Tag Archives: little ice age

Thursday 2nd February 2017 – WHATEVER HAS HAPPENED …

… to Belgium?

We all know that the problem with the Dutch is that they have no word for gratis, and Belgium is pretty much the same. And so I was astonished today to be given a big two-litre bottle of fizzy pop when I walked into the supermarket on the corner for my baguette this morning.

Apparently they had found a crate of it at the back of the warehouse and the sell-by date was just out. And so they were giving away a bottle free to each of their regular customers. I felt highly honoured.

Last night was another typical night just recently so I won’t describe it to you. I wasn’t awoken at 06:00, just for a change, and I did go on my travels – although all memory of it immediately disappeared the moment I awoke.

And apart from that, I had a shower and a shave today, to make the most of my clean bed, and that was really that. But one thing that I didn’t do was to make tea. I was doing something interesting interesting and forgot. It was 21:45 when I realised what time ot was. I had a quick snack instead.

But my search for a copy of Carl Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanae produced some dividends today. And I can hardly be blamed for not finding it sooner because, being held in an American university, they have translated his name to Charles Rafn. Totally stupid if you ask me, but that’s Americans for you.

Mind you,it’s not done me much good because although I was delighted to see that he wrote bilingually, his book is in Latin and … errr … Danish. It makes me wonder why the Americans wanted to possess it, but there we are.

But all is not lost, because I found a book – in English – called America Discovered in the Tenth Century. This dates from 1838 and is a summary by Rafn of his work, and as far as I can tell, presented to the Royal Societies of Northern Antiquaries.

He’s big on the “Cape Cod Bay” theory, although his nautical calculations are rather exaggerated, he fails to take account of the shifting coastline, and he is, like most people until Munn first tentatively explored the theory in his “Wineland voyages Location of Helluland Markland and Vinland,”, totally unaware of the effects of Global Warming.

It needs hardly to be said that the Norse explorations took place in what was known as the “Medieval Warm” period (not that this is intended by any means to belittle the magnificent voyages that the Norse undertook) and that in the days of Rafn the Northern Hemisphere was still recovering from the effects of the Little Ice Age, with a couple of degrees’ difference in temperature and climate. During this period, the Domesday Book records grapes being grown commercially as far north as mid-Yorkshire. That’s about 500 miles north of the current viable limit and all of this puts the flora and fauna discovered by the Norse in Vinland into a potentially much-different region than where the same might be found today

So now I’m off to bed, early again. Let’s hope I have a good night tonight, and remember where I’ve been.

And I wonder what this free fizzy pop tastes like.

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Wednesday 18th January 2017 – LAST NIGHT …

… was something a bit more like it too.

Although it took me ages to go off to sleep (I was reading Vaino Tanner’s notes on the Finnish expedition to Labrador until something silly in the morning) I ended up soundly asleep until the Eastern European workmen awoke me at 06:30. They were actually quite quiet during the night which was very a pleasant surprise.

On my own at breakfast, I came back down here and … errr … went back under the bedclothes to keep warm (it was minus 5°C outside). The next thing that I remembered was that it was 11:10. I’d slept for 3 hours without any difficulty at all.

Braving the freezing cold I nipped out to the supermarket on the corner for my baguette and an apple – I’ve run out of fruit in here. But making my butties at lunchtime, I was joined by a Far-Eastern woman and another man whom I don’t recall having seen before.

I pressed on with my expedition notes this afternoon in between crashing out somewhat. We’ve hit the anthropological stuff now, and he talks at great length about the Inuit. He’s tentatively identified a new race of Inuit round about the 15th Century that began to push aside the Thule Inuit, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion from his notes

Although now discredited by almost everyone despite the efforts of James Enterline in his book Viking America: The Norse Crossings and Their Legacy, the obvious conclusion has quite a logical ring to it – in that with the Little Ice Age descending on Greenland in the mid-14th Century and the Norse settlers being cut off from Iceland by the dramatic deterioration in weather, the only way for the Norse to escape the weather would be to head west and live off the ocean instead of the land.

Like many Europeans since then – in fact right up until the early 20th century, the quickest way for a new settler to assimilate traditional survival skills in a hostile environment is to take a native spouse who can teach you the necessary skills. Most of the population of Labrador are descendants of mixed unions of European men and Inuit women, and had the Norse assimilated (and there is no reason to suppose that they didn’t – they aren’t likely to have sat around and starved or frozen to death), there would be a completely mixed gene pool within just a couple of generations. And with their better technology and knowledge of iron, they would quickly have overwhelmed the less-developed Thule culture.

And the timescale fits too.

Liz and I had a good chat on the laptop later and then I went for tea. I was on my own for most of the time except for a young family with a baby (so we have this to deal with tonight).

Now I’m off for a shower and a change of clothes, and then I’ll be having an early night.

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