About five centuries before Columbus, Norsemen set foot on American soil. For a long time this was thought a legend – until the spade proved it.
Every child learns that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered America’ in 1492. But around 500 years earlier, Norsemen were already there – proof of the incredible range of their ships.
The Vikings settled Iceland, then Greenland. From there it was only one more step westward. The Vinland sagas tell how Leif Erikson, around the year 1000, reached a fertile land with forest and wild grapes and named it Vinland.
For a long time the sagas were taken for fiction. Then, in the 1960s, archaeologists found the remains of a Viking settlement at the northern tip of Newfoundland: L'Anse aux Meadows. Houses in the Norse longhouse style, iron nails, a smithy – the clear proof that Norsemen had indeed been in North America. The site is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The settlement lasted only briefly. The great distance from home and conflicts with the native population probably made a permanent stay impossible. But the achievement remains: across the North Atlantic in open wooden ships, to the edge of a new world.
Read more about the ships that made it possible in our post on the dragon ships.