Category Archives: Exploration and Discovery

“Marckalada”

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An article published in the July issue of Terrae Incognitae, the journal of the Society of the History of Discoveries (of which former Reinhardt faculty member Anne Good is about to become president), has been getting a certain amount of attention. The full text may be read at the publisher’s website. Paolo Chiesa of the University of Milan has discovered, in the (currently unpublished) Cronica universalis of Galvaneus Flamma (1283-c. 1345), a reference to “Marckalada,” which Chiesa interprets as the “Markland” mentioned in several Viking sagas. The relevant passage:

Sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway say that northwards, beyond Norway, there is Iceland; further ahead there is an island named Grolandia, where the Polar Star remains behind you, toward the south. The governor of this island is a bishop. In this land, there is neither wheat nor wine nor fruit; people live on milk, meat, and fish. They dwell in subterranean houses and do not venture to speak loudly or to make any noise, for fear that wild animals hear and devour them. There live huge white bears, which swim in the sea and bring shipwrecked sailors to the shore…. Further westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build with them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds. However, no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features.

Unfortunately, the Cronica universalis does not also mention Helluland or Vinland, two other New World locations mentioned in the sagas, but the appearance of “Marckalada” does suggest that in fourteenth-century Milan some people knew about other places “beyond Greenland,” likely through information exchanged in the nearby maritime entrepôt of Genoa. 

It is always tempting to believe that this is where Columbus got his ideas about sailing westward to Asia, but keep in mind that there is a difference between information and knowledge. That is, “Marckalada” in this context is no more real than Prester John or the Cynocephaloi. Furthermore, note that Columbus did not sail to Greenland in order to recreate Leif Erikson’s journey (indeed, for his first voyage he sailed south to the Canary Islands before turning west). The only thing that can really be said about this piece of information is that, if Columbus actually knew of it, it was only one of many suggesting to him that Asia was just over the horizon. 

For Columbus Day

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In The American Spectator, Armando Simón defends Christopher Columbus, claiming that he was not as bad as his current reputation holds. This does not excuse what Spanish colonialism became, of course, and the idea that “the founder was good, it’s just that the people who came after him messed things up” is a trope (i.e. the founder more than likely shares some of the blame). Still, Simón raises some good points:

There is not one single historical source in existence that substantiates any of the “crimes.” Not one. None!

Consult, not secondary sources written centuries later by individuals with a political agenda, but primary (i.e., contemporary) sources in the original Spanish: Los Cuatro Viajes del Almirante y su Testamento, and, Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias, both by Bartolomé de las Casas. De las Casas, as every schoolchild in the Caribbean and Spain knows, was The Apostle of the Indians, an indefatigable defender of the Indians who fulminated endlessly against the Spanish crimes on the indigenous people. More importantly, he chronicled the atrocities against the Indians, fearlessly naming the criminals. Not once does he mention Columbus as an evildoer. On the contrary, he documented the exact opposite, that Columbus repeatedly defended the Indians against Spanish depredations.

The third primary source is the biography of the explorer written by his son, Fernando. Should the reader cynically discount his son’s biography as whitewashed because his son somehow saw that 500 years later his father’s statues were going to be vandalized in a new country called the United States and he had to salvage his reputation, think instead that, considering the zeitgeist, Fernando could have easily portrayed his father as a great conqueror of satanic, evil savages who practiced cannibalism (after all, look at all the hagiographies written on Napoleon, who turned Europe into a charnel house). Significantly, Fernando also portrayed the natives in a benevolent light — and this was long before the syrupy “noble savage” mythos that we have been force-fed to this day. He was being faithful to facts.

Lastly, there is the Capitulations, the documents between the Spanish monarchy and the Admiral.

If Columbus had, indeed, committed the countless crimes that some people with their ignorance of history have attributed to him, if he was, indeed the monster that he has been portrayed, on a par with Attila the Hun, Josef Stalin, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, I for one would be among those condemning him. But the historical facts are clear: the atrocities that have been heaped on him are nowhere to be found, except in the minds of his detractors. They are just not there.

Much more at the link – read the whole thing. 

Recycled Fabric

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From UPI (hat tip: Instapundit):

Wright brothers’ wing fragment to take flight again on Mars

A piece of cloth from the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 is set to become part of aviation history again — this time on Mars.

Carillon Historical Park, the Ohio home of the Wright Brio home of the Wright Brothers National Museum, said NASA officials got in contact in 2019 about finding a way to connect Wilbur and Orville Wright‘s first successful flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C., with the first heavier-than-air flight on Mars.

The museum provided a small fragment of the Wright Flyer I’s wing covering to be carried aboard Ingenuity, a small helicopter attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet.

NASA said Ingenuity is expected to take its first flight sometime after April 8. The flight will mark the first-ever powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet, NASA said.

More at the link. 

New Blog by Anne Good

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Dr. Anne Good, former chair of the history program at Reinhardt, is now assistant curator of the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. The Bell is home to some 40,000 rare books, maps, and manuscripts that focus on the history and impact of trade and cultural exchange in the Early Modern Period. Due to pandemic, she is working remotely for now – but has started a blog entitled Contours of the Premodern World that focuses on items in the Bell’s collection. Check it out – and also the JFB’s Facebook page, which she also regularly updates.

Canadian Flaggery

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Apologies for my long absence this past month, dear reader, as my family and I were on an extended road trip through Atlantic Canada, with a return leg through Quebec and Ontario. We saw and learned a lot, and I’m hoping to write some posts about our experience. This one, following a great theme of this blog, will be about… flags!

The provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia comprise “the Maritimes,” and they all feature the same type of flag:

Flag of New Brunswick, flying in St. Andrews, N.B.

Flag of Prince Edward Island, flying in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Flag of Nova Scotia, flying in Pictou, N.S.

That is, all the Maritime flags are essentially banners of the provincial arms:

Arms of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia. Wikipedia.

The only difference between any of the arms and any of the flags derived from them is the red and white border added to the flag of PEI. 

Design-wise, this is a good way to do things. Most provincial flags date from the mid-1960s, around the time that the current Maple Leaf flag replaced the Canadian Red Ensign. Both Ontario and Manitoba adopted provincial Red Ensigns out of spite, but in the Maritimes “banners of arms” prevailed. 

Canadian Red Ensign, de facto national flag of Canada 1957-65, hanging in All Saints’ Anglican Church, St. Andrews, N.B.

Flags of Ontario and Manitoba, featuring provincial arms substituted for the national arms. Wikipedia.

Aesthetically, the Red Ensign motif is a little too cluttered, and symbolically it is a relic of the past. Ontario and Manitoba now suffer, rather needlessly, the same problem that Canada itself had in the 1960s!

For the record: the arms of New Brunswick reference its historic shipbuilding industry; the arms of PEI illustrate its motto “the small under the protection of the great” (the large tree represents Canada, and the three small trees PEI’s three counties); and the arms of Nova Scotia reference Scotland twice, with a blue-on-white saltire of St. Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint, and an inescutcheon of Scotland’s royal arms. These date from King James VI’s original settlement efforts in the 1620s but were forgotten by the time of Confederation in 1867, when different arms were devised for the new province. The original arms were rediscovered in the 1920s and were officially readopted in 1929. 

Flag of Cape Breton Island, flying in La Prairie, Nova Scotia.

An unofficial flag that I did not know about: the flag of Cape Breton Island. Cape Breton lies off the eastern coast of mainland Nova Scotia, and comprises about 20% of the area of the province. It was actually its own colony from 1784 until 1820, with Sydney as its capital. The flag is not very well designed (maps and writing are not good flag elements), but it’s certainly very popular, as I discovered.

Flag of Newfoundland and Labrador, flying on Portugal Cove Road, St. John’s, NL.

The province of Newfoundland – or rather, “Newfoundland and Labrador,” as it has been officially known since 2001 – is somehow not considered part of the Maritimes, but of “Atlantic Canada.” It boasts an abstract flag designed by artist Christopher Pratt in 1980. I was told once that this flag was a project of the government at the time, which would have been Progressive Conservative, and in the 1980s you would fly it if you were PC, or otherwise a supporter of Premier Brian Peckford. But if this situation was ever true, the flag seems to have moved beyond its partisan origins and is now embraced by most everyone. Its symbolism is wide-ranging, with references to water and ice, both halves of the province, Innu and Inuit decorative pendants, the Union Jack, the sacrifice of Newfoundlanders in military service, and the fishing industry (see Wikipedia for more). It also cannot be flown upside-down.

Flags of Canada and the United Kingdom, War Memorial, Woody Point, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Prior to the advent of Pratt’s flag, the provincial flag was the Union Jack, believe it or not. Newfoundland had been a dominion of the United Kingdom from 1907 until 1934, when it reverted to the status of a crown colony before joining Canadian Confederation in 1949. As a colony, of course, it flew the Union Jack, and they officially readopted this as their provincial flag in 1952. Strangely enough, Liberal Joey Smallwood, the one most responsible for getting Newfoundland to join Canada, was still premier. Was he having regrets? Was this a sop to certain disappointed people? 

I do find it interesting how this is a reversal of the usual pattern. You would think, as it was with the national flag, that the Conservatives would be defending the traditional British design, and the Liberals the abstract modern one. 

In any event, the Union Jack is still displayed quite a bit in Newfoundland, even officially. 

Newfoundland tricolour, flying at Elliston, Newfoundland and Labrador.

But also appearing quite a bit is the Newfoundland tricolour. Some claim it dates from the 1840s and is essentially a local version of the Irish tricolour, illustrating the same hope for peace between Protestants and Catholics. A Wikipedia editor insists that it represents the “Roman Catholic fraternal organization the Star of the Sea Association (SOSA) established in St. John’s in 1871.” I was told that it emerged out of obscurity in the last thirty years to become universally popular, kind of like Inukshuks and poutine elsewhere in Canada. I was also told that it does not represent any desire for Newfoundland independence; it’s just an alternate, “historic” flag that people have come to embrace. 

Flag of Labrador, hanging at Cape St. Mary’s Ecological Preserve, Newfoundland and Labrador.

The “Labrador” part of Newfoundland and Labrador has its own (unofficial) flag, which dates from the early seventies. I saw it here and there. It represents snow, land, and water, with a sprig of black spruce, the provincial tree.

Flags of Charlottetown, Canada, and Prince Edward Island, flying in Charlottetown, PEI.

I’m afraid that most cities in Atlantic Canada do not have well designed flags. One exception is Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island. They did the banner-of-the-arms thing with their 1989 grant from the Canadian Heraldic Authority. Princess Charlotte’s crown appears in a grid pattern, representing the city’s layout. 

Flag of Saint John, New Brunswick, flying outside Saint John City Market.

Flag of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Crwflags.com.

Flag of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Wikipedia.

Otherwise, cities in Atlantic Canada tend to put their entire coats of arms on their flags, as do Saint John, N.B., Fredericton, N.B., and St. John’s, N.L. Such a move tends to introduce both a lot of blank space and a lot of extraneous detail. Keep it simple!

Flag of Acadia, hanging in the St. John City Market, New Brunswick.

Maritime Francophones, particularly in New Brunswick, are known as “Acadians” and have a distinctive flag, which dates from 1884. It takes the form of a French tricolour, defaced with a gold star, “the Stella Maris, the symbol of Mary, Acadian national symbol and patron of mariners.” The British had assumed control of Acadia in the early eighteenth century, and fears of disloyalty prompted them to expel its inhabitants during the Seven Years’ War. They couldn’t get them all, of course, and later many returned, to form a distinctive community that exists to this day (we stopped in Grand Falls, N.B. – the town was bedecked in Acadian flags, since the Acadian Games had just taken place there). That the Acadians should have adopted the French revolutionary tricolour, when they never lived under that regime, and were clearly quite religious themselves, has always been a bit of a mystery to me. 

Flag of the Francophone Community of Newfoundland, flying at Cape St. George, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Outside of Quebec and Acadia, other Francophone communities in Canada have their own flags. That of the “Franco-Terreneuviens” was flying at Cape St. George in Newfoundland. 

Flag of the Mi’kmaq Nation Grand Council, flying at the ferry terminal at North Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Another minority group in the Maritimes: the First Nations people known as the Mi’kmaq. I saw the flag of the Mi’kmaq Grand National Council flying here and there, although apparently it is only supposed to be hung vertically. According to Flags of the World, the white represents the purity of creation, the red cross the four cardinal directions, the sun the forces of the day, and the moon the forces of the night. (I guess the five-pointed star denotes the sun here.)

Micmac National Flag, flying at Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

We spotted another Mi’kmaq flag outside Confederation Centre in Charlottetown. In addition to the flag of Canada and all the provincial and territorial flags, the so-called Mi’kmaq National flag flies. It’s not as well designed as the National Council flag, but it’s certainly symbolic. Flags of the World states that the three colours, white, red, and blue, signify the three divine persons, The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, and the cross signifies Christ. The letters “NMAT” on the right stand for “Nin Alasotmoinoi Mento Tooe,” which can be translated as “I am a Catholic; you, devil, get out.” The letters on the left read “MIGMAG” (an alternate spelling of Mi’kmaq) “SA” (interlaced – a reference to St. Anne), and “LNOG” (meaning “the people”).

Flags of the Province of Quebec flying near the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, Lower Town, Quebec City.

I am a huge fan of the of the fleurdelisé flag of Quebec, easily Canada’s most attractive provincial flag. The odd thing is that the flags in the photo are the wrong dimensions: the official ratio is 2:3, but these ones were made 1:2, the same as the national flag of Canada. For shame! Where’s their independent spirit?!

Flag of the City of Quebec, flying on Rue Saint-Louis, Quebec City.

The City of Quebec has a cool flag too, which was granted in 1988 by the Canadian Heraldic Authority. 

Flag of Montreal, flying at Quai Victoria, Montreal.

Montreal has a good flag. They added the golden pine tree in the middle a couple of years ago. 

Cross of St. George, flying at Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Finally, to round out the post: a cross of St. George flag flying from Cabot Tower, a lookout tower on Signal Hill guarding the entrance to St. John’s harbour. I liked this: I read it as a reference to both Henry VII of England and John Cabot of Genoa, who sailed for Henry and who rediscovered Newfoundland in 1497. (Both England and Genoa used the cross of St. George.) 

Samuel de Champlain

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Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) was a French navigator, cartographer, and explorer, who is commonly designated “The Father of New France” for his role in founding that particular colony in 1608. He died and was buried in Quebec City – but the exact location of his grave is currently unknown, and has become a holy grail of sorts for archaeologists. A recent article in the Globe and Mail (hat tip: Robert Black) rejoices in the discovery of a seventeenth-century palisade at Quebec, but laments that Champlain’s grave is still unfound. From the article:

Records suggest Champlain died on Christmas Day in 1635, and his remains were moved to a chapel that was later burned to the ground. A Jesuit text from 1642 refers to a priest who was buried alongside the founder and another friend, but there is no record of where that burial took place.

“It is likely the remains were moved, but nobody knows when or where,” Mr. Lavoie said.

Serious efforts to find the tomb began in the mid-1800s. Scientists began “digging left and right” to find Champlain, he said, but without success. More recently, an archaeologist who shared the name of former Quebec premier Rene Levesque led a series of digs in the 1980s and 1990s that proved equally fruitless.

Mr. Lavoie believes the location of the original “Champlain chapel” to which his remains were moved has been found in the old city. Mr. Lavoie believes there’s a good chance Champlain could be lying somewhere beneath Quebec City’s basilica, either on his own or in a common grave.

But the search for the founder’s remains are at a standstill, and even if found, they would not be easy to identify. Champlain fathered no children and left no descendants, which eliminates the possibility of DNA matching. To confirm the identity, researchers would have to match up remains with what little that is known about Champlain physically — for example traces of the arrow wounds he suffered during a 1613 conflict with the Iroquois.

Robert comments:

Champlain was a Protestant, was he not? And the prevailing theory for many decades has been that he and other Protestants were buried apart from later cemeteries (and therefore, not under the Basilica). If anything his remains have for a very long time thought to be buried under the Anglican cathedral, either the car park or the outbuildings.

I did not know this. Wikipedia claims that:

He belonged to either a Protestant family, or a tolerant Roman Catholic one, since [Champlain’s birthplace of] Brouage was most of the time a Catholic city in a Protestant region, and his Old Testament first name (Samuel) was not usually given to Catholic children.

A note elaborates:

According to many modern historians… Champlain could have been born a Protestant. Professor [Alain] Laberge [of Laval University] suggested that Champlain’s Protestantism would have been downplayed or omitted from educational materials in Quebec by the Roman Catholic Church, which controlled Quebec‘s education system until 1962.

I discover that the Champlain monument in Orillia, Ontario, which I remember seeing as a kid, has been removed for restoration – perhaps indefinitely, given concerns expressed “over the monument’s representations of Indigenous peoples raised by members of the public and by Indigenous communities.”

A Welsh Crossing

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Another legend of a transatlantic crossing that I had not heard of:

Whilst it was generally believed that Columbus was the first European to discover America in 1492, it is now well known that Viking explorers reached parts of the east coast of Canada around 1100 and that Icelandic Leif Erikson’s Vinland may have been an area that is now part of the United States. What is less well known is that a Welshman may have followed in Erikson’s footsteps, this time bringing settlers with him to Mobile Bay in modern day Alabama.

According to Welsh legend, that man was Prince Madog ab Owain Gwynedd.

A Welsh poem of the 15th century tells how Prince Madoc sailed away in 10 ships and discovered America. The account of the discovery of America by a Welsh prince, whether truth or myth, was apparently used by Queen Elizabeth I as evidence to the British claim to America during its territorial struggles with Spain. So who was this Welsh Prince and did he really discover America before Columbus?

Owain Gwynedd, king of Gwynedd in the 12th century, had nineteen children, only six of whom were legitimate. Madog (Madoc), one of the illegitimate sons, was born at Dolwyddelan Castle in the Lledr valley between Betws-y-Coed and Blaenau Ffestiniog.

On the death of the king in December 1169, the brothers fought amongst themselves for the right to rule Gwynedd. Madog, although brave and adventurous, was also a man of peace. In 1170 he and his brother, Riryd, sailed from Aber-Kerrik-Gwynan on the North Wales Coast (now Rhos-on-Sea) in two ships, the Gorn Gwynant and the Pedr Sant. They sailed west and are said to have landed in what is now Alabama in the USA.

Prince Madog then returned to Wales with great tales of his adventures and persuaded others to return to America with him. They sailed from Lundy Island in 1171, but were never heard of again.

They are believed to have landed at Mobile Bay, Alabama and then travelled up the Alabama River along which there are several stone forts, said by the local Cherokee tribes to have been constructed by “White People”. These structures have been dated to several hundred years before the arrival of Columbus and are said to be of a similar design to Dolwyddelan Castle in North Wales.

Early explorers and pioneers found evidence of possible Welsh influence among the native tribes of America along the Tennessee and Missouri Rivers. In the 18th century one local tribe was discovered that seemed different to all the others that had been encountered before. Called the Mandans this tribe were described as white men with forts, towns and permanent villages laid out in streets and squares. They claimed ancestry with the Welsh and spoke a language remarkably similar to it. Instead of canoes, Mandans fished from coracles, an ancient type of boat still found in Wales today. It was also observed that unlike members of other tribes, these people grew white-haired with age. In addition, in 1799 Governor John Sevier of Tennessee wrote a report in which he mentioned the discovery of six skeletons encased in brass armour bearing the Welsh coat of arms.

More at the link (although I confess to a certain skepticism – what happened to these suits of armor? You’d think that some of them would be on display somewhere…)

Other such stories were touched on in an earlier post.

Exam Question

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Both the Vikings (around the year 1000) and the Spanish (from 1492) were Europeans who set foot in the New World. But a majority of the people in the New World now speak Spanish as their native language, while virtually no one speaks Old Norse. What explains the Spanish success at colonization?

This question uses language as a gauge of colonial success, but does it deserve to be? A fuller picture involving law, religion, technology, music, clothing, and other folkways might be more useful. There may, after all, be something “recessive” about some languages. As we learned in class, everywhere the Vikings settled, whether northern England, Ireland, Normandy, or Russia, saw them lose their language within a generation – often without them losing their fighting spirit! The only place this did not occur was Iceland, where there was no local population to get absorbed into. If the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was not abandoned, it is entirely possible that John Cabot, when he arrived in Newfoundland in 1497, would have been surprised to meet blonde-haired Beothuks employing Viking technology. That might indicate some colonial success. Similarly, in Latin America, Spanish may have extinguished native languages, but many native customs continued unmolested.

Be that as it may, it is manifestly apparent that the Spanish colonial enterprise was more successful than the Viking by any number of metrics. L’Anse Aux Meadows was occupied for perhaps five years, and the two small Greenland settlements were abandoned in the fifteenth century, while much of the New World was “New Spain” from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. What explains the difference?

One explanation might be simple geography. Greenland and Newfoundland, even in the medieval warm period, did not have as much to offer in terms of exploitable resources as Central America and the Caribbean. Similarly, the Aztec and Incan empires were already civilized, and all the Spanish needed to do was replace the rulers at the top to win the whole thing; the conquering had already been done for them. Such conditions did not prevail in the extreme northeast.

But differences in time are probably more significant. The five-hundred year gap between Leif Erikson and Hernán Cortés saw the advent of a number of technological and cultural changes that gave an impressive advantage to the Spanish in their colonial endeavors. The medieval silk road that flourished under the Mongols gave Europeans a taste for Asian luxury goods, and the advent of the Ottoman Empire, which impeded this traffic, impelled Europeans to find alternate routes to Asia. Various technologies borrowed from the Arabs and/or developed through Mediterranean commerce allowed Europeans to sail longer distances out of sight of land, such as lateen sails and fixed rudders (allowing ships to tack against the wind, and obviating the need for galley crews), the astrolabe (for determining latitude), the magnetic compass (for determining cardinal directions when the sun or stars are occluded), or the traverse board (for plotting distance traveled). Such technologies allowed for a transatlantic voyage, something the Vikings were not capable of. That it was the Spanish who discovered the New World is also no accident – the union of Castile and Aragon, and its 1492 defeat of Grenada, completing the reconquista, gave it an overweening sense of self-confidence. God was on their side! The fact that Portugal was establishing a route to Asia down the coast of Africa make the Spanish fearful, and willing to gamble on a trans-Oceanic route. This is another difference between 1000 and 1500 – states were simply more powerful, and in competition with each other.

But perhaps the most significant event to occur in Europe between 1000 and 1500 was the Black Death. Europeans alive in 1500 were the descendants of people who had survived the plague (and other diseases like smallpox and swine influenza). They could still die from these diseases, of course, but they had a much greater chance of surviving them than did the native Americans, whose bodies were more evolved to counter parasites than microbes. This biological weapon (coupled with other weapons like firearms and steel swords, the other points of Jared Diamond’s triad, and domesticated fauna like attack dogs and ridable horses), gave the Spanish, and eventually other Europeans, an overwhelming advantage at conquest and colonization.

Vikings in Greenland

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From the Guardian:

New analysis casts doubt on theory that change in climate influenced Vikings to move to Greenland in 985, and posits it would have been relatively cold

The Vikings’ arrival and departure from Greenland was not heavily influenced by the so-called medieval warm period, according to new research that casts doubt that the climatic change was a global phenomenon.

Viking seafarers, led by Erik the Red, are understood to have expanded from Iceland to south-western Greenland around 985. The Norse population grew to about 3,000 to 5,000 settlers, harvesting walrus ivory and raising livestock. But the colonies disappeared by 1460, with the local Inuit population remaining as the only inhabitants before Europeans again arrived in the 1700s.

Previous theories have suggested that a warming climate allowed Norse people to push further north to the frigid expanses of Greenland, before leaving as temperatures dropped again. In what has become known as the medieval warm period, temperatures rose from around 950, with the generally balmier conditions lasting until 1250, before the arrival of what is known as the little ice age.

But new analysis of glaciers in Greenland shows that there was no significant change in their extent during the medieval warm period, suggesting that it remained relatively cold throughout the Viking colonisation of Greenland.

More at the link.