Remi signed off, wanting to conserve their battery time, and moved back to the Viking ship, where Sam had resumed his seemingly endless chore of picking away at the vessel. They spent the remainder of their daylight hours like that, painstakingly removing ice from chest after chest and making copious notes of their findings.
At night, the specially designed heater kept the temperature in the tent bearable. They fell asleep quickly after a full day working on the ship, which slowly but surely was yielding more treasures.
One night drifted into the next, and it was with some surprise that they realized over a week had gone by. When the satellite phone chirped on the morning of their ninth day camping, it so startled Sam that he almost dropped it in his haste to answer.
“Yes?”
“Sam Fargo? Dr. Jennings from Montreal. I’m on my way there with a team. We should make it to the fjord by early tomorrow. How are you holding up?” Jennings was one of Canada’s top archaeologists and the head of the group that would eventually be transporting the ship and its contents to a controlled lab in Mo
ntreal.
“As well as can be expected. Although I’ll admit that sleeping on the ice is getting old.”
Remi rolled her eyes as she continued working nearby.
“I’ll bet. We’re bringing an entire camp with us. You’ve been fortunate that no storms have moved through. But it doesn’t look like we’ll be so lucky. There’s a front headed toward Baffin and it’ll hit tomorrow in the late afternoon or evening. The first order of business will be to get the camp set up and the longship under cover, and to get you out of there before the worst of it starts.”
“Will you be all right on the ice in a storm?” Sam asked. “Maybe the ship could wait for a day or two until it passes . . .”
“That’s up to you. Depends on your schedule and your level of urgency to get back to civilization.”
“I’ll talk to my wife, but it seems like the most prudent course would be to wait it out with you on board after securing the site, doesn’t it?”
“I won’t argue that, but I can’t ask you to do it. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Sam terminated the call and explained their options to Remi, who concurred that they weren’t in such a rush to leave that they would risk their colleagues to the brutal force of a storm. Now working with a renewed sense of urgency, they reviewed the contents of all of the chests, each numbered and with the items cataloged, as the ten dead Viking warriors watched over them. They’d had the luxury of taking their time, documenting everything in meticulous detail for later research—something all too rare, given the high-profile nature of many of their more visible discoveries.
When the archaeology team arrived the next morning just after sunrise, Sam and Remi heard the ship enter the fjord before they saw a massive red hull squeeze through the gap with no more than twenty feet of clearance per side. Almost twice the size of the Alhambra, the CCGS Cameron was a Canadian Coast Guard A1 Lloyd’s ice-class two-hundred-twenty-six-foot offshore oceanographic science vessel with a forty-eight-foot beam. Entry into the fjord would pose no great problem, according to the bottom-mapping data supplied by the Alhambra—the depth varied from sixty to a hundred forty feet, easily accommodating the enormous craft’s fifteen-foot draft.
The Cameron’s high bow crushed through the surface ice with ease and slowed to a stop twenty-five yards from the Viking longship’s stern. Sam and Remi could make out the captain and his mate in the towering pilothouse, and then a tall man in his forties emerged from the superstructure and moved to the bow, almost three stories above them. He waved and called out.
“Ahoy there! You must be the Fargos.”
“Dr. Jennings, I presume. I recognize the voice,” Sam answered, returning the wave.
“And that’s the Viking ship. Goodness. She looks like she was just built.”
“It’s remarkable. We left much of the hull with ice on it to preserve it.”
“I can’t tell you how excited we are about this. It’s an honor to meet you both.”
“Likewise, Dr. Jennings,” Remi said.
“Please, it’s Matthew. It’s a bit chilly to stand on pointless formality,” he said, his breath issuing fog with every word.
The archaeology team on the Cameron wasted no time. After testing the ice to ensure that it was stable enough to walk on, they began carting tools and sections of temporary buildings to the area by Sam and Remi’s tent. It took the better part of the morning and much of the afternoon to erect five structures: a portable field kitchen, a bathroom-and-shower facility, two barracks, and an equipment room with a communications center. The eight-man building crew worked with quiet efficiency as Sam and Remi luxuriated in a stateroom, enjoying their first hot shower in over a week, followed by a massive meal of seafood washed down with beer and white wine, compliments of the Canadian government.
Sam met with the archaeologists after lunch and spoke to a packed house. After a report of their progress to date on excavation and news of their incredible discovery of pre-Columbian artifacts, a spirited discussion ensued.
Jennings cleared his throat and said, “We know that there was contact between the Viking settlements in Greenland and the one discovered on southern Baffin Island, in the Tanfield Valley. So it’s obvious that there was a trade route of some kind, even if irregular. But we’ve never seen any hard evidence of Vikings journeying farther south. There’s been speculation about trips to the Canadian mainland for logging, but nothing conclusive ever surfaced.”
“We’ll need to get the ship carbon-dated, of course,” another scientist pointed out, “but it looks like it’s a later type—a dragon ship with a sail.”
Jennings put his pencil down on the desk. “Which would narrow it to anywhere from A.D. 900 to 1300. That’s consistent with the saga of Leif Eriksson, which has him journeying westward around A.D. 1000, after hearing about the New World from Bjarni Herjólfsson, when he sailed the Newfoundland coast after being blown off course in A.D. 986. The point being, this new evidence clearly proves that there were others who ventured south as well as west.”
Remi turned over their notes and the record of their observations, having already entered them into their computer. She and Sam took turns fielding questions from the group. When the gathering broke up, everyone descended to the ice, and the scientists got their first close look at the Viking craft. The team looked like children in a candy store, and the sense of excitement was palpable for the men and women who would spend weeks, if not longer, preparing the boat for transport to Montreal.
The sky darkened as the afternoon passed, and an ominous line of angry clouds moved in from the ocean as the team secured a huge tarp over the Viking vessel to protect it from the elements. Even in late spring, a major storm in the Arctic Circle was nothing to take lightly, and the crew hurried to batten down the little camp and harden it against whatever nature threw at it.