On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus left Spain and sailed west. He was looking for a new route to Asia and ended up landing in the Americas. Yet 500 years earlier, an entirely different group of Europeans had already reached the coast of Canada: Norse sailors from Greenland.
These Norsemen, also known as Vikings, were expert sailors. They had settled Iceland and then Greenland, and kept pushing west in search of resources and new land. Their voyages brought them to a place they called Vinland, which seems to have included part of present-day Newfoundland. Yet saying they "discovered" America would be false: Indigenous peoples had lived there for thousands of years. They were simply the first known Europeans to reach it. So the real question becomes: is there any actual evidence that they came?
- 2The sagas and the land of Vinland
- 3L'Anse aux Meadows: the proof from archaeology
- 4A base camp, not a colony
- 5Columbus and the new Atlantic
