Not too long after that, in 1477, Columbus went to Galway Ireland to ask fishermen about routes across the northern sea. These fishermen routinely visited Iceland, and knew about Greenland. Columbus also inspected a boat on which a couple had arrived in Galway from beyond Iceland, likely Greenland, and either viewed the bodies of the couple or met with them depending on how you read his Latin.
People must have been so much more comfortable feeling vaguely curious, but not ever satisfying that curiousity.
You couldn’t just book a ticket and hotel room.
It cost a lot of money so the only way to do it was via setting up a company to try and make profit on the endeavor. Only few people could manage that.
It’d be like asking years hence, the Americans had been to the moon, why wasn’t anyone else curious about the moon, why hadn’t others put people on the moon?
Since the resources coming from the North Atlantic were not that valuable, the knowledge of the lands and culture there stayed with the people who worked it.
They didn't dwell on that in American History class.
See https://www.biography.com/political-figure/squanto for verification.
I am imagining all these old salts in the pub rolling their eyes at the aristocratic "explorers"
https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/03/26/episode-4-...
Not dissimilar from the hollowing out of rural America today. People keep on going, assuming that things will either stay stable or turn around at some point. Meanwhile everything keeps on at roughly the same trajectory of the people hanging on getting older and older, and the young people moving on to greener pastures.
And then one day you realize that there isn't really anything left.
Some topics that the article didn't mention is that:
a) Norse in Greenland continued internal infighting losing (in such a small population) able men due to duels and revenge killing
b) They had been spending much of the efforts during short summer on costly expeditions to aquire walrus-tusk ivory instead of obtaining timber and other necessities.
c) The upper class had been directing most resources into vanity projects like large cathedral and exchanging walrus-tusk ivory for luxury imports like wine, fine clothes etc..
It is still beyond me why living in Greenland by the sea they had refused to eat fish.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...
-- Globalization: Elephant ivory from Africa, newly available, crowded out walrus-tusk ivory from the market. And Greenland's ivory sales were reduced in the wake of the plague. (Ivory was their foreign-exchange product.)
--Climate fluctuations, decades-long.
It's cool to learn a little more above the lived experience of those people. I imagine they argued with each other all the time about whether to spend their efforts getting stuff they could SELL or stuff they could USE. Figuring that out is hard enough for us, and we have perfect information about markets compared to them. Imagine how hard it must have been for them.
According to Diamond the Norse outposts in Greenland lasted five hundred years. That's a hundred years longer ago than the first English settlers clawed a foothold around Massachusetts Bay. A lot can happen in five hundred years! I suspect saying "it was this - " or "it was that - made them collapse" leads to gross oversimplification.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e392/f5fc6683acf7c1f05df7b3...
The whole notion of Vikings being stupid and naive sounds very old fashioned. The whole idea that short seasons and snow would scare off any people from the Nordic countries is bullshit. Nuuk is at 64 degrees north, roughly similar to Reykjavík, Trondheim or the southern point of the northern third of Sweden. Which had been inhabited for much longer. The climate is slightly better in Scandinavia that far north, but Greenland would surely have been similar.
I thought something named the Smithsonian magazine would be better than this yet here we are
