Canadian Says Vikings Not 1st Across Atlantic

St. Peter's, Nova Scotia -- In a grand North Atlantic arc, from Washington to Newfoundland to Norway, Scandinavians and their New World descendants are gearing up for a series of lavish museum exhibits next spring, designed to celebrate the 1,000th anniversary of the arrival of the first Europeans in North America.

But here, in a fishing village 500 miles south of Leif Ericsson's colony, one of Canada's best known authors is waging a one-man battle, happily trying to prick the Vikings' balloon. Farley Mowat is watching his new paperback climb high on Canada's best-seller lists. The title is: The Farfarers: Before the Norse.

``The Norse were not the first to cross the Atlantic,'' the 78-year-old writer said recently as he prepared to close his summer cottage here for the winter. ``I always had this sense that someone was there ahead of the Norse -- in Iceland, in Greenland, in Labrador.''

In his book, drawn on half a century of poking around stone ruins in the remote reaches of the North Atlantic, Mowat theorizes that a ``pre-Indo European people'' that he calls the Albans sailed from the north of Scotland in the 700s, partly fleeing Viking slave raiders and partly lured by walrus herds. Northern Europeans prized walrus tusks, carving them into crosses, buttons, knife handles and saddle pommels. Following the walrus, the Albans island-hopped until they reached northern Labrador. Unable to return before winter, they built stone longhouses and roofed them with their boats.

Uncovering New Stories

A generation ago, in the mid-1960s, Mowat wrote Westviking -- The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America, a book that popularized new discoveries from the excavation of Ericsson's colony at L'Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland's northernmost tip. Now, just weeks before the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is to open a large show, ``Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga,'' American bookstores are to start carrying his new book, which argues that another group from Europe beat the Vikings here by 200 years. ``Now, here comes Farley to rain on that parade,'' said Tom Powers, an editor at his American publisher, Steerforth Press, said of the Viking exhibits. ``Well, isn't that what writers are supposed to do? Celebrate stories we know, and uncover new ones?'' Many archaeologists and some reviewers have dismissed Farfarers as far-fetched.

``He has gotten some hard and fast scientific information and then put a spin on it that 95 percent of professional archaeologists would not support,'' said Kevin E. McAleese, curator of a show that is to open in June at Newfoundland's provincial museum, ``Full Circle: First Contact, the Vikings and Skraelings in Newfoundland and Labrador.'' Referring to the Viking word for native Americans, McAleese, said: ``It is about the first contact between the Skraelings, or peoples of our side of the Atlantic, with the peoples of the other.''

From Washington, Bill Fitzhugh, curator of the Smithsonian Viking show, called the book's theory ``very far-fetched'' and based on ``no evidence.''

Take History Away from Academics

Such criticism does not faze Mowat, whose 36 books have taught generations of North Americans and Europeans to look differently at wolves, whales, Eskimos, and Vikings. Now he believes that fresh thinking is needed on the history of human contacts across the Atlantic.

``I don't like the concept of firsts -- people drifted across this planet like smoke,'' Mowat said during a break from banging on his Underwood manual typewriter. ``We have to restore history to what it originally was: stories. We have to take it away from the academics, and put it back in the hands of the storytellers, the saga men.''

For this master storyteller, whose books have been translated into 52 languages and have sold 15 million copies, the saga began one windy summer day in 1966 in northern Quebec when Thomas Lee, a Canadian archaeologist, showed him a series of well-fitted, cylindrical towers and several rectangular stone foundations.

The mystery was this: How were these rectangular longhouses roofed? Lying hundreds of miles north of the historic tree line, there was no timber available for beams. Excavations found no evidence of whale bones used as supports. Several decades later, on a visit to Northern Scotland's Shetland Islands, Mowat and his wife Claire, spied what they thought was the answer: houses and animal enclosures roofed with overturned fishing boats.

Weaving together bits and pieces of Norse sagas, chronicles of Irish monks, and archaeological evidence he picked up during a lifetime of travels in Iceland, Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, Mowat wrote what he calls ``a detective story'' and what his publishers, Seal Books and Key Porter Books, list as nonfiction.

Farley Went too Far

Peter Schledermann, a Canadian archaeologist, who has excavated many of the rectangular ruins, has said that all the artifacts recovered from the 700-1000 A.D. period were left by the Dorset people, an indigenous group that was supplanted by Inuit, or Eskimos, between 1000 and 1500.

``Farley went too far when he decided that the sites we were working on in the high Arctic were related to Alban activities,'' said the scientist who directs the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary. ``There is not a shred of evidence of that.''

But Mowat relishes the controversy. Over the last decade, he noted, archaeologists in the Americas have discovered things where, according to reigning wisdom, they should not be. A series of discoveries, some dating back as far as 15,000 years, have forced archaeologists to abandon a fiercely held dogma that the oldest human habitation in the Americas was tied to 11,000-year-old spear points found in Clovis, N.M.

Mowat says that many scientists admit to him privately that the ancient history of trans-Atlantic travel is lost in the murk of time.

``The scientific reaction is: `We are sympathetic to your hypotheses, but we can't admit it, our jobs are at stake, our reputations are at stake,' '' he said, with a subversive twinkle in his eye.

[Source: By James Brooke / NY Times Service via Miami Herald / FLA - November 10 1999 ]

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