First Years
Longboats and Norsemen: A Vinland TL
***
Chapter 1
***
Bjarni Herjolfsson was holding onto the sides of the longboat for dear life as the storm hurled waves after waves of water at him and his longboat. The storm whipped up the winds and they came crashing down upon them. His crew members were desperately manning the longboat to keep the boat afloat on the water as the storm had already claimed two of their comrades into the realm of Njord. The waves crashed onto the sides of the ships and the winds which roared at their high end of speed, made the crew members shiver in gloom.
It was a tense few minutes with the waves crashing down and the winds howling like the Wolf at Ragnarok itself. However as the winds slowly gave away and the clouds departed, Bjarni saw it. He saw land. At first he was relieved and believed that he had reached Greenland against all the odds. However he immediately backtracked. Greenland wasn’t full of green pastures or trees and neither was it filled with hills with forests and the chirping of birds.
“Bjarni! We must disembark and weather the storm in that island!” His trusted shipmate Magnus shouted through the howling winds. “The storm is brewing again, and by this rate, we will be lost to the realm of Njord!”
Bjarni would have liked to see his parents in Greenland sooner, however with the howling winds catching up once again, and the waves rising higher and higher, he reluctantly nodded and shouted “All hands! We make landfall on that island, or land or whatever that place is!”
His shipmates all looked relieved and nodded as they started rowing with renewed strength towards the land they all could see. After a few tense minutes of waves crashing onto them, they crashed into the beach. They all jumped down and immediately got the rope to ties it onto something. Magnus ran inland and carried a huge boulder and plopped it onto the ground where one of the other shipmates tied the longboat onto. Slowly Bjarni and the other men slowly brought out the supplies inside the longboat and went sufficiently inland where the sand gave away to become green grass.
Bjarni sat down on the grass in exhaustion as did his 20 man crew. They all were looking at the longboat and this land with some ill hidden fascination.
Bjarni himself was enraptured by the beauty of the land. There was one thing that struck Bjarni the most however. Vines. Vines were everywhere on this area.
“In the name of the Yggdrasil, what is this place?” Magnus asked in wonder.
“Vinland.” Bjarni answered softly.
“This land is Vinland.” He declared.
Magnus looked at him with surprise and some confusion evident on his face.
Bjarni laughed. “Don’t you get it, Magnus? We thought there was no land beyond Greenland! But we were wrong! We have overshot Greenland by leagues if the stars are anything to go by!”
Magnus looked up towards the sky as the storm and clouds cleared. And according to the stars, well, there was no way, Magnus could identify if what Bjarni said was true or not, however he shrugged in return.
“Do you know what that means my friend?” Bjarni asked with triumph evident in his voice. “We are the first men from Europa to have stepped foot on this land.”
Magnus’s face cleared from confusion as he finished calculating the stars and looked at Bjarni with a look of wonder.
“Bjarni, what do we do with this place?” He asked softly.
“Unfortunately nothing much.” Bjarni said regrettably. “For now we must go to Greenland as soon as possible and then return to Iceland. Then we can invest into this new land we found.”
“Invest into it? How?”
“Settle it of course!” Bjarni said enthusiastically. “We settle down here and create a trading route. After a good enough and stable enough settlement is founded, we go onto explore the area and find out more about this place.”
“Do we have the capability to do this?” Magnus asked with a slight cynical tone entering his voice.
“Oh we don’t. However I have some good friends in high places.” Bjarni laughed.
Bjarni and his crew landing in Vinland.
***
In 986 AD, the Merchant sailor and sometimes Privateer, Bjarni Herjolsson and his crew disembarked onto a land that Bjarni called ‘Vinland’. From the geographical structure, the crew quickly deduced it to be an island of some size. However the crew could not stay as they had an urgent business to attend to and after the storm subsided the next day, Bjarni and his crew left the newly found land. After a few days of somewhat disjointed sailing, Bjarni managed to navigate his longboat to Greenland where he finally met Erik the Red of Greenland whom his parents had gone to meet, which had prompted the journey in the first place.
There in Greenland, he told them the story about a green island (actual green) in the southwest and that the island was much more hospitable than Greenland itself and Iceland combined. Much of the people dismissed his words as nonsense, no more so than the Christians of the colony, with the age old belief that beyond the seas, the world ended.
However a cautious few believed his tale. Bjarni, the merchant and privateer that he was, could see the long term viability of settling the island. He peddled throughout Germanic Norse Europe looking for resources and families willing to join. Coincidentally, he usually found that Christians would dismiss his experience as an exaggeration or wild tale; as again, the old tale of the end of world seemed to have been ingrained in zealous Christians. However in the Baltic and Scandinavia, he found considerable support from many local Jarls and even a few Baltic chieftains.
On a personal level, the contempt that the Christians showed Bjarni and his experience was nothing to Bjarni, himself, considering he himself was a pagan, however he was deeply hurt by the lack of Christian pockets from which he could funds for such an endeavor with which he was working with. However by the ending months of the early winter of 989 AD, Bjarni managed to convince a number of families to come with him and settle down to make a trading station. Strikingly, much to the disgust of much of Christendom, only 2 families were Christian. In 990 AD, Bjarni set off from Iceland with 10 longboats each consisting of 35 people barring the last two longboats. Around 280 people were leaving with which around 160 were men and 120 were women. The last two longboats were tied to other longboats and contained supplies, and even a few domesticated animals such as chickens, and a very limited amount of horses and cows. (Around 2 Horses and 3 Cows).
In the autumn months of 990 AD, Bjarni and his folk managed to land in the same area that Bjarni and his crew had become stranded in 986 AD.
It was found out that Bjarni and his crew landed in a small peninsula in the island from the navigation that the new crews committed in 99) AD.
Bjarni and his settlers landed Bjarni Cove (OTL Petty Harbor Maddox Cove). First and foremost the settlers started to build homes in which they could actually live in the new cove in which they had landed.
The area where they landed was named Bjarni Cove in honor of Bjarni who found the island in the first place. For a few weeks, the settlers slept in their longboats in the night as in the daytime, the men built their new lodges and homes. After around 3 and a half weeks, the men had been able to succeed to build a rudimentary group of lodges. After this construction ended, the families and settlers moved from the longboats into these new lodges.
After the issue of having shelters had been addressed, the men began looking for a solution for agriculture on this new land.
Of course, the Norsemen also started to farm in the new lands. They found out that the lands weren’t exactly as fertile as they had hoped for, however the land was still much better than the lands found in Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland.
It was during this time, that the Norsemen came upon the first natives of the land.
***
Bjarni and Magnus and his small party of 10 men were walking near the edge of the forest when Magnus’s ears perked up as they all heard some rustling in the forests. They all turned to see a group of men. They were tall men, with tanned skin, wearing some……tropical garments, from the looks of it, with spears with them. They were looking at them curiously.
****
The initial contact with the natives were largely peaceful, and through some rudimentary hand signs and basic actions, the points got across, as the natives quickly understood that Bjarni’s men had crossed over from the sea from a different landmass. The first 3 natives that Bjarni came across, were largely friendly and after they happily handed over some hunted wolf pelts they returned into the undergrowth of the forest. Bjarni and his men returned to Bjarni’s Cove with some amount of trepidation.
It was that night in Bjarni’s Cove that natives were coined ‘Gamali’ for the natives. Gamal meant old in Norse, and the entire basis was that the natives were the ‘old folk’ of this new land called Vinland.
Meeting the Gamali folk.
Meanwhile, some of the sailors were getting ready to start bringing new settlers to Vinland as well from Iceland and Greenland. They left during the last months of autumn with 35 men returning to first Greenland and then to Iceland. Bjarni’s end goal was to bring about at least 3,000 settlers into the newly found land.
Meanwhile Magnus and 9 other men created the ‘Exploration Group’ under the auspices of Bjarni, who had by this point become the De Facto leader of the Vinlanders. These ten men started a small scale exploration group towards the west and found out that the place where Bjarni’s Cove was located to be a peninsula. Magnus, named the peninsula to be called the Nerthus Peninsula after the Norse god of peace and prosperity. (OTL Avalon Peninsula).
By this point, the Vinlanders had been able to cultivate fruits and wheat and barley from the ground of their new home, and had collected enough to last the winter, as winter hit the Vinlanders.
By this time, however news had reached to Iceland and Greenland, about the success of the settlers of Vinland, and in Iceland most particularly, the idea of immigrating to a well fertile land was extremely tantalizing. With the pressure to make Christianity the state religion mounting in the Commonwealth of Iceland, many Norse believers were starting to eye the prospect of going to Vinland as well.
By the time the summer of 991 AD approached, the idea of going to Vinland became a good popular theme in Iceland and Greenland.
Also during the start of 991 AD, Magnus’s Brother in Law Einar and his wife, Gurid became the first couple in Iceland to have a baby, named Thors. Thors became the first old worlder to be borne in Vinland.
Meanwhile, Bjarni’s Cove continued to grow in numbers, and its productivity. The Gamali people had kept to themselves. The tribe, who the Norsemen later found out to be named ‘Beothuk’ was an extremely cautious group of people, and had largely steered clear of Bjarni’s Cove and had headed towards the western parts of the island and largely left the Nerthus Peninsula alone. And the rare times they did come forward, it was largely to trade for some wheat and barley in return for skin pelts, and berries with the Vinlanders. Initially, Bjarni had been worried that conflict could erupt between the Vinlanders and the Gamali people, however, due to Bjarni’s merchant expertise, he had cleverly been able to negate any bad impression given to the Beothuk traders who arrived to Bjarni’s Cove once or twice in a few months.
For about five years, the people of Vinland did nothing much else than farming and building a good settlement. Bjarni’s Cove was renamed to be Bjarnithorp by the people. By 999 AD, the population of Vinland reached 3285 people as immigration was almost entirely from Iceland and Greenland. After this, Vinland was quickly becoming alienated as Iceland’s recent Allthing decided in favor of making Christianity the state religion that year.
King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway who forced Iceland to convert to Christianity.
And in the year 1000 AD, the settlement of Vinland went into a radical change.
Purple is the settlement of Bjarnithorp and the black dots represent the exploration of Magnus's crew.
999 AD Vinland
Capital: Bjarnithorp
Religion: Norse Paganism
Population: 3600
***
Chapter 1
***
Bjarni Herjolfsson was holding onto the sides of the longboat for dear life as the storm hurled waves after waves of water at him and his longboat. The storm whipped up the winds and they came crashing down upon them. His crew members were desperately manning the longboat to keep the boat afloat on the water as the storm had already claimed two of their comrades into the realm of Njord. The waves crashed onto the sides of the ships and the winds which roared at their high end of speed, made the crew members shiver in gloom.
It was a tense few minutes with the waves crashing down and the winds howling like the Wolf at Ragnarok itself. However as the winds slowly gave away and the clouds departed, Bjarni saw it. He saw land. At first he was relieved and believed that he had reached Greenland against all the odds. However he immediately backtracked. Greenland wasn’t full of green pastures or trees and neither was it filled with hills with forests and the chirping of birds.
“Bjarni! We must disembark and weather the storm in that island!” His trusted shipmate Magnus shouted through the howling winds. “The storm is brewing again, and by this rate, we will be lost to the realm of Njord!”
Bjarni would have liked to see his parents in Greenland sooner, however with the howling winds catching up once again, and the waves rising higher and higher, he reluctantly nodded and shouted “All hands! We make landfall on that island, or land or whatever that place is!”
His shipmates all looked relieved and nodded as they started rowing with renewed strength towards the land they all could see. After a few tense minutes of waves crashing onto them, they crashed into the beach. They all jumped down and immediately got the rope to ties it onto something. Magnus ran inland and carried a huge boulder and plopped it onto the ground where one of the other shipmates tied the longboat onto. Slowly Bjarni and the other men slowly brought out the supplies inside the longboat and went sufficiently inland where the sand gave away to become green grass.
Bjarni sat down on the grass in exhaustion as did his 20 man crew. They all were looking at the longboat and this land with some ill hidden fascination.
Bjarni himself was enraptured by the beauty of the land. There was one thing that struck Bjarni the most however. Vines. Vines were everywhere on this area.
“In the name of the Yggdrasil, what is this place?” Magnus asked in wonder.
“Vinland.” Bjarni answered softly.
“This land is Vinland.” He declared.
Magnus looked at him with surprise and some confusion evident on his face.
Bjarni laughed. “Don’t you get it, Magnus? We thought there was no land beyond Greenland! But we were wrong! We have overshot Greenland by leagues if the stars are anything to go by!”
Magnus looked up towards the sky as the storm and clouds cleared. And according to the stars, well, there was no way, Magnus could identify if what Bjarni said was true or not, however he shrugged in return.
“Do you know what that means my friend?” Bjarni asked with triumph evident in his voice. “We are the first men from Europa to have stepped foot on this land.”
Magnus’s face cleared from confusion as he finished calculating the stars and looked at Bjarni with a look of wonder.
“Bjarni, what do we do with this place?” He asked softly.
“Unfortunately nothing much.” Bjarni said regrettably. “For now we must go to Greenland as soon as possible and then return to Iceland. Then we can invest into this new land we found.”
“Invest into it? How?”
“Settle it of course!” Bjarni said enthusiastically. “We settle down here and create a trading route. After a good enough and stable enough settlement is founded, we go onto explore the area and find out more about this place.”
“Do we have the capability to do this?” Magnus asked with a slight cynical tone entering his voice.
“Oh we don’t. However I have some good friends in high places.” Bjarni laughed.
Bjarni and his crew landing in Vinland.
***
In 986 AD, the Merchant sailor and sometimes Privateer, Bjarni Herjolsson and his crew disembarked onto a land that Bjarni called ‘Vinland’. From the geographical structure, the crew quickly deduced it to be an island of some size. However the crew could not stay as they had an urgent business to attend to and after the storm subsided the next day, Bjarni and his crew left the newly found land. After a few days of somewhat disjointed sailing, Bjarni managed to navigate his longboat to Greenland where he finally met Erik the Red of Greenland whom his parents had gone to meet, which had prompted the journey in the first place.
There in Greenland, he told them the story about a green island (actual green) in the southwest and that the island was much more hospitable than Greenland itself and Iceland combined. Much of the people dismissed his words as nonsense, no more so than the Christians of the colony, with the age old belief that beyond the seas, the world ended.
However a cautious few believed his tale. Bjarni, the merchant and privateer that he was, could see the long term viability of settling the island. He peddled throughout Germanic Norse Europe looking for resources and families willing to join. Coincidentally, he usually found that Christians would dismiss his experience as an exaggeration or wild tale; as again, the old tale of the end of world seemed to have been ingrained in zealous Christians. However in the Baltic and Scandinavia, he found considerable support from many local Jarls and even a few Baltic chieftains.
On a personal level, the contempt that the Christians showed Bjarni and his experience was nothing to Bjarni, himself, considering he himself was a pagan, however he was deeply hurt by the lack of Christian pockets from which he could funds for such an endeavor with which he was working with. However by the ending months of the early winter of 989 AD, Bjarni managed to convince a number of families to come with him and settle down to make a trading station. Strikingly, much to the disgust of much of Christendom, only 2 families were Christian. In 990 AD, Bjarni set off from Iceland with 10 longboats each consisting of 35 people barring the last two longboats. Around 280 people were leaving with which around 160 were men and 120 were women. The last two longboats were tied to other longboats and contained supplies, and even a few domesticated animals such as chickens, and a very limited amount of horses and cows. (Around 2 Horses and 3 Cows).
In the autumn months of 990 AD, Bjarni and his folk managed to land in the same area that Bjarni and his crew had become stranded in 986 AD.
It was found out that Bjarni and his crew landed in a small peninsula in the island from the navigation that the new crews committed in 99) AD.
Bjarni and his settlers landed Bjarni Cove (OTL Petty Harbor Maddox Cove). First and foremost the settlers started to build homes in which they could actually live in the new cove in which they had landed.
The area where they landed was named Bjarni Cove in honor of Bjarni who found the island in the first place. For a few weeks, the settlers slept in their longboats in the night as in the daytime, the men built their new lodges and homes. After around 3 and a half weeks, the men had been able to succeed to build a rudimentary group of lodges. After this construction ended, the families and settlers moved from the longboats into these new lodges.
After the issue of having shelters had been addressed, the men began looking for a solution for agriculture on this new land.
Of course, the Norsemen also started to farm in the new lands. They found out that the lands weren’t exactly as fertile as they had hoped for, however the land was still much better than the lands found in Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland.
It was during this time, that the Norsemen came upon the first natives of the land.
***
Bjarni and Magnus and his small party of 10 men were walking near the edge of the forest when Magnus’s ears perked up as they all heard some rustling in the forests. They all turned to see a group of men. They were tall men, with tanned skin, wearing some……tropical garments, from the looks of it, with spears with them. They were looking at them curiously.
****
The initial contact with the natives were largely peaceful, and through some rudimentary hand signs and basic actions, the points got across, as the natives quickly understood that Bjarni’s men had crossed over from the sea from a different landmass. The first 3 natives that Bjarni came across, were largely friendly and after they happily handed over some hunted wolf pelts they returned into the undergrowth of the forest. Bjarni and his men returned to Bjarni’s Cove with some amount of trepidation.
It was that night in Bjarni’s Cove that natives were coined ‘Gamali’ for the natives. Gamal meant old in Norse, and the entire basis was that the natives were the ‘old folk’ of this new land called Vinland.
Meeting the Gamali folk.
Meanwhile, some of the sailors were getting ready to start bringing new settlers to Vinland as well from Iceland and Greenland. They left during the last months of autumn with 35 men returning to first Greenland and then to Iceland. Bjarni’s end goal was to bring about at least 3,000 settlers into the newly found land.
Meanwhile Magnus and 9 other men created the ‘Exploration Group’ under the auspices of Bjarni, who had by this point become the De Facto leader of the Vinlanders. These ten men started a small scale exploration group towards the west and found out that the place where Bjarni’s Cove was located to be a peninsula. Magnus, named the peninsula to be called the Nerthus Peninsula after the Norse god of peace and prosperity. (OTL Avalon Peninsula).
By this point, the Vinlanders had been able to cultivate fruits and wheat and barley from the ground of their new home, and had collected enough to last the winter, as winter hit the Vinlanders.
By this time, however news had reached to Iceland and Greenland, about the success of the settlers of Vinland, and in Iceland most particularly, the idea of immigrating to a well fertile land was extremely tantalizing. With the pressure to make Christianity the state religion mounting in the Commonwealth of Iceland, many Norse believers were starting to eye the prospect of going to Vinland as well.
By the time the summer of 991 AD approached, the idea of going to Vinland became a good popular theme in Iceland and Greenland.
Also during the start of 991 AD, Magnus’s Brother in Law Einar and his wife, Gurid became the first couple in Iceland to have a baby, named Thors. Thors became the first old worlder to be borne in Vinland.
Meanwhile, Bjarni’s Cove continued to grow in numbers, and its productivity. The Gamali people had kept to themselves. The tribe, who the Norsemen later found out to be named ‘Beothuk’ was an extremely cautious group of people, and had largely steered clear of Bjarni’s Cove and had headed towards the western parts of the island and largely left the Nerthus Peninsula alone. And the rare times they did come forward, it was largely to trade for some wheat and barley in return for skin pelts, and berries with the Vinlanders. Initially, Bjarni had been worried that conflict could erupt between the Vinlanders and the Gamali people, however, due to Bjarni’s merchant expertise, he had cleverly been able to negate any bad impression given to the Beothuk traders who arrived to Bjarni’s Cove once or twice in a few months.
For about five years, the people of Vinland did nothing much else than farming and building a good settlement. Bjarni’s Cove was renamed to be Bjarnithorp by the people. By 999 AD, the population of Vinland reached 3285 people as immigration was almost entirely from Iceland and Greenland. After this, Vinland was quickly becoming alienated as Iceland’s recent Allthing decided in favor of making Christianity the state religion that year.
King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway who forced Iceland to convert to Christianity.
And in the year 1000 AD, the settlement of Vinland went into a radical change.
Purple is the settlement of Bjarnithorp and the black dots represent the exploration of Magnus's crew.
999 AD Vinland
Capital: Bjarnithorp
Religion: Norse Paganism
Population: 3600
Last edited:
