On the wind-blasted shore of Hudson Bay in Canada there stand some ancient ruins, ruins that, by their own admission, were not made by the indigenous Inuit people. Carbon dating techniques have revealed that the structures pre-date the Viking settlements of the region and as such pose a question mark as to who was actually active in here in a period that equates to the dark ages of Europe. We are now, thankfully, living in a time when many of the old notions of exploration and cultural contact are being toppled. We all know that Columbus was not the first person to explore the Americas, just the best remembered and now it seems that the route taken by Viking explorers nearly one thousand years ago may be based on known sea passages taken by earlier adventurers. The question is which adventurers? The history of contact between the Americas and the Old World is a fascinating one, St Brendan's story of crossing the Atlantic in leather sided boats, Templar fleets escaping persecution, Saxon cod fisherman based on the Canadian shore and ancient Phoenician galleys wrecked on the Brazilian coast all add to the mythology. Those are all subjects that will have to be found elsewhere in books by the likes of Ian Wilson and Thor Heyerdahl, here however author Farley Mowat is on a more specific quest.
The seeds for this quest began many years after being puzzled by the remains on that northern coast line when Mowat found himself on another northern coast viewing remains that were so similar they had to have some cultural connection with is earlier findings. This time he was in Scotland. The obvious question loomed large, was there a race of people now lost to our memory that left roots in both these places. With that the gauntlet is laid down and the whole raison d`etre of the book is summed up. The opening statement of the book comes in the form of a confession. Many years previously Mowat wrote a book called "Westviking - The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America" which supported the then current ideas that the Norse were the first Europeans to cross to the New World. Any good researcher will adapt their ideas and theories in light of new information and the fact that Mowat has written a book that by design supersedes his previous work, speaks volumes for the fact that he has the right attitude, to many authors these days are overly precious about their work. Academic research is by its very nature a fluid and malleable science and Mowat understands this only too well.
Without giving too much away, the book is the story of his search for a people he calls the Albans, who represent the end of a thread that stretches back to the end of the last Ice Age. These people, he claims, were ravaged by a series of invasions by their neighbours, Celts, Romans and later Norse and finally fled west, firstly to Iceland, Greenland and then to the Canadian shores. A combination of a search for safe land to settle on and Walrus herds that provided their livelihood drove them ever further from their European origins and makes them somewhat akin to the settlers of the Wild West of nineteenth century America. What makes the search for these early Scots so fascinating is the modern day journey taken to find evidence of their passing, a journey that takes us through Asia minor, Britain, Iceland, Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, Labrador and finally Newfoundland. What Mowat does well here is combine the skills of writing descriptive travelogue with probing academic research and the result is an enthralling read from a master storyteller. In typical modest fashion Mowat even declares that his book is not to be regarded as history in the academic sense as there is a large amount of supposition on his part, but here I feel he is doing himself a disservice and is as valuable as any other popular market history book of recent times. After all a footnote in Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" said pretty much the same thing and that work has become an icon in the history of academic writing.
It's a fascinating and easy flowing book that mixes information, travel, history and story telling and takes use through the wild wind swept shores and hinterlands of northern Europe and America. Hopefully it completes one small page of mans history and as such will hopefully be seen as an import work for that reason. But apart from its value to posterity, Farley Mowat's search of a lost tribe is a wonderful read that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural movements, lost races and especially anyone who is in love with the wild and wind ravaged seaboards of the north Atlantic.
The Alban Quest is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson but I managed to purchase my copy through "The Ancient and Medieval History Book Club" for around 12. Amazon and e-buy and similar sites will probably have paperback copies for a few pounds and I have even seen a copy up for grabs on readitswapit.com.