Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [128]
After thus abandoning Vinland to the Indians, the Greenland Norse continued to make visits farther north on the Labrador coast, where there were many fewer Indians, in order to fetch timber and iron. Tangible evidence of such visits are a handful of Norse objects (bits of smelted copper, smelted iron, and spun goat’s wool) found at Native American archaeological sites scattered over the Canadian Arctic. The most notable such find is a silver penny minted in Norway between 1065 and 1080 during the reign of King Olav the Quiet, found at an Indian site on the coast of Maine hundreds of miles south of Labrador, and pierced for use as a pendant. The Maine site had been a big trading village at which archaeologists excavated stone and tools originating in Labrador as well as over much of Nova Scotia, New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Probably the penny had been dropped or traded by a Norse visitor to Labrador, and had then reached Maine by an Indian trade network.
Other evidence of continuing Norse visits to Labrador is the mention, in Iceland’s chronicle for the year 1347, of a Greenland ship with a crew of 18 that had reached Iceland after losing its anchor and being blown off course on the return voyage from “Markland.” The chronicle mention is brief and matter-of-fact, as if there were nothing unusual requiring explanation—as if the chronicler were instead to have written equally matter-of-factly, “So, the news this year is that one of those ships that visit Markland each summer lost its anchor, and also Thorunn Ketilsdóttir spilled a big pitcher of milk at her Djupadalur farm, and one of Bjarni Bollason’s sheep died, and that’s all the news for this year, just the usual stuff.”
In short, the Vinland colony failed because the Greenland colony itself was too small and poor in timber and iron to support it, too far from both Europe and from Vinland, owned too few oceangoing ships, and could not finance big fleets of exploration; and that one or two shiploads of Greenlanders were no match for hordes of Nova Scotia and Gulf of St. Lawrence Indians when they were provoked. In A.D. 1000 the Greenland colony probably numbered no more than 500 people, so that the 80 adults at the L’Anse camp would have represented a huge drain on Greenland’s available manpower. When European colonizers finally returned to North America after 1500, the history of European attempts to settle then shows how long were the odds that those attempts faced, even for colonies backed by Europe’s wealthiest and most populous nations, sending annual supply fleets of ships far larger than medieval Viking vessels, and equipped with guns and abundant iron tools. At the first English and French colonies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Canada, about half of the settlers died of starvation and disease within the first year. It’s no surprise, then, that 500 Greenlanders, from the most remote colonial outpost of Norway, one of Europe’s poorer nations, could not succeed at conquering and colonizing North America.
For our purposes in this book, the most important thing about the failure of the Vinland colony within 10 years is that it was in part a greatly speeded-up preview of the failure that overtook the Greenland colony after 450 years. Norse Greenland survived much longer than Norse Vinland because it was closer to Norway and because hostile natives did not make their appearance for the first few centuries. But Greenland shared, albeit in less extreme form, Vinland’s twin problems of isolation and Norse inability to establish good