Academic Reading — Test 163

Reading passage

Towards the close of the tenth century, a band of Norse settlers led by a man known as Erik the Red sailed westwards from Iceland and established the first lasting European communities on the southern coast of Greenland. These settlements, conventionally divided into the Eastern Settlement and the smaller Western Settlement, endured for roughly four and a half centuries before fading from the historical record. Their survival depended on a delicate balance between the natural resources of a harsh sub-Arctic environment and a network of seaborne contacts that reached across the North Atlantic. At the heart of that network lay the ship, for without reliable vessels the colony could neither be founded nor sustained. The Norse vessels that carried colonists and cargo were not the slender longships of popular imagination but sturdier merchant craft known as the knarr. Broader and deeper in the hull than a warship, the knarr was designed to carry livestock, timber and trade goods rather than rows of fighting men. Its hull was built using the clinker technique, in which overlapping planks were fastened to a robust keel and frame, producing a vessel that was both flexible and watertight. A single square sail of woven wool provided the main propulsion, while a small crew managed the steering oar mounted on the right-hand side. Such ships could carry several tonnes of cargo and were capable of crossing open water between Norway, Iceland and Greenland, though the voyages were dangerous and frequently delayed by ice and storm. A persistent difficulty for the Greenland Norse was the scarcity of suitable building timber. The settled districts supported only low scrub and stunted birch, neither of which could supply the long, straight planks and keels demanded by shipwrights. To obtain such wood the colonists looked further west, mounting expeditions to the forested coasts of a region they called Markland, generally identified with the eastern seaboard of modern Canada. Driftwood carried by ocean currents offered a further supplementary source, and was gathered carefully along the shore. Even so, large vessels remained costly and comparatively rare, and a damaged ship could not always be replaced from local materials. This dependence on imported and salvaged wood placed a quiet but constant constraint on the ambitions of the settlements. The economy that the ships supported was built less on grain than on animals and on the products of the hunt. Cattle, sheep and goats were raised on the limited pastureland of the fjords, and hay was cut and stored to keep the livestock alive through the long winter. Yet the most valuable export was walrus ivory, obtained from herds in the hunting grounds far to the north. Each summer, parties travelled by boat to these grounds, returning with tusks that were traded onward to European markets, where they were prized for carving. Ivory and other northern goods such as hides and furs were exchanged for the iron, grain and timber that Greenland itself could not produce in sufficient quantity. The colony was therefore not an isolated outpost but a link in a long commercial chain. For several generations this arrangement allowed the settlements to grow modestly. Farms multiplied along the sheltered inner fjords, and stone churches were raised as the population adopted Christianity. At its height the combined Norse population of Greenland may have numbered a few thousand people. Expansion, however, was always limited by geography. The habitable land was confined to narrow coastal strips where soil and shelter permitted farming, and the cold interior and ice cap offered nothing to the farmer. As a result, growth tended to mean a denser occupation of the same favoured districts rather than the opening of genuinely new frontiers. By the fourteenth century the position of the colony was deteriorating. A cooling climate shortened the growing season and lengthened the winters, while sea ice made the Atlantic crossing more hazardous and less frequent. At the same time, the European demand for walrus ivory declined as elephant ivory became more readily available, eroding the trade on which Greenland's prosperity had rested. The Western Settlement appears to have been abandoned first, and the Eastern Settlement followed within a century or so. Exactly why the last Norse Greenlanders departed or perished remains debated, but the combination of a harsher climate, a collapsing market and an increasing isolation from Europe undoubtedly played a part. When ships ceased to arrive, a community that had always depended on the sea could not long survive.