You’ve probably heard of El-Dorado, that mythical lost city of gold in South America. But did you know that early explorers searched for a lost city in the Maritimes said to be filled with great houses built of gold pillars, where the people wore fine jewelry, precious gems and pearls?
And that on the ancient maps that mythical lost city called Norumbega looks an awful lot like it was located in New Brunswick?
The earliest days of European exploration, maps of the Maritimes and Newfoundland are a poorly documented and frequently confusing mish-mash of names and locations. The maps that survived from the 1500s or so frequently show ‘phantom islands’ which are difficult to explain, and even more bewildering entire lost cities.
While this all sounds very mysterious, remember that making maps of uncharted lands is hard work, and not always very precise so long ago.
Norumbega, however, is interesting because its story began with a first-hand account of an Englishman who visited the city, and lived to tell the story…
David Ingram was an English sailor who in 1567 signed on with a privateer to raid Spanish ships in the Caribbean. He and 100 of his shipmates were marooned in what is now Mexico, about 200 miles South of the Texas border.
He and two dozen sailors set off on foot to escape the Spanish who controlled the area. Over the next eleven months they walked the length of North America, all the way to Nova Scotia, where he and two others who survived were picked up by a French fishing boat.
A truly remarkable feat if true, as the hike would have covered some 3000 miles in a time before roads..
David Ingram was illiterate and sadly never wrote down his story, but 13 years after he returned to England he recounted his odyssey to Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State.
Walsingham recorded Ingram’s tale, including this description of Norumbega:
“He saw kings decorated with rubies six inches long; and they were borne on chairs of silver and crystal, adorned with precious stones. He saw pearls as common as pebbles, and the natives were laden down by their ornaments of gold and silver. The city of Bega was three-quarters of a mile long and had many streets wider than those of London. Some houses had massive pillars of crystal and silver.”
This may sound fanciful, and many of the stories Ingram told Walsingham do stretch credulity. For example, he talked about meeting Indigenous people who had pet penguins, which is difficult to explain. However other stories Walsingham thought fanciful did turn out to be more realistic: for example Ingram seems to be the first non-Indigenous person to ever have seen a bison.
Imagine having to explain a bison to someone who has never heard of such a creature before!
David Ingram met many Indigenous people in his travels, who he found to be kind and friendly, and without whose help he certainly would not have made it home. A reminder this area was not uninhabited before the Europeans arrived; for thousands of years people had been living in the Maritimes, and they were still there, even if the European explorers tried to pretend they were not.
Early French explorer and cartographer Samuel de Champlain was one of the first to actually record in detail his interactions with Indigenous peoples in the Maritimes.
Champlain took a keen interest in Indigenous peoples in the Maritimes. He was surprised to discover they spoke several different languages, as it was generally thought by early Europeans that there was only one language spoken in North America.
He wrote that the areas that encompass the Maritimes today were home to a wide variety of peoples, who were settled, and extensively farmed this land. He was fascinated by the farming techniques that they used to successfully grow food that enabled them to survive and thrive in the harsh winters.
His countrymen, on the other hand, were distinctly less than willing than him to study the successful Indigenous ways of farming. Their refusal to adapt to the local techniques led to a disastrous outcome for the first French settlement in North America.
That first settlement was on St. Croix Island in 1604 on the Maine New Brunswick border, and in it Europeans first experienced living in a Canadian winter. In his diary Champlain wrote, aghast: “in summer it is so very pleasant … but there are six months of winters in that country.”
Many French settlers died that first winter of scurvy, and the entire colony was abandoned and relocated to what is now Nova Scotia the following year.
Norumbega, and its rumored wealth and grandeur, were credible enough to Champlain that in 1604 as the settlement was being built, and again in 1605, as the survivors of the doomed settlement were being evacuated, he spent entire Summers searching for the city.
Champlain first searched for Norumbega in the Bay of Fundy, then up the Saint John River, then up the St. Croix River. He later searched in Maine, going up the Penobscot River. While he mapped and explored the region extensively, he never did find the city built of gold and jewels.
After two seasons of searching for Norumbega he gave up, although he seems to have still believed it was real, ultimately concluding it was in what is now Vermont.
Much later, some two hundred years after Champlain’s Maritime explorations, in the United States Norumbega took on a different mythology. It became known as a lost Viking city, a peculiar and recent myth, which bizarrely still persists today among some Americans in New England.
The switch from Norumbega being a lost Indigenous city to a lost Viking city is difficult to attribute to anything other than racism combined with religious animosity. By the 1800s New England (and the Maritimes as well) was deeply divided between Protestants and Catholics.
The issue was that Christopher Columbus, that purported “discoverer of North America” was an Italian Catholic. This was something that Catholics in Boston were quite proud of.
So Protestants in the city began claiming that New England had actually been discovered by Lief Erikson and settled by Vikings first, and that the legendary Norumbega was actually a Viking city found somewhere around Cambridge.
Archeology ultimately proved that Vikings did indeed arrive in North America nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus did, founding a small village in the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. However, there is little evidence they ever ventured as far South as the United States, let alone founded a large city where Boston is now.
The shifting mythology of a lost Viking city in the American imagination in the 1800s explains why you can find places named “Norumbega” all over New England, including parks, university halls, towers, and hotels. It is also the reason why you can find a bizarre giant statue of a strangely youthful and curiously beardless Lief Erikson standing in downtown Boston today.
The reality of the city of Norumbega, however, is likely more mundane than a long lost Viking city of gold and jewels in New England/the Maritimes.
Recall Samuel de Champlain’s surprise when he discovered that Indigenous peoples in the Maritimes spoke not one language, but many.
There is a word that sounds like “Norumbega” in several languages in the region. In one language it meant “a stretch of quiet water between two rapids.” In another it meant “a turreted city.” In another language it was a word for a specific small stretch of land on the coast of what is now Maine. In another it meant the entire wider region of what we now call, broadly, New England.
Europeans were hearing a similar sounding word in several different languages, and how they chose to interpret it may say more about what they wanted to hear than what was being said.
Sometimes they understood Norumbega as having wide paved streets and large houses.
Sometimes Norumbega had gold and precious jewels.
Sometimes Norumbega was only inhabited by beautiful young women.
It seems that Norumbega is a mirror in which Europeans saw what they wanted to, and which may have said more about their wishful thinking than anything that really existed.
As for lost sailor David Ingram’s story, while parts of his journey seem to genuinely reflective of reality he experienced –such as seeing a bison— other parts seem to be distinctly exaggerated with stories he had heard about what the Spanish had encountered in South America. It is possible he exaggerated a small village in the Maine/New Brunswick region with details he had heard about South American cities, inadvertently sparking several hundred years of searching.
On the other hand, many argued that Lief Erickson and his Vikings’ coming to North America was a ‘mythical lost city’ as well, until archaeologists found it in 1960 in Newfoundland.
Perhaps one day archaeologists will discover Norumbega as well…
Until then, does it not look just a little bit like the lost city of Norumbega is in New Brunswick on this 1570 map?
