There is, however, one claim that is supported by positive proof – that of the Norsemen of Scandinavia, that scourge of Western Europe, and the Old World’s leading seapower between the 9th and 12th centuries. In an era when other Europeans barely knew anything at all of sea voyages, the Vikings had already reached the Faroes, Iceland, and finally Greenland.
According to the Norse Saga that still survives today in transcripts, a rather shady Viking adventurer named Eric the Red had discovered a great peninsula in 984; though it was sheathed in ice, he named it Greenland because, he said, it would attract more people if it had “a good name.” On the west coast of this Greenland he then established two settlements, whose existence has since been confirmed by archeological remains. Five years later, an Icelandic trader named Bjarni Heriulfson set out for these Greenland settlements to follow his father who had gone there with Eric the Red. Bjarni’s ship not only missed the Viking settlements, but sailed past the entire Greenland peninsula until he suddenly encountered still more land. Bjarni was apparently not interested in new discoveries; since none of that country fit the description of the Norse colony, he turned the ship northward again, never setting foot on this strange new coast.
But Leif Ericsson – ‘Eric’s son’ – took up where Bjarni had failed to explore. With a small ship and crew he sailed south in the summer of that same year and made several landfalls along the North American coast – on Labrador, Newfoundland, perhaps Baffin Island and Belle Isle as well. They found huge forests everywhere and – most puzzling – they saw giant grapevines sprawling all over the land, which impressed them so much that they called the region Vinland. Yet it is very unlikely that wild grapes could possibly have grown as far north as the tip of Newfoundland; it is also unlikely that a Viking like Leif Ericsson could have mistaken another plant for the wine-producing grape. It is far more plausible, therefore, that Leif put the Vin into Vinland for much the same reason as father Eric had put the Green into Greenland – that is, to attract settlers, to make a profit. The later English, French, and Spanish explorers used much the same tactics to good advantage.
Only a few years later, Leif’s brother Thorvald set out to explore this Vinland still further, and on this voyage the first encounter between Europeans and Native Americans was recorded. Somewhere near the Strait of Belle Isle, the Norsemen met what they called Skraellings, though it is still not clear whether these natives were Eskimo or perhaps Indians like the Naskapi or Micmac. At any rate, neither side seems to have shown much hospitality; for some unknown reason, the Norsemen soon killed several of the Skraellings, only to be attacked in turn by a large number of the natives in a whole fleet of kayaks; in the resulting battle, Thorvald himself was killed.
Several more such expeditions were recorded during the next decade, and Norsemen may have gone far south along the coast of North America, perhaps reaching Cape Cod and New York Bay, even the Chesapeake area. Around 1004, a Icelandic trader named Thorfin Karlsnefi seems to have established a settlement near Belle Isle, and in the following year there was recorded the birth of a child, the first child of European settlers known to have been born in America. But that outpost was soon abandoned again after repeated encounters with more hostile Skraellings.
From that time on, however, Vinland all but disappears in Norse history. A century later, a bishop named Eric Gnupsen set out “to look for Vinland,” but he was never heard of again. Not until another two century later, in 1347, do the Icelandic records state that “a ship came from Greenland . . . “ But that was the very last reference to any Norse colony in the west. Neither Vinland nor Greenland is ever mentioned again thereafter; Eric the Red and his descendants had simply ceased to exist.
There could be many explanations for this disappointing end to so promising a Viking adventure. Perhaps the most plausible reason was a disruption of supplies from the Icelandic and Scandinavian homelands. No European settlement in early America was ever able to survive on its own if its connections with the homeland were cut off; the first English colonies in Virginia were to learn that lesson through bitter and painful experience. And supplies to Greenland were most certainly disrupted by the cataclysmic events that overtook Europe after the 13th century. The lack of a profitable trade with Greenland must have made the Norse colony an iffy proposition all along; when the years of unbelievably harsh winters began with the 14th century, few, if any medieval sailing vessel could have attempted the voyage to Greenland. And with the appearance of the Black Death, which devastated Iceland as much as any country in Europe, few people could have been much concerned over the fate of the Greenland settlements. Also, soon after, the ships of the German Hansa ran the Scandinavian merchant ships out of business, and English and Scotch pirates were beginning to raid Iceland. Besieged on all sides by man and nature, the people of northern Europe had no doubt already forgotten Eric the Red and his Greenland colony.
The severe weather conditions of the early 14th century continued for many years and the settlers of the Greenland colony must have slipped into ever-deeper despair. Its agriculture, always a marginal enterprise at best, was all but destroyed during those years of extreme weather, and there are indications that a locust plague finished off what little had remained. The once robust Norse warriors, physically degenerate as later skeleton finds indicate, soon grew too weak to go out and hunt for themselves. Barely able to find enough food to keep alive, they must have spent much of the short summers watching the sea, hoping for a ship from home to bring the supplies so desperately needed. By September, the long, dark winter set in; cold and hungry, the people were barely able to hang on until the next summer, when again there was hope for a supply ship. But the ships never came. Soon there was no more oil for the lamps, no more food, and finally no more hope, and before long, the last of the descendants of Eric the Red were dying. Europe had long forgotten them; by the later 15th century there is no indication at all that Christopher Columbus or any of his contemporaries had ever even heard of the Vinland voyages.