The Greenland Plague
1533 - Danish Traders venture to Greenland, trading for quantities of roseroot. The Danish ship travels up for a week or more, sailing along the southern coast, encountering a number of Thule communities. Most of the time, communication is by sign, or by a clumsy Norse pidgin. No traces of the Norse colonies are found, which attracts much comment. There debate over whether some of the natives are Christian, and if Christian are Catholics. The ship’s captain suggests that a Christian church and mission should be erected. Upon return, much of the commodity found to be food roseroot, rather than the more potent medicinal varieties. The returning cargo is considered a fiasco. No further efforts to reach Greenland will be made until 1540.
1536 - Kalmar Union dissolves. The remaining members of the union are reconstituted as the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway. The Danish-Norwegian Trading Company is formed to farm roseroot in Norway for Danish traders, and its focus is European. However, there are substantial purchases from Iceland.
1540 - Bouyed by good harvests in Iceland and Trondheim in the previous year, the demand for Roseroot rapidly outstrips supply and exorbitant prices are commanded for relatively paltry amounts. The Danish-Norwegian company sends expeditions to Greenland to procure what is believed to be a markedly inferior Roseroot. This time, with Icelandic Thule guides, trading is much more successful, particularly in East Greenland, where medicinal roseroot is cultivated intensively as part of the whaling culture. From this point on, Danish and Hanseatic ships are regularly crossing from Iceland to Greenland.
1542 - the Danish crown establishes a church and a trading station in a natural harbour on the East Coast of Greenland, to minister to the Christian needs of the local population.
1546 - The Danish-Norwegian Trading Company is granted a royal monopoly on the roseroot trade, both from Norway and Iceland. Hanseatic merchants continue to purchase in Iceland, but are assessed special taxes for any trading in Iceland. Hanseatic merchants stopping in Iceland to and from Greenland are also taxed, discouraging travel to Greenland.
1549 - Near the end of the sailing season, approximately late September, a sailor on a Danish ship out of Copenhagen come down ill with the measles. Most of the crew has already had it, so the voyage is little affected. Somewhere short of Iceland, he dies and is buried at sea. However, two other sailors are infected at different times. Both remain on ship during a stop in Iceland. The ship proceeds on to Greenland. Upon arrival on October 12, one of the sailors is clearly dying. The priest is called to deliver the last rites. He is buried in the small cemetery. Shortly thereafter, measles breaks out in the congregation....
1549 - November - measles is burning its way through the East Greenland Thule, headed north and south. The mortality rate among those infected is over 30%. Although the Thule have had previous experience with infectious diseases, through Bruce, Joan and particularly Mona, and through sheep/caribou infection, the speed and virulence of measles takes them by surprise. Entire households are infected and die, villages are wiped out. The disease applies universally, striking everyone from children, to youth, mature men and women, and elders. This makes it extremely difficult for care to be provided.
The epidemic strikes in the middle of harvest season, leaving crops partially in the ground. Along the shores, whale carcasses rot as whalers return home to be infected, and there is no one left to butcher the animals. Families flee ahead of the epidemic, in some cases bringing it with them and spreading it further. In other cases, hasty flight escapes infection but leaves families floundering without food or water, scraping to survive. Herding subcultures move away, hoping to avoid infection.
Then of course, there are the people who miraculously escape infection. People who are infected but survive. They emerge blinking into a nightmare, into villages stinking of rotting flesh, dogs and foxes, owls and hare eating human corpses in the middle of streets. Animals in pens starving from lack of attention. Fires broken out and untended, smoldering ruins everywhere.
A late Hanseatic trading ship, comes into harbour, just ahead of the coming ice. Finding plague has broken out, it hastily withdraws, sailing south. The expedition has bypassed Iceland, making it long and costly. The Captain desperately needs to fill his hold and bring back a return on investment somehow. The best bet is to find an uninfected region to trade with.
In the upper reaches of East Greenland, a surviving Shaman’s apprentice, recovers from the disease and buries her Master and tries to decide what to do next. Her village was small. Between people who died and people who fled, she feels that she is the only one left. Gathering together a small herd of Caribou as pack animals, a few of which are large enough and trained for riding, she heads south, looking for survivors.
Within four days, she reaches the Danish Harbour, receiving the story of how the epidemic broke out. Initially, she gathers enough information to form the conclusion that this is the center, and it is moving north and south. She resolves to travel south, to outrun the epidemic and warn people. The famous long run of Maptanaq begins.
She drives her herd ruthlessly south along the pathways, skirting fords, going up and down cliffs never meant to be traversed. Over and over again, she comes to communities where survivors are pulling themselves together. She stops again and again, meeting survivors, delivering blessings, calling upon spirits. The Shamanic class has been devastated, and most of the survivors have no idea how to cope. Alone by herself, Maptanaq seems the only person in the world who knows what is going on. The truth, however, is that she is merely driven.
As she stops, again and again, talking to survivors, meeting some of her surviving peers, she gathers the stories as she goes. At first, these are merely chronicles of disaster and survival. But between the villages, in cold nights as she clenches Caribou for warmth, writing notes on pieces of hide that no one may ever look at, the raw stories begin to sort themselves into insight.
These are new and powerful spirits raging among the people stealing their lives. This is obvious, of course, the infected died in droves despite the best songs, dances, supplications and sacrifices, despite the most powerful magics. There is a new, virulent magic. She begins to list symptoms, attempting to describe the trajectories of the disease. The early phases where it had seemed unremarkable, the escalating progress.
Her Master had been a Shaman with special knowledge of the Caribou. He had known and taught her diseases of the animals, their transmission, the strange toxicity of sheep. As any healer or Shaman, she had been taught what was known or understood about Bruce, Mona and Joan, the diseases that had struck the Thule, and the ways that these diseases had been confined. This knowledge gives her a kind of baseline structure to reflect upon the new pandemic.
There are common threads among those who survived. Food and water in plenty, warmth available from fire or animal bodies. People tell her of being too weak to go out and harvest, too weak to cook, of suffering awful thirsts. Of being too weak to care for themselves, and being cared for by those not yet infected, or recovering from infection. The ones who made it had these things to hand. For villages which had not yet begun harvests, whose seasonal slaughter had not begun or was only half done, there had been no survivors.
She begins to form a theory, that one key to survival is ensuring that the resources - food and water in particular are plentiful and easy to hand when the weakness strikes. Otherwise hunger and dehydration will finish those off who might have recovered. Medicinal Roseroot had made a small difference, giving people energy to care for each other and themselves that they might not have had. But even with all that, people had still died. It had just given some a chance to survive. She shares her observations and insights. To those surviving Shaman struggling to grasp what has happened, she is no longer an apprentice, she is clearly one of the Great Ones.
In village after village, she observes the process of the disease, the devastation wrought, coming closer and closer to the virulent front. Passing through a village of the dying, she has an insight. The virulence did not arise from nowhere. It was brought by the Christian man, by the foreigners. She has only the vaguest ideas of Christian tenets, that Christ was a spirit-man who walked among lepers - whatever they were - sick men certainly, who had died and then recovered, who had shown his followers afterwards the open sores of his hands.
Shivering in the cold one night, unable to sleep, half starved, nestled between two Caribou for warmth, she has her epiphany. Christ was the spirit of plague, of disease and death.
1549 - December - In the North shores of Greenland, measles has succumbed to low population density and panic. It does not reach Cape York, or cross over into Ellesmere. The Thule Realm is saved, for now.
1549 - December - in South Greenland, Manupataq has finally outrun the infection. Crazed desperation gives her credibility among the astonished southerners. Prior fleeing uninfected have brought stories with them. She offers her prescriptions - quarantines, avoidance of infection, stockpiling fuel, food, water and medicinal roseroot, apportionment of care duties. She passes south, giving her advice and prescriptions.
Behind her, the disease infiltrates, killing the sceptical and unwary, striking where it will. Nevertheless, its progress slows, becomes patchier. Infection rates decrease, survival rates increase. Still, the effects are terrible. Village after village comes to know the stench of rotting flesh.
Manupataq pushes deeper, a plague crier. In a Southern Harbour, she arrives at the same time as the Hanseatic merchant ship. Her status is not entirely unquestionned. She is a young northern women, heir to the mantle of Shaman, of dubious provenance. There are whispers that she may be the plague carrier rather than the crier. For those southerners who style themselves as versions of Christian, or who know a little more, her theory of Christ the plague-spirit is dubious. Her life almost hangs in the balance.
It is the Hanseatic ship that decides matters for her and for everyone. In the south, there are enough people left with some norse or norse pidgin, that a conversation can take place. They confirm the plague, of course, reporting a line of dead villages. Innocently, they report that these plagues are well known in their home country. Most tellingly however, they are avaricious in their pursuit of medicinal roseroot....
To Manupataq, their quest for roseroot confirms her paranoid theory. They are seeking to strip the southerners of a crucial element of their defense.
Following fierce debates, she sways the population. The crew of the Hanseatic Merchant are attacked, some killed. Using firearms to cut through the crowd they flee back to their ship. Kayakers harry the ship, firing arrows as they scurry around the slow leviathan. In frustration, with barely half a hold of cargo, the captain bombards the shore and heads for home.
1550 - January - Increasingly stringent and draconian quarantine measures, including in some cases relocating whole villages and scorched earth tactics and killing on sight, have slowed and finally stopped the progress of measles. Through January it continues to sputter, with isolated outbreaks up and down the east coast and in parts of the south. But the population of uninfected in areas where it raged is small enough that there’s simply not enough to keep it going. In the uninfected portions of the south, draconian measures slow it. The Cross becomes the sign of infection, the sign of plague. It is a simple symbol, easily made or drawn, and visible from far off. Manupataq’s conspiracy theory is widely adopted and continuing to spread.
1550 - February onwards. The plague of measles is essentially over. The area is in the jaws of winter. Travel is now minimal. Any accidental further infections tend to die rapidly with the infectee, transmission opportunities are very few.
The culture of the East Coast Thule is beginning to right itself. Bodies are disposed of, burnt homes cleared away. Many ptarmigan and arctic hare have died in their pens from lack of care. But the Caribou and even northerly the Musk Ox and dogs are unimpaired. The Thule culture has always been remarkable in the amount of animal horsepower it has had available to it, and that fountain of horsepower is mostly still intact, despite the drop in human population. Times are tough, people are hungry this winter because of the interruptions in harvest. But not as hungry as they might be - there is still plenty of caribou, musk-ox and dog to eat, if you get hungry enough. Most of the Thule crops are still in the ground, and intact. If you don’t harvest sweetvetch or claytonia in the third year.... well, the plant is fine, it just keeps doing its thing, and you can harvest in the fourth year or fifth year. It’s not as if the crop is going to rot in the field, as might happen in southern cultures.
People are people. There are new marriages among the survivors, children are adopted, elders get taken care of. Broken bonds are re-established, or new bonds and new arrangements are made. The herding subculture up and down gains at the expense of the agricultural people. Many of them abandon emptied villages to consolidate, leaving their lands to aggressive herders. Of course, the herdsmen, with all those fields of produce now under their control... some of them will eventually settle down and start farming themselves - why look a gift caribou in the mouth.
Manupataq is a Shaman of immense stature. Those who know her personally are fairly dubious of her, she’s a bit flaky, a bit crazy at times, she’s too young and headstrong. But this doesn’t matter. Her reputation has spread across Greenland, and her theories and ideas and insights become the dominant intellectual structure for the surviving castes of Shaman’s who, faced with this catastophe, desperately need something to make sense of it all. Rightly or wrongly, Manupataq has created a good ‘off the shelf’ package that they can use, and it’s the only real package out there. It doesn’t hurt that in many critical ways, she has the right of it. People will die for what she’s gotten wrong, but perhaps more people will live for what she managed to get right.
The Danish ships that come in the summer find themselves extremely unwelcome. In many places, they are driven off with volleys of arrows, in other places people simply flee. The ships report crucifixes up and down the coast, a puzzle whose meaning they cannot sort out. There are a few places where landings take place, where there are no ambushes, and where something like the old trade takes place. But mostly, they go home empty.
For Danish captains, and particularly Hanseatic captains, the situation is a disaster. Greenland is a long way to go, to come back with empty hands. In the larger sense, the Danes are sanguine, the Greenland Roseroot market has had a poorer reputation for quality and was relatively more expensive to procure, and it was only a supplementary production source to them in any event - their real production was coming from Iceland and Norway. Production is still tiny, compared to the potential demand, the Danes could sell ten or twenty times the quantities of Roseroot and still not find the market’s bottom. But they’re making money, they are happy.
The Hanseatic merchants are unhappy. Greenland was the last real independent source of Roseroot, otherwise the Danes have a monopoly. Events have shut them out of the market. There’s some talk of heading north to the Sea Thule, or of travelling further west.... but it doesn’t amount to much.
1551 - 1554 - European ships are still unwelcome the length and breadth of Greenland, but as the plague fades into memory, that begins to fade a bit too. In the next decade some trade will re-establish. In the meantime, the interrupted trade network across the north of Greenland starts up again. Christianity will be distinctly unwelcome, and there will be considerable suspicion and caution accompanying dealings with the visitors. The story and reports of the plague cross over to Ellesmere, spreading through the trade network, and reaching as far as Baffin Island, Hudson Bay and McKenzie basin, as do copies of Manupataq’s documents, suitably remarked upon and annotated. While for most, it is a seven day wonder, some traders and shamans pay particular attention....
* At this time, the aggregate population of Greenland is about 240,000. Of these, 45,000 have died.