They had the latter. And weaponized breasts at that.
So that’s how they knew when it was cold?
My understanding is Europe simply was not ready to exploit the discovery in 1000, while it was in 1500. Probably the moon landings will prove the same – sure we could do it 45 or 50 years ago, but we may not be able to do much with the moon for another couple hundred years or so.
Toy yo ho ho!
It might be mentioned that Europeans didn’t establish their first permanent colonies in North America (north of Florida/Mexico) until more than a century after John Cabot had “rediscovered” it in 1497. It really wasn’t a hot property for a long time.
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Which article?
[not in citation given]
That link goes to a different storm disaster in a different part of Scotland in 1881. The Shetlands storm disaster of 1881 affected a fishing village named Gloup as you describe, but didn’t seem to have made a dent in the Shetlands on the whole.
Sorry, this one;
*"The Norse, he says, were especially vulnerable to sudden death at sea. Revised population estimates, based on more accurate tallies of the number of farms and graves, put the Norse Greenlanders at no more than 2,500 at their peak—less than half the conventional figure. Every spring and summer, nearly all the men would be far from home, hunting. As conditions for raising cattle worsened, the seal hunts would have been ever more vital—and more hazardous. Despite the decline of the ivory trade, the Norse apparently continued to hunt walrus until the very end. So a single storm at sea could have wiped out a substantial number of Greenland’s men—and by the 14th century the weather was increasingly stormy. “You see similar things happening at other places and other times,” McGovern says. “In 1881, there was a catastrophic storm when the Shetland fishing fleet was out in these little boats. In one afternoon about 80 percent of the men and boys of the Shetlands drowned. A whole bunch of little communities never recovered.”
*
Then also this one;
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/why-did-greenland-s-vikings-disappear
Johanna’s scepticism is justified. The storm of July 1881 killed just 58 men in Shetland. Certainly a tragedy for those affected and a huge blow for particular villages. But it was hardly a demographic disaster for the Shetlands as a whole, which then had a population of over 29,000. It wasn’t even the worst such disaster in the nineteenth century - 105 Shetlanders had been killed in a storm in 1832.
{SHRUGS}
How much did any news spread, during that era?
If it wasn’t about the Pope, a King, the Plague, or a War, few knew or cared.
Remember the “Columbian Exibistion” in 1893? The Vikings built a copy of one of their long ships and sailed it from Scandnavia to Chicago via the Eire Canal to show everyone that Columbus was not the first to North America. That ship is still around in Geneva, IL after many years rotting in a park in Chicago. It needs a building like the one in the old country.
The wording in that article is perhaps prone to misreading. Should have said “A Shetland fishing fleet,” not “The Shetland fishing fleet” as though the whole archipelago had just one fishing fleet like a soccer team. “80 percent of the men and boys” 80 percent of what? “of the Shetlands drowned.” True in the sense that the victims were all “of the Shetlands.” What got elided is that 80 percent of the men & boys from the fishing villages that were affected drowned. (Why so many were out on the sea at once is because they’d just waited through a spell of stormy weather, and the day it cleared, they all headed out at once, not expecting another storm would hit suddenly. This is what made it an extra-big tragedy.)
The key to this more accurate reading is in the next sentence: “A whole bunch of little communities never recovered.” Those being little communities from the northern end of the small island of Yell, mainly Gloup. Not the Shetlands as a whole. The way they phrased it could have been clearer.
Apart from that rather large quibble, your point stands. It takes only one disaster to devastate a small isolated community beyond its ability to recover, if you get especially unlucky, like the Gloupers did.
Thanks for the corrections!
Not only that, this was the golden age of fake news. There were legends of unicorns, Prester John and his lost kingdom, stories of mermaids and serpents and lands paved with gold and people with two heads and any other urban and sub-urban legend; all of course, just beyond where the most recent voyagers had gotten too and all unverifiable. “The land just over those mountains and five days’ travel is far richer than here…” (Of course, when the Spaniards reached the new world, that was the story they heard from the natives when looking for gold. “None here, keep going that-a-way…”)
Not sure how accurate Norse navigation was (probably pretty good) but it’s not like the directions to North America were published and distributed by Viking raiders. So any story of boring islands a long way over the horizon was drowned out by all the other mythical and more interesting stories.
An excellent strategy not only for getting rid of your greedy smelly visitors but also fobbing them off on your enemies on the next island…
The Vikings built a longship replica in 1893? Which Vikings would that be?
LARPers?