Product Description

After years of research, sparked by his discovery of roofless ruins in Hudson Bay, Farley Mowat presents a speculative history of the first Europeans in North America, and a challenge to the presently held notion that the Vikings were the first to inhabit northern Canada. During the sixties, on a windblown shore off Hudson Bay, Farley Mowat observed ruins that could not have been left by the Inuit, the only known first inhabitants of the region. Carbon dating placed these ruins hundreds of years before the Vikings landed in Newfoundland, but conventional, accepted historical theory could offer no explanation for them. Mowat`s search led him to Scotland and the Northern Isles where he discovered ruins that resembled those he had seen on the other side of the Atlantic. He painstakingly researched early historical accounts from Roman and pre-Roman times for answers, and was able to reconstruct the story of a forgotten people. Fictional accounts of the Albans in their skin-covered boats, venturing ever farther from known shores, in search of the massive walrus herds that were their livelihood, and a place of safety from the warlike Celts and Romans, are woven skilfully into the re-construction. Provocative and controversial, The Farfarers is a beautifully wrought literary adventure that is sure to excite lively debate. It is a book that challenges perceptions and forces the reader to re-think the origins of the North American continent.(1998)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6635 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-25
• Binding: Hardcover
• 377 pages

Amazon.ca
In 1965, the accomplished novelist and natural history writer Farley Mowat published a book, controversial in its time, called Westviking, in which he argued that Norse sailors had landed on the far northern coasts of North America fully 500 years before Columbus saw the beaches of Hispaniola. Mowat's hunch turned out to be correct, as archaeological excavations of Norse settlements at places like L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, proved. But, Mowat writes, he worried even then that the story was incomplete--that if the Norse had made their way across the North Atlantic, there was no good reason why some other European people could not have preceded them. In The Farfarers, Mowat claims that "Albans," the pre-Indo European inhabitants of western Eurasia, island-hopped across the sea in skin boats, landing at Iceland (which, Mowat says, they called "Tilli"), Greenland, and northern Canada. There, they intermarried with the native peoples they encountered and established a thriving trade in walrus ivory and other goods much in demand back home.

Mowat’s argument rests on slender evidence, it has to be said: a few beacon-like rock cairns, a few attestations in always-undependable texts from Greek and Roman travellers. But, speculative though it is, Mowat's claim is attractive for many reasons, and he makes his case with such spirit, learning, and hope that even a skeptical reader will be moved to entertain the possibility that some Alban seafarer 2,000 and more years ago gazed upon the icy shores of Ultima Thule. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
A veteran investigator of early European voyages to North America, Mowat (Westviking) has conjured up a vision of pre-Viking settlement by a people he calls the Albans. Originating in what is now Scotland, Mowat's Albans were displaced in stages between about 700 and 1000 A.D., first to Iceland and Greenland, and finally to the western coast of Newfoundland. The author sees the Albans as driven westward by two forces: the search for valuables such as sealskin and walrus tusk, and the remorseless pressure of Viking raiders. To support his thesis, Mowat presents what scant evidence exists-mainly, stone constructions, like tower beacons and foundations for shelters, which Mowat believes cannot be attributed to the Norse or to native inhabitants of Greenland or Atlantic Canada, and which resemble stonework found in the Orkney Islands. On this basis, Mowat accepts that the Albans existed and sets out to imagine what their migrations were like. Scattered throughout the book in italicized passages are stories set in that era, telling how the Albans might have explored their new surroundings and survived, even prospered, in the Arctic. The Albans lost their separate identity, Mowat believes, by merging into the aboriginal population of Newfoundland. This account rests on informed speculation, as Mowat explicitly acknowledges, and is not intended as a formal exposition of all the evidence for and against the author's thesis. The book is best enjoyed as a richly detailed and imaginative reconstruction of how a long-vanished European people may have been the first of their kind to venture into the New World. Illus. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Mowat's 1960's book, Westviking: The Ancient Norse Vikings in Greenland and North America, first advanced the now-widely held belief that the Norse visited North America five centuries before Columbus and had settlements for a time on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Now Mowat returns to argue that before the Norse got to North America, and as early as the 700s, a pre-Indo-European people whom he calls "the Albans" had already been there. They fled their settlements in Scotland, he argues, to escape Viking slave-raiders--but they also went in search of walrus ivory tusks which were then highly prized in Europe. He supports his thesis with bits of Norse sagas, the chronicles of Irish monks, and his own archaeological finds. Some archaeologists dismiss Mowat's Alban theory as lacking in evidence--but whether he's correct or not, large academic libraries will want to have a copy of this controversial text.
-Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.