Great Expeditions: 50 Journeys that changed our world. Levison Wood

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      While there will always be speculation about who was the first European to land on the North American continent (was it St Brendan in the sixth century, for example?), there is clear evidence that Leif Eriksson did reach Newfoundland at the start of the eleventh century, both from accounts in two Icelandic sagas and from the discovery of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in northwestern Newfoundland.

       The naming of Greenland

      The story starts with Erik the Red, one of the Vikings who had come from Norway to settle Iceland. He did not get on well with the other Vikings, and on a voyage in 982, landed on Greenland. It was summer, and he had found a land of green pastures by the coast, and so gave it the name ‘Greenland’, then unaware that beyond that southern coastal fringe it was covered in ice all year around. Erik saw great potential here, and his plans to colonize it came to fruition in 986, when he sailed with twenty-five ships and around 700 people from Iceland to Greenland.

      One Viking arrived back on Iceland after a trading trip to discover that his father had already sailed to Greenland and he wished to follow as soon as possible, even though it was getting late in the season. So it was that Bjarni Herjolfsson set off from Iceland, but soon the wind dropped and the fog descended so that he could no longer navigate. Once the fog lifted after a few days, he sailed on and then sighted land. The sailors asked Bjarni whether it was Greenland, but he replied that it was not, for when they sailed close by they found that the land was ‘not mountainous but covered with small wooded knolls’. They sailed on for another two days and saw more land, but Bjarni declined to land, much to the anger of his crew. After another three days they saw a country with high mountains and glaciers. Bjarni regarded it as pretty worthless, and set sail again, this time reaching Greenland, where he was reunited with his father. He and his crew are the first recorded Europeans to see North America (most likely Labrador and Baffin Island) but Bjarni was much criticized for not landing. Thereafter he stayed with his father and did not go sailing again.

      ‘They saw no grass, the mountain tops were covered with glaciers.....’

      The Greenlanders’ Saga

       Leif Eriksson sailing down the Labrador coast, as imagined in a nineteenth-century illustration.

      An unpromising land

      Now Leif Eriksson, the son of Erik the Red, heard the tale of Bjarni and thought he would like to visit such lands. He visited Bjarni and purchased his boat and recruited a crew of thirty five. The first land they reached was most likely Baffin Island, an inhospitable place according the Saga’s description: ‘They saw no grass, the mountain tops were covered with glaciers, and from sea to mountain the country was like one slab of rock. It looked to be a barren, unprofitable country.’ He called it Helluland (Land of Flat Stones).

      They sailed on and saw more land, most likely Labrador, with gently sloping forested land along its coast. This he called Markland (Forest Land). Then they sailed on again and reached more land, first landing on an island, where the Saga recounts that ‘they discovered dew on the grass. It so happened that they picked up some of the dew in their hands and tasted of it, and it seemed to them that they had never tasted anything so sweet.’

       The outside of a recreated long house at L’Anse aux Meadows the Viking settlement in north-western Newfoundland, discovered by the Norwegian archaeologist Helge Ingstad in 1960.

      A winter of content

      They then beached their boat and landed on the mainland. Given the time of year they decided that they would settle here for the winter and return home in the spring. They built turf huts, ate the plentiful salmon from the rivers and lakes, and had a remarkably mild winter (‘there was no frost by night, and the grass hardly withered’). Leif sent out groups to explore the area round about, and on one СКАЧАТЬ