Made In America - Bill Bryson [5]
Nquitpausuckowashâwmen – There are a hundred of us.
Chénock wonck cuppee-yeâumen? – When will you return?
Tashúckqunne cummauchenaûmis – How long have you been sick?
Ntannetéimmin – I will be going.6
Clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend, and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they called him Squanto. The answer, surprisingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English. Samoset spoke it only a little, but Squanto spoke English with total assurance (and Spanish into the bargain).
That a straggly band of English settlers could in 1620 cross a vast ocean and find a pair of Indians able to welcome them in their own tongue seems little short of miraculous. It was certainly lucky – the Pilgrims would very probably have perished or been slaughtered without them – but not as wildly improbable as it at first seems. The fact is that in 1620 the New World wasn’t really so new at all.
II
No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. The credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about AD 1000, but there are grounds to suppose that others may have been there even earlier. An ancient Latin text, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to the New World made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Vikings – and this on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.
Even the Vikings didn’t think themselves the first. Their sagas record that when they first arrived in the New World they were chased from the beach by a group of wild white people. They subsequently heard stories from natives of a settlement of Caucasians who ‘wore white garments and ... carried poles before them to which rags were attached’7 – precisely how an Irish religious procession would have looked to the uninitiated. (Intriguingly, five centuries later Columbus’s men would hear a similar story in the Caribbean.) Whether by Irish or Vikings – or Italians or Welsh or Bretons or any of the other many groups for whom credit has been sought – crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Ages was not quite as daring a feat as it would at first appear, even allowing for the fact that it was done in small, open boats. The North Atlantic is conveniently scattered with islands that could serve as stepping-stones – the Shetland Islands, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland and Baffin. It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea. We know beyond doubt that Greenland – and thus, technically, North America – was discovered in 982 by one Eric the Red, father of Leif Ericson (or Leif Eríksson), and that he and his followers began settling it in 986. Anyone who has ever flown over the frozen wastes of Greenland could be excused for wondering what they saw in the place. But in fact Greenland’s southern fringes are further south than Oslo and offer an area of grassy lowlands as big as the whole of Britain.8 Certainly it suited the Vikings. For nearly five hundred years they kept a thriving colony there, which at its peak boasted sixteen churches, two monasteries, some 300 farms and a population of 4,000. But the one thing Greenland lacked was wood with which to build new ships and repair old ones – a somewhat vital consideration for a sea-going people. Iceland, the nearest land mass to the east, was known to be barren. The most natural thing would be to head west to see what was out there. In about 1000, according to the sagas, Leif Ericson did just that. His expedition discovered a new land mass, probably Baffin Island, far up in northern Canada, over a thousand