A paradise for the extractive industries: European reports of land to the West from St Brendan to the Newfoundland voyages

A paradise for the extractive industries: European reports of land to the West from St Brendan to the Newfoundland voyages It is generally taken for granted that at least one set of pre-Columbian explorations, namely the Norse-Greenland voyages to 'Vinland' around 1000 AD, brought genuine information back to Europe regarding the North American continent.1 Irish anchorites searching for a monastic 'desert' in the eighth century A D and Bristol mariners searching for largeresourcesof fish in thefifteenth2 are also given credit for coming close to landing in North America. Thereportsof the latter two groups certainly influenced Columbus and his contemporaries. N o discussion of the background to Columbus's voyage would therefore seem complete without considering these pre-Columbian contacts. This paper will briefly re-examine the evidence for medieval Irish, Norse, and English explorations and will argue that anachronistic post-colonial assumptions as to the intent of these early explorers, aided by some misleading characteristics of the records themselves, have allowed modem, nationalistic obsessions to be imposed upon the priorities of medieval exploration and setdement. The medieval voyages do not prefigure later colonization. Rather, they are part of its 'prehistory' and give insights into the sentiments and foreknowledge, real or romantic, which insphed later explorers. A tendency to try to 'rationalize' details in medieval accounts, with attendant ethnic-stereotyping as to which nationalities are morereliablewitnesses, or were more or less 'capable' of making the voyage (a moot point, as most vessels used in extended coastal voyaging in Northern Europe have the technologically capacity to cross the 1 See most recently G. F. Bigelow, ed., The Norse of the North Atlantic, Ac Archaeologica 61, 1990, papers by Keller and Wallace, and esp. E. Wahlgren, The Vikings and America, London, 1986, bibliography: pp. 183-87; for earlier studies see esp. J. Tornde, Norsemen before Columbus, Oslo, 1972, bibliography. In general see G. Jones, 77K; Norse Atlantic Saga, Oxford, 2nd edn, 1986. 2 D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620, London, 1974, pp. 5-23; P. McGrath, 'Bristol and America, 1480-1631', in K. R. Andrew, N. P. Cooney, and P. Hair, eds., The Westward Enterprise, Liverpool, 1978, pp. 81-102; G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic, Woodbridge, 1980. PARERGON ns 12.2 (January 1995) 98 J- Wooding Atlantic), tends to blind us to the continuum of discourse in all the medieval accounts: an interest in landsrichin naturalresources,from which European visitors could extract resources, food, timber, or solitude, according to then particular needs. The Irish voyages, in particular, though on historical grounds most unlikely to have reached America, initiated a discourse which both inspired later voyages, along the 'stepping stone' route (via the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland), and shaped then subsequent recording. From these Irish beginnings can be traced an evolving history of Atlantic exploration by medieval North Europeans, moving away from the ethnically isolated treatments which characterize the history of this subject Most explorations did not lead to setdement, but to short-term exploitation. The medieval sources reflect, even create, this motivation through then images of plenitude. The desire for short-term extractive use of paradisical lands explains the transient character of the Vinland settlements, the ultimate disappearance of the Greenland colonies, and the vestigial use made of western lands by the Irish and Bristol mariners. The historiography of the European discovery of America has become something of a battlefield for empirical historians, holding out against the reductionist critiques of cultural studies.3 Empirical history could find many better advertisments, however, than the exceptionally uncritical treatment of the sources in this topic, especially of those sources from the medieval period and earlier.4 Few studies go further than questions as to which explorers 'got therefirst',whether the technology of the different ethnic groups was capable of the voyage and why viable colonies were not made prior to the seventeenth century. Success and failure are often judged only in such terms,5 neglecting the possibility that medieval colonialism arose from 3 See most recently K. Windschuttle, The Killing of History: how a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists, Sydney, 1994. 4 For a general survey see E. R...