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j^-v

CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY
By Georob Johnson

GREENLAND belongs to this Continent and no doubt the first white
baby that ever opened its eyes in America was bom in the fiord to
which Eric the Red gave the name of Gronelant. But we are not iu
the habit of associating Greenland with the Continent in our ordinary talk.
As the first nursery of white babies in this western hemisphere, we will put
Greenland to one side — where she is geographically. We want to get some-
what nearer home. "Who was the first baby ))orn of white parents along the
shores of the Atlantic, my from Capo Breton to Boston, or to the Straits of
Magellan, if 3 ou like ?

The early settlers in Gnenland were adventurous men aad wom3n. The
men .'f>re good 8hip-builders, good searaen^ bold and plucky. They put their
consciences into their ivork as ship-builders. They constructed strong vessels
and large one? 100, — larger than those Columbus obtained to sail westward
over the " Sei* of Darkness," on his memorable voyag*? of 1492. In Norway

Milton located

that tallest pino

Ilpwn on N'orwegian hills to be the mast

Of gome groat admiral

whifh to the " superior friends " spear was " but a wand." From these
Norwegian hills the Groonland settb^rs selected the timber for the vessels
with which they puKhed their way through the northern seas. Hence the
largest vessel that Columbus had on his first voyage was only about the same
size as some of the second class vessels of the Vikings, and not to bo compared
in strength or size with the f>"3at " Dragons " of the Norsemen *.

1 — Tho ninglo-d'jckeil caravel which carrierl Colurabun to tho West Indies on his first
voyage was aboiit 'J(! foet long by 20 foot breadth of beam. The other vessels with Cnliinibill
were titill small* r— one of them being named tho Kina or liaby from its diminutive size in
comparison wit)> the other two.

Kroiide deKCrib< s a Viiting'H ship ho saw at Christiania that lia<l been exhumed from
its grave of peat in niiich it hail been buried as tho cotlln of its owner, about the time
when the Danes were driving the Enjilish King Alfred into the marshes ot Somersetshire,
Its dimensions were SO feet in length by 17j| feet beam.

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CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY S

Having these veBsels and beiug what they were, these Icelanders natu-
rally enough wanted to know what there was in the neighbourhood of Green-
laud in the way of lands for settlement, or of natural products for home ust.

Some of them iu their voyages between Iceland and Eric's fiord had been
carried far to the south by the wind in storm and tempest, or by the pressure
of the polar current in foggy weather. They had taken back to the homes
that nestled beneath the great ice mountains on the green lowlands of the
IgaVko fiord, stories of other lands, from shipwreck on whose rock-bound
coasts nothing but their good seamanship saved them. Thus very early, even
before the centuries of the Christian era attained their teens, something, more
or less misty, was known of our continent. That something was sufficient to
stimulate the curiosity of Lief, the son of Eric the Red, who having been con-
verted to Christianity was the first to bring christian clergymen to Greenland.
Lief got together a crew of five and thirty men and sailed in the summer of
1000 A. D., for ihe south country. He arrived on the coast in the neigh-
bourhood of the Strait now called Belle Isle, and gave to the shores he had
sailed along the name of Heluiand it Mikla— the " Great Slate Land," or
the " Stone Land,'' as Charles Roberts in his delightfully written History of
Canada has translated it. Keeping on southward, Lief skirted a shore covered
with great forests and this he called Markland ^, or "Wood (or Busu) land.

this was one of tlie fieivent or Crane clasg which were inferior in sizo to the Dragons ;
Froudo's shij) being only a ,U oared vessel, while the Jhaijons had 60 oars, 30 on each side,
and carried as many men as all three of the Caravels with which Columbus sailed from
Talos on August 3rd, 1492

2 — In the 5th century" of thi Christian Chronology the one country which bore the
name of England was what we now call Sleswick (from •' wiok," meaning the '• seacoast,"
and " Schley.s," an arm of the Uultic Sea). Each little farmer common-wealth of those
English was girt in by its own bonier or " Mark," a belt of fo;'e»t which parted it from its
fellow villiige — Cf. Green's Hia/ory of the EnglUh people.

Taylor says the root is found in .all the Indo'Euroi)ean lan^'uages and is probably to be
referred to the Sannkrit Marya, a " boundary," which is the derivative of the verb tmri,
" to remember."

The iincleared lorest served its the boundary of the yau of the Teutonic settlers. Hence
the Scandinavian miirk, " a forest," and the English word murky which originally denoted
the gloom of the " forest primeval." A very interesting history is embalmed in this work
mark. Max Muller has a most interesting lecture (,i) the Aryian root word mar — a trace of
which is in the word " mark " — namely the ]>ouniling, crushing or destruction which was
invariably the punishment of the stranger who ventured to cross the forest belt of the
Eaglish without souuding » horn to give notice to the villagera of his coming.

-44-

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« CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY

Seeing that Lief had just left behind him the rocky forbidding shores of
Labrador (as we now call it) and was coasting along a densely wooded region,
it was the most natural thing in the world to contrast this land with the
other by naming it the Forest Land. This must have been the eastern and
southern coast of our wayward sister, Newfoundland, who won't join in our
Canadian tea party, hut keeps aloof from our roof-tree. Dr. Fiske, however,
thinks that it was the coast of Cape Breton without giving any reasons for
his belief. On leaving Forest Land, Lief sailed westward and was for two
days out of sight of land. When the " stift* northeastern " which blevr him
along, subsided, he found himself near a shore, along which he coasted till he
came to a place where a river, issuing from a lake, fell into the sea. The spot
pleased him so much that he concluded to enter the lake (or bay) and winter
there. He built booths on the shore, very like the lumber-shanties of more
modern times. One day one of his party came into the camp talking in a
surprised sort of a style. He was not a Norseman but had somehow found his
way from Southern Europe, possibly from the Mediterranean, to Iceland and
thence to Greenland. Being a Southron (as the Scotch say) he knew grapes
when he saw tlem and declared to his companions that in his rambles ho had
found bunches of that luscious fruit. Lief was bo impressed with the fact
that he called the country Vinland ; the land of the Grape Vine, the Land
of "Wine.

Just where Vinland was situated we do not positively know. There has
been as much speculation over its exact whereabouts as over that of the
Garden of Eden. The general idea in that it was somewhere between Halifax
and Boston. Dr. Storm (Studies on the Vinland voyages) thinks that Vinland
was on the sonthern coast of Nova Scotia. Dr. Fiske thinks that the
abundance of grapes as described by Lief points to a more southerly region
and, therefore, mentions the shore between Cape Ann in Massachusetts and
Point Judith in Rhode-Island, as the likelier region. Of course it ie quite
natural that doctors should differ ; it has passed into a proverb that they do.

Wherever Vinland was. Lief passed the winter there and returned to
Greenland in the spring with a cargo of timber and received from his
countrymen iho cognomination of the Lucky, " Lief the Lucky."

The success of Lief s venture induced his brothers to start of " strange

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CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY 7

countries for to see." Thorwald found Vinland and Lief a booths, and spent
a couple of winters there. Thorstein, another brother, took Lief s sturdy
ship, in 1006, and tried to reach Vinland but encountered severe weather ;
died, was buried at sea ; and Gudrig, his widow, returned sorrowfully to
Greenland.

Sometime during the summer of 1006, Thorfinn Karlsefni arrived in the
Greenland settlement from Iceland, foil in love with the charming widow
Gudrig, and married her. She was as adventurous as she was beautiful and
persuaded her husband to undertake the founding of a settlement in Vinland.
Possibly she was tired of the climate of Greenland and objected to the long
dreary winters. It might be that she wanted to keep her handsome husband
from flirtations with the other belles of Brattahlid. Whatever the promoting
cause she succeeded in winning him over to the idea, and in the course of the
next summer the Greenland settlement of Brattahlid witnessed the departure
of four ships with 100 men, several women and a goodly supply of cattle.
They reached Vinland without misadventure, and to Thornlinn and Gudrig,
soon ufter, a son was born and named Snorro, in honour of the Captain of
one of the vessels. The boy Snorro, with his parents, lived in Vinland till
he was a sturdy, flaxen-haired, blue eyed youngster of three summere. The
colony was then broken up because of the hostility of the Indians and the
remnant returned to Greenland.

This Snorro became the progenitor of a long line of eminent mnn. Any
Canadian who visits Lucerne in Switzerland will be all the more enthusiastic
over the colossal lion carved out of the living rock there to be seen, if he
recalls the fact that Thorwaldsen ^, the great sculptor whose work it is, was a
descendant of Snorro, the first boy baby born of European parents in what is
now Canada.

In these circumstances it becomes an interesting query. Where was
Vinland? Is Vinland a myth laud like the islands of Atlantis? I have
already stated that an impartial student, Dr. Storm, thinks it was somewhere
on the south of Nova Scotia, but that Dr. Fiske thii-.ks it was somewhere
along the coast of either Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Dr. Fiske tries

3— The Thorwoldson Museum in Copenhagen contains a large number of his statuary.

m.:^

Si.*;.-.vi :>;

8 CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY

hard to be impartial, but evidently his desire to deprive Nova Scotia and to
give his own couutiy the honour of possessing Vinlaud has got the better of
his historical judgment.

It must be remembered, in explanation of the uncertainty, that the
Norse sagas were not written by the men who had the experiences. They
are not narratives in the sense in which Armstrong's North West Passage is
a narrative — a narration by a man connected with the Expedition. They are
not narratives as Sherard Osborne's Discovery of the North West Passage is —
a narration by a man well acquainted with Arctic exploration but not himself
a participant in the particular expedition about which he writes. These sagas
are the statements which were current in Norse households and which varied
more or less from the original accounts, as any story told for generations
would vary in the telling by father to son and by successive generations. In
the course of time it would become impossible to distinguish between myth
and history.

Yet the Vinland story seems to have made a deep impression upon the
Norse families. It recurs again and again. Rafn, in 1837, enumerated eigh-
teen manuscripts which contained mention of Vinland. There was beyond
doubt a Vinland.

There are four or five facts which must be taken into account in any
effort to locate Vinland.

1. Thorlinn's vessels, after they left Markland, were two days out of
sight of land driving before a stiff" North-easter." That would be just what
would happen to a sailing vessel to-day if it sailed from Newfoundland
westward. It would be out of sight of land while crossing Cabot Strait
connecting the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. The " North-
easter " would carry the vessel past Cape Breton and naturally the first land
to sight would be the west end of Nova Scotia that projects south out into
the ocean ; the end that the steamers seek to-day on their way to New York
from Liverpool. The longer distance to Boston could not have b«fm covered
by the Norseman's vessel in the two days. It takes a steamer twenty-four
hours to go from Halifax to Boston, and it is as long a trip from Halifax to
Newfoundland as from Halifax to Boston. It was probably this d'atance
argument that led Dr. Fiske to place Markland in Cape Breton, igUDring the

■mmi

CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABI

fact that the distance between Cape Breton and Cape Cod could not well be
covered in two days without seeing land ir the meantime.

After sighting land at Cape Sable (as we assume) Thorfinn followed
the coast and soon came to a bay which he named Straumiiord, the swirling
eddies and varying currents there encountered by him, suggesting the very
appropriate name.

Now it is a singular coincidence that Champlain, going over the same
route from Cape Sable, penetrated a bay to which he gave the same name in
French as Thorfinn had given in Scandinavian to a bay which he also pene-
trated. Thornfinn called his bay Straumfiord * and Champlain called his
Bale des Courants, for exactly the same reasons, the presence of swirling
eddies and varying currents— the singularly disturbed state of the water
being caused by the meeting of the high Bay of Fundy tides and the ordinary
Atlantic tides.

2. Thorfinn coasted along the shore of the land he sighted for a time
till he came to a river which flowed out of a lake so easy of access that it
was the simplest bit of seamanship to take his vessel into the lake and anchoi
there. Now no where along the coast of Massachusetts is there such a river
and such a lake or bay. There is, however just such a bay in Nova Scotia.
It is the far-famed Annapolis basin. After sighting land at Cape Sable,
Thorfinn by following the coast would come to what is known as Digby
Gut, a passage that may very well be described as a short river leading into
a bay or lake. It is narrow and the land is high on cither side, like the
rivers the Norsemen were familiar with. It is easily entered. The great
lake can be seen from its mouth, and would invite the weary sailors as a
haven of rest.

In some cases Vinland is referred to as an island and in others as a
region. Apparently the original vivd voce accounts which were told to their
wondering brethren by the returned survivors were somewhat misty in this
particular. This very mistiness tends to corroborate the idea that Vinland
and Nova Scotia are the same. The latter is almost an island and some of

4— Alphonse Gagnon (Lea Scandinaves en Amirique, Prooeedinga of the Royal Soc'ety
of Canada, 1899) quoting the Saga says : " Thorfinn p6n6tra enguite dans una bale qu'il
nomma Stiaumtiord (Bale dea Couranta)."

v-;?v

■fr". J'^f;

CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABY

the Norsemen who had sailed along its Atlantic Front and well into the Bay
of Pundy and had seen that this bay penetrated inland as far as the eye could
see would naturally speak of it as an island, while others wonld give it the
more indefinite description of a " region." Possibly those of Thorfinn'a
company who climbed the precipitous side of the narrow river (now called
the " Gut " or Gate) saw from the top the waters of the Bay of Pundy on
the north and the waters of the Basin on the south while beneath them
swirled the short connecting river by which they had passed from Bay to
Basin, and thus seeing water on three sides concluded that the particular spot
called Vinland was an island and had so spoken of it on their return to their
ancestral home.

3. They found the bay and river full of halibut, ducks, salmon and fish
of all kinds ; Annapolis basin being salt water, there was then, as now, in
them an abundance of halibut and other salt water fishes. There is not on
the coast to my knowledge any other salt water bay or lake connected with
the ocean by a short river with high precipitous sides, and be it remembered
Thorfinn's bay or lake was salt water.

4. The Valley of the Annapolis, protected by the North Mountain range
from the cold north and north-east winds and sheltered by the South Moun-
tain range, has been from the earliest period famous as the " hot house " of
North Atlantic coast. It has now, as it had 900 years ago, great strips of
treeless land, on which corn grows and ripens. Any other part of the coast
from Cape Breton to Cape Cod would be covered, in Thorfinn's time, with
dense forest, just as it was when Champlain 600 years later sailed along the
whole coast to Cape Cod and found no place to his liking, finally concluding
that the Annapolis basin (Port Royal, they named it) was the ideal spot \
It has always been a grape-growing region. Haliburton mentions the grapes
which were found growing on the banks of the St. John River, thirty or
forty miles to the north of the Annapolis basin, and in less sheltered places,
as exciting the wonder even of the French.

5 — Champlain refera to the Port Royal country as " the most commodious and pleasant
place that we have yet Been." There is a great similarity between the account of Thor-
finn's " find " and De Monts'. Haliburton says De Monts " discovered a narrow Strait into
which they entered and soon found themselves in a spacious basin environed with hilU
from which descended streams of fresh water. It was bordered with beautiful meadows
and filled vrith delicate fish."

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CANADA'S FIRST BOY BABT

n- }

The lands on which Thorfinn found the " self-sown Avheat," described as
Sjalf SAna hveitiaker, were the meadows on which Poutrincourt sowed winter
wheat and found to his surprise that it grew under the snow. The cereal
described by Thorfinn was, however, more than likely the Indian corn ^ ; for
Poutrincourt states that the Indians in his time on one occasion carried off
their children and their corn, and hid themselves on his approach. Haliburton
quotes Poutrincourt to the effect that in 1608, the Indians gathered seven
barrels of corn one of which they kept for the colonists from France.

5. Thorfinn describes the Indians of Vinland as swarthy and ferocious,
mth big black eyes and broad cheeks. This is a good description of the Micmac
Indians of Nova Scotia. Dr. Fiske admits tha'i. it is not a description of the
Indians of Massachusetts Bay, whose eyes are small and beady. Marc Les-
carbot, describing the Micmacs of the Annapolis Basin, says their eyes were
neither blue nor green, but for the most part, black as their hair — " et nSant-
moins ne sont pas petits mats grandeur bien agriable" (and moreover they are
not small, but of a large size and fine). Here is a characterization that sug-
gests a different tribe from those of the iNew England and N"ew Brunswick
coastc. The Abb^ Maureault statcsj that the Abenakis occupied Maine, New
Hampshire and New Brunswick, " even to the borders of Nova Scotia" ;
and it is a notable fact that these all spoke the same language, but that the
Micmacs did not speak that language, having their own. These big-eyed
Micmacs, who regarded the other Indians as enemies, were evidently the
descendants of those encountered by Thorfinn, Snorro's father, and their
peculiarity of large eyes was described 600 years after Snorro's birth by a
very careful observer, exactly as Thorfinn had described them at the birth of
the boy.

6. The Vinland of Thorfinn is distinguished by " low lands, a ness or
promontory facing north, with a bay or sound to the west of it opening to the
north ; an island in the bay to the northward or eastward and a place whore
a river flows out of lake into the sea." These were the general characteristics

6 — Nova Scotia would not be considered to be in the Corn belt of this continent any
more than New England. Yet the Census of 1851 gives the corn crop of 1850 at 37,475
bushels and 26,726 bushels of the total were raised in the Annapolis Valley. Of the total
of 69,950 pounds of grapes raised in Nova Scotia in 1890 according to the census, 27t800
pounds were brought to maturity in the Annapolis Valley.

THE ACADIAN8 IN liOUISIANA

afl ^iven in the Saga \ The Annapolis Basin fulfills all these topographical
peculiarities.

These facts emphasize Dr. Storm's conclusion that Vinland was in Nova
Scotia and suggest strongly that the particular part of Nova Scotia was the
Annapolis Basiu.

It seems then that on good grounds we can claim Snorro not only as the
first white boy baby born on this continent, but as the first born on our half
of the continent.

He was a good boy, grew up a good man and his descendants are
scattered throughout northern Europe, and some of his blood may have come
with the Icelanders who settled in our North West in 1875. No doubt he
was all the better man for his experience of the Canadian Province of Nova
Scotia. We ought to have Vinland and Snorro among our place-names.

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