The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown Read Online Free PDF Page B

you may be battered and hard pressed, even in real danger, but the force and fury of the wind and sea at least lift the spirit—you are fighting something you can see to fight. Ice had been perilous and often frightening, but it had been beautiful and interesting, too. Fog has the vindictiveness of the secret poisoner—the strongest man cannnot fight fog, because he does not know what he has to fight. After twenty-four hours of fog you feel that you have sailed somehow beyond the rim of the human world, to a light-less Hades from which there is no escape.
     
    The arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson called the fog off Greenland “preternaturally dense,” explaining that such fog is common “where warm and cold waters sort of brush against each other, particularly if the cold waters contain fragments of ice,” which is the case year-round along Greenland’s east coast, thanks to the East Greenland Polar Current. During the summer sailing season, the current carries masses of ice—“monstrous great islands of ice,” as the English explorer Martin Frobisher described them in 1576—down the east coast, flips them around Hvarf, and sends them north, up the west coast almost as far as Nuuk, where a “relatively warm” current keeps the coast ice-free by shunting the bergs west, toward Vinland. According to a modern-day “field guide to icebergs,” 40,000 icebergs the size of a 15-story building break off from Greenland’s glaciers each year. Of these, 1 to 2 percent—400 to 800 bergs—reach Vinland. Uncountable numbers of “bergy bits” (as big as a house) and “growlers” (a grand piano or a small car) travel with them. The combination of fog and ice can be deadly to a thin-hulled wooden ship.
    The story of sailing in Greenland waters, writes Jens Rosing, former director of Greenland’s National Museum, “is the story of long cold watches, fogs, shining days when everything shimmers in the light, terrifying storms, and undercurrents so strong that the ice, against all reason, moves up against even the most powerful storm winds.... The Icelandic sagas and annals speak time and time again of the wrecks of Greenland ships, of ships that vanished with man and mouse.” The sagas tell much the same story, missing only the ice, of all the seas Gudrid sailed.
    To protect themselves from such catastrophes, the Vikings had no Coast Guard. They had no chase boats, no winches, no diesel backup engines. They didn’t even have a friendly Eskimo in a kayak, as the artist Rockwell Kent did when his yacht wrecked off the coast of Greenland in 1929, to paddle home and radio for backup. All they had was magic. In
The Saga of the Volsungs
is a sailor’s verse:
     
    Wave runes shall you make
If you desire to ward
Your sail-steeds on the sound.
On the stem shall they be cut
And on the steering blade
And burn them on the oar.
No broad breaker will fall
Nor waves of blue,
And you will come safe from the sea.
     
    In a Viking longhouse in Greenland, dating from the days of Gudrid, archaeologists in the 1950s found a wooden rod covered with runes. On one side is the
futhark,
or complete runic alphabet—what one rune specialist called “the most powerful magic factor to defend and protect one.” On the other side is a verse, carved in precise runes that are easily read—yet remain mysterious.
On the sea, sea, sea, where the gods sit
—or watch, or lie in wait—it begins, and then its meaning grows unclear. One specialist thinks it’s a riddle about a mirage. Another thinks it’s a joke. The most persuasive reading makes it a prayer, or an epitaph:
Bibrau is the maiden who sits in the blue.
“Bibrau,” similar to the Icelandic word for mirage, is otherwise unknown as a name. “The maiden” could be a goddess, the Virgin Mary, or an ordinary girl. “The blue” could mean the sea, or the sky (the giant from whose skull the gods fashioned the heavens was called “The Blue One”). Yet
On the sea, sea, sea, where the