The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (14 page)

No one could resist the onslaught of an angry North Sea, which contemptuously cast aside the crude earthen dikes of the day. The hydrological and technological know-how to erect truly permanent coastal fortifications did not yet exist. The first serious and lasting coast works date to
after 1500, but even they were usually inadequate in the face of savage
hundred-year storms. Small wonder the authorities often had trouble persuading peasants to settle on easily flooded lands.

At least 100,000 people died along the Dutch and German coasts in
four fierce storm surges in about 1200, 1212-19, 1287, and 1362, in
long-forgotten disasters that rivaled the worst in modern-day
Bangladesh. The Zuider Zee in the northern Netherlands formed during the fourteenth century, when storms carved a huge inland sea from
prime farming land that was not reclaimed until this century. The
greatest fourteenth-century storm, that of January 1362, went down in
history as the Grote Mandrenke, the "Great Drowning of Men."3 A
fierce southwesterly gale swept across southern England and the English
Channel, then into the North Sea. Hurricane-force winds collapsed
church towers at Bury St. Edmunds and Norwich in East Anglia. Busy
ports at Ravenspur near Hull in Yorkshire and Dunwich on the Suffolk
shore suffered severe damage in the first of a series of catastrophes that eventually destroyed them. Huge waves swept ashore in the Low Countries. A contemporary chronicler reported that sixty parishes in the
Danish diocese of Slesvig were "swallowed by the salt sea." At least
25,000 people perished in this disaster, maybe many more: no one
made accurate estimates. The fourteenth century's increased storminess
and strong winds formed huge dunes along the present-day Dutch
coastline. Amsterdam harbor, already an important trading port, experienced continual problems with silting caused by strong winds cascading sand from a nearby dune into the entrance.

In the early 1400s, more damaging storm surges attacked densely populated shorelines. On August 19, 1413, a great southerly storm at extreme low tide buried the small town of Forvie, near Aberdeen in northeastern Scotland, under a thirty-meter sand dune. More than 100,000
people are said to have died in the great storms of 1421 and 1446.

Judging from North Atlantic Oscillation readings for later centuries,
the great storms of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the result
of cycles of vigorous depressions that flowed across northwestern Europe
after years of more northerly passage when the NAO Index was low. The
changing signals of hydrogen isotopes from a two-hundred-meter section
of Greenland ice core GISP-2 tell us summer and winter temperatures for
the fourteenth century. This hundred-year period saw several wellmarked cycles of much colder conditions, among them 1308 to 1318, the
time of Europe's massive rains and the Great Famine; 1324 to 1329, another period of unsettled weather; and especially 1343 to 1362, when
stormy conditions in the North Sea culminated in the "Great Drowning"
and the Norse Western Settlement struggled through its exceptionally
cold winters.

Sometime between 1341 and 1363 (the date is uncertain), Norwegian
church official Ivar Bardarson sailed northward with a party of Norse
along the western Greenland coast from the Eastern to the Western Settlement, charged by local lawmen to drive away hostile skraelings who
were rumored to be attacking the farms. He found the Western Settlement deserted, a large church standing empty and no traces of any colonists. "They found nobody, either Christians or heathens, only some
wild cattle and sheep, and they slaughtered the wild cattle and sheep for
food, as much as the ships would carry."4 While Bardarson blamed elusive Inuit, whom he never encountered, his account is puzzling, for one
would assume that the marauding hunters would have killed the livestock. Bardarson seems to have visited a ghost town abandoned without
apparent reason. But modern archaeological excavations reveal a settlement that was dying on its feet from the cold.

Ever since Eirik the Red's time, the Greenlanders had lived off a medieval dairying economy just like those in their homelands. Even in good
years with warm summers and a good hay crop, they lived close to the
edge. Their survival depended on storing enough hay, dried sea mammal
flesh, and fish to tide humans and beasts over the winter months. The
Norse could usually survive one bad summer by using up the last of their
surplus the following winter. But two successive poor hay crops placed
both the animals and their owners at high risk, especially if lingering ice
restricted summer hunting and fishing. The ice-core analyses for 1343 to
1362 reveal two decades of much colder summers than usual. Such a
stretch, year after year, spelled disaster.5

The main house block of a small manor farm called Nipaatsoq tells a
grim story of the final months of its occupation. Animals and people
lived in separate rooms linked by interconnecting passages. Each spring,
the owners swept out the reeds and grass that covered the floors and emptied dung from the byres, yet the archaeologists found the debris of the
very last winter's occupation intact. No one had been left to clean up in
the spring.

Five dairy cows once occupied the manor's byre. The hooves of these
five beasts, the only part of a cow that has no food value whatsoever, were
scattered among other food remains across the lower layer of one room.
The owners had butchered the dead animals so completely that only the
hooves remained. They did this in direct violation of ancient Norse law,
which for obvious reasons prohibited the slaughter of dairy cows. In desperation, they put themselves out of the dairy business by eating their
breeding stock.

The house's main hall, with its benches and hearths, yielded numerous
arctic hare feet and ptarmigan claws, animals often hunted in winter. The
larder contained the semi-articulated bones of a lamb and a newborn calf, and the skull of a large hunting dog resembling an elkhound. The limb
bones of the same animal lay in the passageway between the hall and
sleeping chamber. All the dog bones at the manor farm came from the final occupation layer and displayed the butchery marks of carcasses cut up
for human consumption. Having first eaten their cows and then as much
small game as they could take, the Nipaatsoq families finally consumed
their prized hunting dogs.

The houseflies tell a similar tale. Centuries before, the Norse accidentally introduced a fly, Telomerina flavipes, which flourishes in dark, warm
conditions where feces are present. Telomerina could only have survived
in the warmth of the fouled floors of the main hall and sleeping quarters,
where their carcasses duly abounded. Quite different, cold-tolerant carrion fly species lived in the cool larder. Once the house was abandoned,
the cold-loving flies swarmed into the now empty living quarters as the
fires went out. Telomerina vanishes. The uppermost layer of all, accumulated after the house was empty, contains species from outside, as if the
roof had caved in.

There were no human skeletons in the house-no remains of dead
the survivors were too weak to bury, no last survivor whom no one was
left to bury. With but a few seals for the larder, the Nipaatsoq farmers
may have simply decided to leave. Where and how they ended up is
anybody's guess. Had they adopted toggling harpoons and other traditional ice-hunting technology from their Inuit neighbors a few kilometers away, they could have taken ring seal year round and perhaps
avoided the late spring crises that could envelop them even in good
years. Perhaps they had an aversion to the Inuits' pagan ways, or their
cultural roots and ideologies were simply too grounded in Europe to
permit them to adapt.

Another isolated Norse settlement, known to archaeologists as Gard
Under Sander (Farm Beneath the Sand) lay inland, close to what was once
fertile, rich meadowland just ten kilometers from Greenland's ice cap.
Farm Beneath the Sand began as a long house used first as a human
dwelling, then as an animal shed. In about 1200 the hall burnt down. Several sheep perished in the blaze. The farmers now built a centralized farmhouse, like that at Nipaatsoq, with constantly changing rooms, not all of
them in use at one time, as the stone-and-turf farm changed over more
than two centuries. Late in the 1200s, the climate deteriorated, local glaci ers advanced and the pastures sanded up. Farming became impossible and
the settlement was abandoned. After abandonment, sheep that were left
behind continued to shelter in the empty houses, as did overnighting
Thule hunters."

The Norse kept a foothold at the warmer Eastern Settlement for another 150 years. Here they lay close to the open North Atlantic, where
changing fish distributions, southern spikes of pack ice, and new economic conditions brought new explorers instead of the traditional knarrs.
Basques and Englishmen paused to fish and to trade for falcons, ivory,
and other exotic goods. But above all, they pursued whales and cod.

In the eighth century, the Catholic Church created a huge market for
salted cod and herring by allowing the devout to consume fish on Fridays,
the day of Christ's crucifixion, during the forty days of Lent and on major
feast days. The ecclesiastical authorities still encouraged fasting and forbade sexual intercourse on such occasions, also the eating of red meat, on
the grounds it was a hot food. Fish and whale meat were "cold" foods, as
they came from the water, and were thus appropriate nourishment for
holy days. But fish spoils quickly, and in the days before refrigeration,
drying and salting were about the only ways to preserve it. Dried salt cod
and salted herring quickly became the "cold" foods of choice, especially
during Lent. Salted cod kept better than either salt herring or whale meat
and was easily transported in bulk.

Cod had been a European staple since Roman times. Dried and salted
fish was light and durable, ideal hardtack for mariners and armies. In
1282, preparing to campaign in Wales, King Edward of England commissioned "one Adam of Fulsham" to buy 5,000 salted cod from Aberdeen in northeastern Scotland to feed his army. Salt cod fueled the European Age of Discovery and was known to Elizabethan mariners as the
"beef of the sea." Portuguese and Spanish explorers relied heavily on it to
provision their ships during their explorations of the New World and the
route to the Indies around the Cape of Good Hope. No one held the
stuff in high esteem. On land and at sea, people washed it down with
beer, cider, malmsey wine, or "stinking water" from wooden barrels. For centuries, thousands of fishermen, especially Basques from northern
Spain, Bretons, and Englishmen, pursued cod despite horrifying casualty
rates at sea in all weathers. A commodity with a value higher than gold,
cod sustained entire national fisheries for centuries.?

The Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, flourishes over an enormous area of
the North Atlantic, with a modern range from the northern Barents Sea
south to the Bay of Biscay, around Iceland and the southern tip of Greenland, and along the North American coast as far south as North Carolina.
Streamlined and abundant, it grows to a large size, has nutritious, bland
flesh, and is easily cooked. It is also easily salted and dried, an important
consideration when the major markets for salt cod were far from the fishing grounds, and often in the Mediterranean. When dried, cod meat is almost 80 percent protein.