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By Root 1966 0

objects clearly originating with Vikings—especially pieces of smelted metal that would have been prized for making tools—discovered at Dorset sites scattered over Northwest Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Of course, we don’t know whether Dorset people acquired those objects by face-to-face contacts, peaceful or otherwise, with Norse, or whether they were merely scavenged from abandoned Norse sites. Whichever was the case, we can be confident that Norse relations with the Inuit had the potential for becoming much more dangerous than those relatively harmless relations with Dorset people.

Inuit culture and technology, including mastery of whale-hunting in open waters, arose in the Bering Strait region somewhat before A.D. 1000. Dogsleds on land, and large boats at sea, enabled the Inuit to travel and transport supplies much more rapidly than could Dorset people. As the Arctic became warmer in the Middle Ages and the frozen waterways separating Canadian Arctic islands thawed, the Inuit followed their bowhead whale prey through those waterways eastwards across Canada, entering Northwest Greenland by A.D. 1200, and thereafter moving south along Greenland’s west coast to reach the Nordrseta, then the vicinity of Western Settlement around A.D. 1300, and the vicinity of Eastern Settlement around 1400.

The Inuit hunted all of the same prey species that Dorset people had targeted, and probably did so more effectively because they (unlike their Dorset predecessors) possessed bows and arrows. But the hunting of whales as well gave them an additional major food supply unavailable to either Dorset people or the Norse. Hence Inuit hunters could feed lots of wives and children and lived in large settlements, typically housing dozens of people, including 10 or 20 adult male hunters and fighters. In the prime hunting grounds of the Nordrseta itself, the Inuit established, at a site called Sermermiut, a huge settlement that gradually accumulated hundreds of dwellings. Just imagine the problems it must have created for the success of the Norse Nordrseta hunt if a group of Norse hunters, who could hardly have numbered more than a few dozen, were detected by such a big group of Inuit and failed to establish good relations.

Unlike the Norse, the Inuit represented the climax of thousands of years of cultural developments by Arctic peoples learning to master Arctic conditions. So, Greenland has little wood available for building, heating, or illuminating houses during the months of Arctic winter darkness? That was no problem for the Inuit: they built igloos for winter housing out of snow, and they burned whale and seal blubber both for fuel and for lighting lamps. Little wood available to build boats? Again, that was no problem for the Inuit: they stretched sealskins over frameworks to build kayaks (Plate 18), as well as to make their boats called umiaqs big enough to take out into unprotected waters for hunting whales.

Despite having read about what exquisite watercraft Inuit kayaks were, and despite having used the modern recreational kayaks now made of plastic and widely available in the First World, I was still astonished when I first saw a traditional Inuit kayak in Greenland. It reminded me of a miniature version of the long, narrow, fast battleships of the U.S.S. Iowa class built by the American navy during World War II, with all of their available deck space bristling with bombardment guns, anti-aircraft guns, and other weaponry. Nineteen feet long, tiny compared to a battleship, but still much longer than I had ever imagined, the deck of the slim kayak was packed with its own weaponry: a harpoon shaft, with a spear-thrower extension at the grip end; a separate harpoon head about six inches long, attachable to the shaft by a toggle connection; a dart to throw at birds, with not only an arrow point at the tip but three forward-facing sharp barbs lower on the dart shaft to hit the bird in case the tip just missed; several sealskin bladders to act as drags on harpooned whales or seals; and a lance for delivering the death blow to