Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [149]
Walruses and polar bears were virtually confined to latitudes far to the north of the two Norse settlements, in an area called the Nordrseta (the northern hunting ground), which began several hundred miles beyond Western Settlement and stretched farther north along Greenland’s west coast. Hence each summer the Greenlanders sent out hunting parties in small, open, six-oared rowboats with sails, which could cover about 20 miles per day and could hold up to a ton-and-a-half of cargo. Hunters set off in June after the peak of the harp seal hunt, taking two weeks to reach the Nordrseta from Western Settlement or four weeks from Eastern Settlement, and returning again at the end of August. In such small boats they obviously could not carry the carcasses of hundreds of walruses and polar bears, each of which weighs about a ton or half-a-ton respectively. Instead, the animals were butchered on the spot, and only the walrus jaws with the tusks, and the bear skins with the paws (plus the occasional live captive bear), were brought home, for the tusks to be extracted and the skin to be cleaned at leisure back in the settlements during the long winter. Also brought home was the baculum of male walruses, a bone like a straight rod about one foot long that forms the core of the walrus penis, because it proved to be of just the right size and shape (and, one suspects, conversation value) to make into an axe handle or a hook.
The Nordrseta hunt was dangerous and expensive in many ways. To begin with, hunting walruses and polar bears without a gun must have been very dangerous. Please imagine yourself, equipped with just a lance, spear, bow and arrow, or club (take your choice) trying to kill a huge enraged walrus or bear before it could kill you. Please also imagine yourself spending several weeks in a small rowboat shared with a live, trussed-up polar bear or its cubs. Even without a live bear as companion, the boat journey itself along the cold stormy coast of West Greenland exposed hunters to risk of death from shipwreck or exposure for several weeks. Apart from those dangers, the trip constituted expensive use of boats, manpower, and summer time for people short of all three. Because of Greenland’s scarcity of lumber, few Greenlanders owned boats, and using those precious boats to hunt walruses came at the expense of other possible uses of the boats, such as going to Labrador to acquire more lumber. The hunt took place in the summer, when men were needed to harvest the hay required to feed livestock through the winter. Much of what the Greenlanders obtained materially by trade with Europe in return for those walrus tusks and bearskins was just luxury goods for churches and chiefs. From our perspective today, we can’t help thinking of seemingly more important uses that the Greenlanders could have made of those boats and man-time. From the Greenlanders’ perspective, though, the hunt must have brought great prestige to the individual hunters, and it maintained for the whole society the psychologically vital contact with Europe.
Greenland’s trade with Europe was mainly through the Norwegian ports of Bergen and Trondheim. While at first some cargo was carried in oceangoing ships belonging to Icelanders and to the Greenlanders themselves, those ships as they aged could not be replaced due to the islands’ lack of timber, leaving the trade to Norwegian ships. By the mid 1200s,