“In return for unblemished skins, the savages would accept a span length of red cloth and bind it around their heads. Thus the trading continued. When Karlsefni’s people began to run short of cloth, they ripped it into pieces so narrow that none was broader than a finger, but the savages even then gave as much for it as before, or more.”
And, so the trading continued, according to a version of the saga in Hauk’s Book, until it ended in a battle as usual. Once more many of the natives were killed. So were two of the Norsemen.
After three years Karlsefni abandoned the idea of a permanent settlement. The Skraelings were too hostile. The Norse, with their superior boats and shields, could cope with them on water. But on land the red men were too numerous and had the advantage of surprise. They couldn’t be held at bay—the Norsemen didn’t have the terrifying firearms available to later colonists coming to America.
All of which may reasonably account for the dearth of Viking artifacts on the eastern seaboard of America. The Norsemen kept close to the shore-line, whether on the seacoast or on a tidewater river, building their huts near the safety of their shielded dragon ships. Today, the sites of those early camps may well be under water as the level of the sea has risen at least five or six feet in the intervening time due to glacial meltings.
A translation of the Flatey Book saga relates that when Karlsefni’s people returned to Greenland they “carried away with them much booty in vines and grapes and peltries,” and that after this “there was much new talk in Greenland about voyaging to Vinland, for this enterprise was now considered both profitable and honorable.”
Not to be outdone in the matter of profit Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eric the Red and with a heart as murderous as that of her father, led an expedition to Vinland a few years later. Honor appears to have had no part in her plans.
Freydis had a husband, but she made the plans. Before leaving Greenland, she arranged with Leif for the loan of his house in Vinland and induced two unsuspecting brothers of another family who had a particularly fine ship to become her partners in the venture. These two men were pledged to take only thirty warriors and their women. Freydis had agreed to take a like number, but somehow she contrived to conceal five extra men in her smaller ship.
After they arrived in Vinland, Freydis managed to keep the two groups apart by fomenting antagonism. The brothers were forced to build a separate house for their men and women. This house, together with too much wine and heavy sleep, proved to be the means of their undoing—all according to the Viking lady’s plan it appears. And what a red-handed proceeding it was!
Freydis, with her husband’s grudging cooperation, succeeded in murdering the two brothers in their house one night after shackling their company. She had all of their men put to death and personally wielded the axe that killed their five women when no one else would do it. Then, taking her deceased partners’ fine trading ship, she returned to Greenland with a rich cargo of furs, wine and lumber.
One shudders to think how she went about extracting the furs from the Skraelings!