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The Norse made it to Canada circa AD1000, and used it as a base to explore. The BBC has delved into the "lost history" of the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic.
Christopher Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492 – arriving in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, to be precise – but he wasn't the first European to reach what we now know as the Americas. His predecessors did so without much fanfare: no royal proclamations or crowds lining the streets to greet them upon their return. And they didn't sail directly across the vast Atlantic Ocean from one continent to another.
Instead, they hopped their way there, with Iceland and Greenland as staging posts. Their exploration was retold, centuries later, in sagas that were the stuff of epic literature rather than history books. And they made their first journey to American soil 500 years before Christopher Columbus.
The Norse sagas – Viking stories written down by their descendants – have come to be recognised as containing reliable historical truths. In 1966, BBC presenter Magnus Magnusson described the 14th-Century Flateyjarbók, or Flatey Island Book, as "one of the most valuable Icelandic manuscripts in existence". The book is so valuable, he added, that when, in 1893, the organisers of the Chicago World's Fair asked to borrow it for their belated 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus's voyage, "they offered to send a warship to Denmark to pick it up and an armoured train to transport it across America and to insure it for a sum of $1 million [the book was housed in Denmark at the time.] But even at that, the Danes didn't care to take the risk."
And the reason the Americans "wanted to borrow it so badly"? Because the book contains "the account of the Norse settlement of Greenland in the 10th Century, and even more astonishingly, the story of the Norse discovery and attempted colonisation of North America a few years later – five centuries before Columbus".
In 1960, a Norse transit camp was discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. And in 2021, researchers using a new dating technique found that Vikings had occupied the site 1,000 years earlier. It is believed to have served as a base camp for exploring deeper into North America. "This is the start of a lost history, the centuries when Europeans visited America in voyages whose records are written only on the water," said Robin Ellis in a 1997 episode of the BBC documentary series, Timewatch.
The Norse had found Iceland in around 870AD, and Greenland 100 years later. From there, it was just 200 miles across the Davis Strait to Baffin Island in modern Canada, which they called Helluland, the land of slabs. According to the sagas, they followed the coast southwards to Labrador, or Markland, the land of forests, and then further south to what they called Vinland, the land of vines. "The sagas describe not only these guys stopping off in one place, but stopping off in a number of places," Emily Lethbridge of the University of Iceland said on Timewatch in 2016. "And they left for several years. They had a whole new world to explore."
The sagas say that the most famous settler, Erik the Red, arrived in Iceland around 960 after his father was banished from Norway for murder. But that wouldn’t be Erik’s last banishment. In the year 932, the Icelanders had established a parliament, the Althing. It was an open-air assembly of the whole nation, meeting every summer for a fortnight for legislative and judicial purposes – and it took place in a remarkable setting, inside a ravine that made an extraordinary natural amphitheatre.
"It isn’t just the acoustics that make this place special," Lethbridge told the BBC. "This is a natural fault line. We’re on the point where the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates meet." The first Europeans to explore North America happened to have sited one of their parliaments in a rift valley between the two continents.
At the parliament, said Lethbridge, "Sentences of outlawry would be imposed on members of society who had broken all of the rules. You could go anywhere else, but you couldn’t set foot on Iceland for the period that the outlawry stood."
The Althing banished Erik the Red from Iceland in 982, following a violent dispute with a neighbouring farmer – and his exile launched an astonishing chapter in Viking exploration. "Erik the Red was the first Icelander to discover Greenland and then make a permanent settlement there," said Lethbridge.
He started a colony on Greenland that would last for around 500 years and be the launching point for the Norse exploration of North America. "They were people who took chances and were prepared to undergo huge physical trials," said Lethbridge, "such as sailing in open boats across the Atlantic, to see what they could find."
The Norse settlement on Greenland continued until the early 15th Century, and the Vikings – led by Erik's son Leif Eriksson – appear to have made not just one but multiple journeys across the sea from there to North America.
"Most people assume that after Leif Eriksson and his friends came to Vinland and then gave up and went away, nothing more was heard of the New World," Robert McGhee, an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, told Timewatch. "But archaeologically, we have evidence which shows that the Norse were at least making occasional trips to the New World for the following two or three centuries."
"We have so many good reasons to know that travels did take place throughout the entire Middle Ages on the two coasts that we call Greenland and North America," Kirsten Seaver, a historian of medieval shipping, told Timewatch. "By 1480, we know that they deliberately tried to sail to North America, or what they called the Isle of Brazil. We shouldn't look upon that as their first voyage, but as their first attempt to do it directly, without going via Greenland, which was the ordinary navigational marker."
Seaver also cited a document which implied that Columbus himself knew about such voyages. "In the winter of 1497-98, an Englishman named John Day wrote to Christopher Columbus to tell him about John Cabot's successful 1497 voyage to North America. And among many other things, he mentioned as a matter of course that as Columbus knew, men from Bristol [in England] had made this voyage to the northern part for many years already."
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By the time Columbus reached the shores of the Bahamas in 1429, then, the place the Vikings called Vinland could already have been on his radar. There are even theories that Columbus was deliberately attempting to avoid a land he knew had already been discovered by Europeans.
"Columbus knew as well as any navigator does today that if you want to travel across oceans [in the Northern Hemisphere]... you move up into the north where the latitudes are short, and you zip across, and then you go back down again," McGhee told Timewatch. "Instead, Columbus took the long way around directly across the ocean. Perhaps he was trying to avoid Canada. Maybe he was trying to avoid Vinland… which was not what he was looking for. I think Columbus's intent was to bypass America and therefore try to get to the riches of the Far East."
So while many US citizens celebrate Columbus Day every October, they shouldn't forget all the Atlantic crossings that came first.
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