I read somewhere that when the Norse discovered and settled
Greenland in the middle ages, they had compasses of a sort
fashioned from lodestone. Using these they got their
directions mixed up because, I think, in Greenland a compass
actually points west–due to the position of the North Magnetic Pole. But as I understood it, they confused East
with South and West with North, calling the southernmost part of their colony “Eastern Settlement” and the northernost part “Western Settlement”. I can see how they
would get mixed up with their compasses, but wouldn’t they
have done it in the opposite way, i.e. North = East and South = West? If I’m standing on the west coast of Greenland and look at a compass, it’s going to point west
to Canada because that’s where the NMP is. But if I, in my
ignorance, think that it’s pointing north, then I’m going to
conclude that South, on my left, is West.
So how did the Vikings, great navigators that they were,
get so mixed up?
And has anything new been discovered on the disappearance of
the Norse colonies? Is there any basis in fact for the
Bristol pirate attack as described in Jane Smiley’s novel?
Perhaps it was part of the “Call the cold place Greenland and call the green place Iceland ruse,” but I wonder if that was another of the lies were were taught in school.
Off the top of my head, because somebody’s waiting for his turn at the computer and I don’t have time to play with my Google:
As I understand it, the early lodestone compasses were nowhere near as accurate as today’s. They just generally showed you the direction “north”, more or less, useful in overcast conditions, but not an unerring guide. When you can’t see the sun, any general indication of “north” as opposed to “south” is helpful.
The Vikings had other sailing skills besides being able to follow a pointing needle. They used the flight of birds, the set of the waves, the stars, and they memorized general sailing directions handed down verbally (“sail north and west for eight sleeps until you get to the place where you can see the clouds that form over the island…”). Sailing a boat across an ocean isn’t like driving a car down an interstate–it doesn’t require pinpoint accuracy. There’s lots of room for adjustment. You realize that you’re heading a little bit too far south, because of the way that island off the port bow looks, so you steer a little bit north.
AFAIK, Jane Smiley (being a novelist) made the whole Bristol pirate thing up. That’s her job. The best guess of archaeologists is still that the Greenland colony simply succumbed to a combination of climate change, disease, and lack of support from home, and just faded away.
Both Samuel Eliot Morison, nautical history deity, and Farley Mowat, scholar of all things north of 45 degrees north latitude, state that the Vikings did not have compasses. They could estimate latitude so their usual method of navigation was to sail north or south until they reached the latitude of their destination and then sail east or west.
Mowat explains your question in detail. Erik the Red’s original settlement was the Ostri Bygd or Eastern Settlement at modern day Julianehaab Bight. With increased immigration from Iceland, the Norse began to settle a little west of the Eastern Settlement, just past Cape Desolation to an area now called Ivitgut Bight. Around 997, this was known as the West Bygd or Western Settlement. Within a few years, the Norse began to settle much farther north to the area called Godthaab Bight, (most of the intervening coast was unappealing). For a period all of these new settlements were called the Western Settlement. Eventually only the northern Godthaab region was called the Western Settlement and the original Western Settlement was called the Middle Settlement.
I looked up a magentic declination map and, extrapolating from Hudson Strait, in the area of the Norse settlements, the declination is 35-40 degress west. But the Norse would have had the North Star to let them know something was screwed up.
The southern colony was further east than the northern one. The coast between the two is aligned roughly NW-SE.
It should be noted that the Greenland colonies were actually further south than Iceland by several degrees of latitude. Iceland has a better climate because it’s closer to the North Atlantic Current.