1 September 2019, Sunday
Showers, laundry, breakfast and on the road by 10 am. From camp we stop at the Dark Tickle Co. (a tickle is a shallow area that “tickles” the bottom of the boat as you pass through) which has a cafe, various Newfoundland items for sale, boat tours and, our primary reason for visiting, Newfoundland wild berry jams, sauces and relishes. Next we drive past the entrance to L’Anse aux Meadows and on to Norstead, a re-creation of a Norse village from about the same time period of the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. Here Snorri, a knarr built to be an approximate replica of the trading ships used 1000 years ago, is housed. After its construction in the US it was sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland. With its crew of nine, it took 87 days to complete the voyage. The Norse would have had a crew of about 25 and would likely have completed the journey much faster. Snorri’s keel is make of oak, her planks of white pine, and her 47 ft mast of spruce. She is 54 feet long with a sail of canvas, not wool as the Norse would have had. The Norse would have treated their wool sails with animal oils to make them more seaworthy. The ship itself is coated with pine tar and linseed oil. Under normal conditions she can travel at 4-6 knots, with really favorable conditions, 10 knots.
After admiring Snorri we move on to the church, built to resemble one that Leif Erikson had constructed for his mother. Next, we stop at the blacksmith’s where O uses the bellows to help heat an iron rod to glowing red.
At the longhouse, women demonstrate how wool was spun from fleece using a drop spindle. (Spinning wheels weren’t invented until the 14thcentury.) There is also a loom here with soapstone weights. Another woman is busy knitting a wool hat with a single needle made of whale bone. Each stitch is a knot so that the hat won’t unravel if torn. The staff is also experimenting with local fruits and vegetables to see what might work as natural dyes for their wool. Thus far they have tried onion, turmeric, coffee, and tea. Today they are boiling a kettle of crowberries to see how that will work.
They also show us some items that may have been traded: horn bowls, iron nails, a shirt of iron chain, and woven goods. It’s an interesting place to spend an hour or two, and the weather is beautiful! (I overhear one of the interpreters saying that on days like today you can understand why the Norse stayed here. On bad weather days, you can understand why they left!)
From Norstead we drive a short distance to a geologic site along the shore where layers of schist have been pushed up in sloping sheets which encompass other rock types that were caught up in the layers of mud and shale that underwent metamorphosis as the Iapetus Ocean closed almost a half billion years ago.
In the early afternoon we drive to St. Anthony, a beautiful town on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Here we find a supermarket with almost all the groceries we need, plus a cell signal strong enough to touch base with S and G. We also find Lightkeepers Restaurant which has excellent sea food.
After dinner, or rather late lunch, we return to Dark Tickle for some live folk music and dessert – chocolate torte with partridgeberry sauce. Then we drive westward back to camp into a sunset the color of cloudberries, with a sliver of a new moon hanging about an hour above the darkening hilltops.