A Viking Voyage: In Which an Unlikely Crew of Adventurers Attempts an Epic Journey to the New World

Book by Carter W Hodding

If you are really, truly into Vikings, then you should immediately abandon this book, grab your horned helmet (which no self-respecting Viking actually ever wore, by the way), and go froth at the mouth in some fog-enshrouded ancient rubbish heap like a good little berserker, convinced that you alone have found the much-ballyhooed Vinland.

If instead you enjoy tales of quixotic idiocy, passion, determination, frightening beauty, love, loss, enlightenment, failure, and redemption, then read on. This is your story, and I have lived to tell it.

These things always begin innocently enough. Sometimes with a mere thought.

Why not retrace the Viking voyages to the New World?*

I get ideas like this all the time. Some people sit in rush-hour traffic fantasizing about bashing their fellow drivers with a sizable ham hock. When I find myself delayed, I decide it's high time to ride an elephant across Hannibal's route through the Alps, al-though I know nothing about elephants or war.

*Some stern people may object, but I use the term "Viking" freely, not only to mean raiders of the sea, but all people during the 700s to the 1100s originating from what is now Scandinavia.

I just like retracing the steps that renowned or notorious people once took. I have dogged Lewis and Clark by rubber boat, foot, and horseback from St. Louis to the Pacific, paddled a canoe in Thoreau's wake in the Maine woods, and chased after John Wilkes Booth by minivan in northern Virginia.

In the case of the Vikings, I initially did just enough research to find out that Leif Eriksson sailed to a place he called Vinland--a place somewhere along the eastern edge of North America between Labrador and Florida--in the year 1000. He raised a few sod buildings, wintered at his new quarters, and then returned to Greenland, claiming to have found a great new land for his people. His fellow Greenlanders were suffering from a paucity of wood as well as quality farmland, and a place claiming an abundance of arable land, frostless winters, grapes, and plenty of salmon drummed up more excitement than the latest gated community outside of Atlanta would today.

This was enough for me. The millennial anniversary of Leif's voyage was coming up, and my research showed that no one had yet dared (or bothered) to retrace his exact route. I would fly to Greenland, hitchhike across the country to the different abandoned Viking settlements, and then buy some functioning vessel and motor it along the prescribed route to what is generally accepted as Vinland.

That is what I told my wife (at the time my girlfriend) and friends. I was running a contract post office for the dying town of Thurmond, West Virginia. While I referred to myself as the postmaster, the Postal Service sent me letters addressed "Dear Mr. or Ms. Contract Postal Unit," and although I never tired of hearing how Billy used to spy on naked prostitutes back in the thirties, I craved adventure. So I repeated to everybody who would lis-
ten, including those whose hearing was long gone but pretended to understand every word I said, that I was bound and determined to retrace, in my own fashion, Leif Eriksson's voyage to the New World.

Imagine my surprise when I did a bit more research and learned that Greenland has no roads connecting its towns and settlements. Its deep fjords, formidable mountains, and endless ice have made highway infrastructure a very low priority. Travel in summer is solely by boat, airplane, or helicopter. In the winter, which is not when the Vikings would have been sailing, Greenlanders travel by dogsled, snowmobile, or air. If you fall in the ocean up there, even in the summer, the temperature of the water will kill you in five minutes. Sea ice (or pack ice, as I learned to call it) and icebergs
are everywhere. Southeastern Baffin Island, my destination after Greenland, has ice-free shores for only a brief period each summer and then only in select areas. Pack ice, when mixed with high winds, can crush the hull of nearly any boat. I don't even need to mention what icebergs, which are glacier fragments, can do to vessels much stronger than a Viking boat--say, a luxury liner, for example.

And, of course, I knew something about the polar bears. They live there. They like fresh meat. No account I read about traveling in a boat in northern waters was complete without a polar bear encounter--and not a single mention of their cuddly cuteness.

Worst of all, I knew nothing about sailing. I had not even read a single Patrick O'Brian novel. I did not know athwartships from "You sank my battleship!" The most memorable sailing accomplishment in my life was flipping my family's Sunfish beneath a moored barge on the Mississippi River, losing both the sail and the mast.

The nightmares did not start then--they would come later--but I did begin to worry. That very worrying, however, was the clincher. It ensured I would do everything I could to retrace Leif's route. The little voice in my head suggesting, "That's insane!" forced me to do it. At similar times I've eaten a fish as it still flopped on my plate; sneaked into Burma to interview Khun Sa, the world's largest producer of heroin; or eaten 135 oysters in fifteen minutes at the Louisiana Oyster Festival. Mostly, though, I have an unyielding need to walk in much bigger shoes than my own. I crave to see just how brave, stoic, undaunted, or even insane our historical figures were. In following Hannibal or Leif Eriksson, I put myself in their situation, get in way over my head, and then attempt to survive.