Icebergs, long a fact of life for anyone who sailed in the northern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean, became more prominent in the consciousness of Europeans as a result of the dramatic expansion in the number of explorers in the region during the 16th century.
There was no mystery about what an iceberg was in the 16th century, at least for those who had experience traveling in the North Atlantic. Icebergs were a fact of life for the Inuit who traveled frequently through those frozen waters on kayaks. But most Europeans had little contact with them. The situation began to change when European fishing fleets traveled farther into the Atlantic in search of COD, but there are few surviving accounts of those voyages.
According to Canadian Geographic magazine, which offers details about icebergs on its Web site, the name for the phenomenon probably derives from ijsberg, a Dutch term meaning “ice mountain.” The icebergs that came to have the most significance for Europeans in the 16th century were those they came into contact with in their search for the Northwest Passage. Those icebergs could be found in waters in or near modern-day Canada.
When Martin Frobisher led three English exploratory missions into the northern Atlantic in search of the Northwest Passage, the travel accounts generated after their return contained ample details about icebergs. Crews on ships, which at best could determine their latitude (through the use of equipment such as astrolabes and cross stales) but had no effective way to measure longitude, could locate their position in relation to the stars but had imperfect information about the shallows and shoals that could tear the hull of a ship. But even if they possessed firm knowledge about such fixed objects, no European could have known in advance when a ship might hit the submerged portions of an iceberg. The situation was even worse in storms, when ships could become unsteerable if their sails ripped or the cables snapped. A fierce Atlantic storm on its own could wreck a ship, as the narrative of Jorge d’Albuquerque Coelho revealed. But the accounts of Frobisher’s crews reveal that storms in the north Atlantic brought even more danger.
One sign of Europeans’ increased interest in icebergs can be found in the narrative of Thomas Ellis, who had accompanied Frobisher on the explorer’s last westward expedition of 1578. In addition to describing the threats that the sailors faced as a result of storms, he added an illustration that provided four views of an iceberg. It might be the first time that a printer (see printing press) attempted to represent visually what an iceberg looked like from the vantage point of someone who saw one at sea level.
European sailors had good reason to fear icebergs in this region. As it turns out, at least in modern times, the icebergs that form between Greenland and Newfoundland are among the most active in the world, migrating up to 4.35 miles (7 km) each year. Icebergs, composed of fresh water, move southward into what is known as Iceberg Alley. Though icebergs naturally shed outer parts, a process known as calving, global warming has made this phenomenon more frequent since the 16th century.
Further reading: Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. “Frobisher, Sir Martin.” Available online. URL: Http://www. biographi. ca/009004-119.01-e. php?&id_ nbr=230. Accesssed November 24, 2008; Thomas Ellis, A True reporte of the third and last voyage into Meta incognita. . . by Martine Frobisher (London: 1578).
Cal systems and the adaptability of European peoples to new environments.
The first known human inhabitants of Iceland, situated between Norway and Greenland, were Irish hermits, but some scholars speculate that travelers from the classical Mediterranean world knew about the island. All historians agree that immigrants from Norway established Iceland’s first permanent settlement. Early Icelandic sources credit Ingolfur Arnarson and his wife with homesteading on the site of present-day Reykjavik in 874. Early Icelandic settlers were mostly Norse immigrants. Many fled Norway to Iceland during the attempt by King Harold the Fairheaded to consolidate separate chieftainships into a unified Norwegian kingdom.
The Norse chieftains who made Iceland their home were determined to use negotiation to prevent such abuse of power. In 930 they created an assembly called Althing that met for two weeks every summer to promulgate laws and settle differences. The greatest threat to chieftain power came from a rapidly spreading Christianity. In 1000 the chieftains agreed to build Christian churches, which resulted in an independent church that played a prominent role in spreading literacy to wealthy Icelandic families.
Norway attempted to rule the island from the 10th century onward, gaining control in 1262 following the Icelandic civil war. The 1380 union of Denmark and Norway transferred governance of Iceland to Denmark, yet Iceland remained relatively independent until the middle of the 17th century, when the Danish Crown asserted stricter control over its island possession.
Environmental factors, including disease, played a pivotal role in Icelandic history. The distance of Iceland from continental Europe ensured that when diseases reached Icelandic shores they spread with the ferocity of so-called virgin soil epidemics. The Black Death (see plague) arrived in Iceland in 1402. Smallpox repeatedly swept the island, most disastrously in a 1707 epidemic that killed
18,000 people, one-third of the population. Overgrazing by imported cattle and sheep also triggered soil erosion that transformed once-fertile land into barren rocky outcrops.
Further reading: Kirsten Hastrup, Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800 (Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1990); Sigurdur A. Magnusson, Northern Sphinx: Iceland and Icelanders from the Settlement to the Present (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977).
—Kevin C. Armitage
World History
