POD 1400: Henry St. Clair, Earl of Orkney and Lord of Shetland,
survives his encounter with pirates and sees fit spread word of his
journeys to the lands beyond Greenland at least to his nominal overlord
Eirik III of Norway and Scottish royal house of Stewart to which he was
rather more closely connected (having long been a Baron in the Lowlands
under them before inheriting the northern isles).
Little real interest was aroused in either Copenhagen or
Edinburgh, but enough funding and potential settlers for a second trip
was secured and Earl Henry returned to OTL Newfoundland in time to
rescue the few survivors of the initial settlement attempt. The
subsequent explorations discovered that fishing would keep the settlers
at Ny Roslin alive better than farming (the Grand Banks being quite
near), and that there were rather more clement lands along the large
estuary to the south that would be named the Gulf of Saint Olaf.
This distant land became regarded as a useful dumping ground by both
the House of Stewart and the Kalmar Union's kings for unruly clansmen
and rebellious/unpopular nobles that could not be killed out of hand;
and thus by 1460 there were over three thousand transplanted Scots
Highlanders, Greenlander refugees, Swedish exiles, POWs, Scots
lowlander exiles, Crusaders, Basque/Breton fisherfolk, Monks, Norwegian
settlers, and Christianized Skraelings under the nominal rule of
William St. Clair (Henry's grandson). In that year the Treaty of
Kirkwall was finalized establishing a formal condominium over the
County of Orkney, Shetland, Vinland, and the Northern Seas in return
for equal cuts of the taxes in the increasingly popular furs.
The main center of Vinland was the town of New Kirkwall on Ny Gronland
(OTL's Prince Edward Island), and the settlers that bother to send
anyone to the Thing there are scattered over the shores and island
surrounding the Estuary and up St. Olaf (St. Lawrence) River as far as
OTL Montreal. There have been some feelers to the south as well, and
rumors of renegades establishing a settlement some distance down the
coast.
Long term ramifications?
HTG
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