Vikings reach North America

Around the year 1000, Norse seafarers from the young settlements in Greenland sailed west and reached North America, nearly five hundred years before Columbus. Led by Leif Erikson, the son of Erik the Red, they named three new lands, Helluland, Markland and Vinland, built a base camp and spent the winter there. Over the next years his brothers, his sister and an Icelandic trader, Thorfinn Karlsefni, made more voyages, until fighting with the people who already lived there, and the long way home, ended the venture. The only place where their presence is proven is L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, where wood cut with metal blades has been dated to the year 1021.

The story begins in Greenland. Erik the Red, banished from Iceland for killings about 980, explored the coast to the west and came back to Iceland in 985 or 986 to recruit settlers: of 25 ships that sailed, about 14 arrived, and Erik took the farm of Brattahlíð at the head of a long fjord in the south-west. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, a trader, Bjarni Herjólfsson, sailing to join his father there, was blown off course and saw wooded lands to the west, but never went ashore. Leif bought Bjarni's ship and set out with 35 men. On a coast of flat stones and ice, then on a low wooded shore, and at last in a milder land where they found timber and wild grapes, they gave the names that mean 'land of flat rocks', 'land of forests' and 'land of wine'. The other saga, the Saga of Erik the Red, tells it differently: Leif, coming home from the court of King Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, where he had become a Christian, was blown to the new land by accident.

The later voyages ended badly. Leif's brother Thorvald was killed in a fight with the local people; another brother, Thorstein, never got there. Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, Thorstein's widow, came with three or more ships, perhaps 135 men and 15 women, and cattle, meaning to stay. They traded cloth for furs with the people the Norse called skrælings, ancestors of the Indigenous peoples of the region, until the trading turned to fighting. Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri, the first European child known to have been born in the Americas, and after about three years the settlers gave up. The last voyage the sagas tell, led by Leif's sister Freydis, ended in murder among the Norse themselves. The distances were too great and the Greenland colony, perhaps 500 people, was too small to hold a settlement more than 3,500 kilometres from home.

For centuries the voyages were known only from the two sagas, written down in Iceland in the 13th century and kept in manuscripts such as the Flateyjarbók of the 1390s, and from the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, who about 1075 heard from the Danish king of an island called Vinland where vines grow wild. In 1960 the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad, guided by a local fisherman, George Decker, found the overgrown walls of eight buildings at L'Anse aux Meadows. He and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, excavated them until 1968: halls, workshops and a smithy built of turf like those in Iceland and Greenland, a bronze cloak pin, a spindle whorl and a bone needle that show women were there, iron rivets for ship repairs, and the first iron smelted in the Americas. Butternuts, which do not grow in Newfoundland, show that the Norse went further south. In 2021 scientists in Groningen found in three pieces of cut wood the trace of a cosmic-ray burst of 993; counting the rings to the bark gave the year the trees were felled, 1021.

Vinland changed little in its own time: no colony took root, and the Norse of Greenland, who held out until the 15th century, turned back to Europe for their trade. But it is the first known meeting of Europeans and Native Americans, and, as the dating team put it, the earliest known year by which human migration had closed the circle around the globe. L'Anse aux Meadows became a Canadian national historic site in 1968 and one of the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1978. The wish to prove the Vinland story also produced a famous fake: the 'Vinland Map', announced by Yale in 1965 as a medieval map of North America, was shown in 2021 to be drawn in 20th-century ink.