Viking Exploration in North America

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Generations of school children were taught that America was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus. Of course, this was not true, since the Americas were settled by indigenous people thousands of years before Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas in 1492.

What is not so well known, however, is the fact that Columbus wasn’t the first European person to reach the New World. About 500 years before Columbus, the Americas were “discovered”, and colonized by another group of Europeans.

The Vikings, or Norse, were a group of Scandinavian people whose homelands were in what are now Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In the early Middle Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Vikings began to push out of their homeland in northwestern Europe. Sailing in fast-moving longboats, the Vikings became notorious for their raids in Europe. Viking attacks devastated communities on the coasts of France, Ireland, England, Scotland, and elsewhere.

Some of the Vikings also engaged in more peaceful activities, such as trading, exploring, and settling in new lands. One group of Vikings sailed westward in the North Atlantic, beyond the British Isles, and discovered the uninhabited island of Iceland. They settled there, and their Icelandic descendants still live on the island today. One group of Icelandic Norse sailed further west, and reached the island of Greenland, and established settlements there. The Greenland settlements can be considered to be the first European settlements in North America, since Greenland can be considered to be a part of North America.

The Norse living in Greenland sailed further west, exploring the islands off the coast of Canada, and possibly the mainland as well. The oldest known European settlement in the Americas, outside of Greenland, was at a site called L’Anse aux Meadows, on the Canadian island of Newfoundland. This settlement was a small camp established by the Vikings around 1000 AD. The L’Anse aux Meadows site was rediscovered by Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad , and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad . Over the last few decades Canadian archaeologist Patricia Sutherland has uncovered evidence of a Norse presence on Baffin Island in Nunavut Territory, in Arctic Canada. The Canadian Arctic islands were part of the region that the Norse called “Helluland”.

The Greenlandic Norse disappeared by about 1500, perhaps a few decades before Europeans began to return to the Americas once again. Unlike Columbus, the Greenlandic Norse “discoveries” had little impact on the Western world, because contact between Greenland and the outside world was limited.

The disappearance of the Norse from Greenland was probably due to environmental degradation and food scarcities. The delicate environment of Greenland could not handle the farming practices of the Norse and the grazing of their livestock. The Norse living in Greenland may have starved to death, or simply left the island and returned to Iceland. The space that was once occupied by the Norse was taken over by the Inuit people, whose technology was better suited to exploiting all of the resources of the harsh Arctic environment.

This description of early Norse exploration and settlement was originally published in 1884. The author, Philip Henry Smith, was born in 1842. Smith’s description of Norse discoveries made use of old Icelandic sagas, which were translated and published in Danish and Latin in the early 19th century.