Note Back to Main Text — Chapter II · PRE-COLUMBIAN VOYAGES.

These incidents are of surpassing interest, for they were attendant upon the first meeting (in all probability) that ever took place between civilized Europeans and any people below the upper status of barbarism.[222] Who were these natives encountered by Thorfinn? The Northmen called them "Skrælings," a name which one is at first sight strongly tempted to derive from the Icelandic verb skrækja, identical with the English screech. A crowd of excited Indians might most appropriately be termed Screechers.[223] This derivation, however, is not correct. Meaning of the epithet "Skrælings." The word skræling survives in modern Norwegian, and means a feeble or puny or insignificant person. Dr. Storm's suggestion is in all probability correct, that the name "Skrælings," as applied to the natives of America, had no ethnological significance, but simply meant "inferior people;" it gave concise expression to the white man's opinion that they were "a bad lot." In Icelandic literature the name is usually applied to the Eskimos, and hence it has been rashly inferred that Thorfinn found Eskimos in Vinland. Such was Rafn's opinion, and since his time the commentators have gone off upon a wrong trail and much ingenuity has been wasted.[224] It would be well to remember, however, that the Europeans of the eleventh century were not ethnologists; in meeting these inferior peoples for the first time they were more likely to be impressed with the broad fact of their inferiority than to be nice in making distinctions. When we call both Australians and Fuegians "savages," we do not assert identity or relationship between them; and so when the Northmen called Eskimos and Indians by the same disparaging epithet, they doubtless simply meant to call them savages.