby outports, Newfoundlanders are writing their own saga of exploration and settlement as they discover their long history and turn it to useful purpose. It has its tragedies and brutal events, but it's hopeful, spirited, humorous. And speaking for the workers at the Norstead, Nat Patey said, "We're all proud to have been involved in such an interesting project." Yet there's sadness and deep nostalgia for the old days. Thelma Hedderson recalls how she and the children would watch from the kitchen window for Alonzo's boat. When it appeared off Belle Isle, they'd all pile into the car and off they'd go to the wharf at Quirpon to meet him and see how much fish he'd brought in.
"Anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 pounds," she said. "Really good years. It was a good living."
She has another way of making a living now. She's goin' for the four-star, and so in their various ways are Wayne and Bonnie and Tony Pilgrim ("Grimm") and Mike Simmonds ("Ragnar"). It may be a little harder for older men like Gayden Pynn, Allan Patey and Winston Colbourne but the Norstead may provide for them too.

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