The Vikings who reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus
Five hundred years before Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, Norse sailors had already made it to North America — not via one dramatic Atlantic crossing, but by island-hopping through Iceland and Greenland, leaving behind stories that survived not in history books but in epic sagas.
Those sagas, written down generations later by the Vikings’ descendants, are now widely accepted as containing genuine historical detail. One key manuscript, the 14th-century Flateyjarbók, or Flatey Island Book, was hailed by BBC presenter Magnus Magnusson in 1966 as “one of the most valuable Icelandic manuscripts in existence” — so prized that when organisers of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair tried to borrow it for a belated Columbus anniversary, they reportedly offered a warship, an armoured train and $1 million in insurance, yet “the Danes didn’t care to take the risk”. Its value lay in recording the Norse settlement of Greenland and, soon after, the discovery and attempted colonisation of North America, five centuries ahead of Columbus.
The sagas have physical backing: a Norse camp found at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, in 1960 was shown by newer dating methods in 2021 to be 1,000 years old, likely a base for inland expeditions. As Robin Ellis put it in a 1997 BBC Timewatch episode, “This is the start of a lost history, the centuries when Europeans visited America in voyages whose records are written only on the water.”
According to the sagas, the Norse reached Iceland around 870 and Greenland about a century later, before sailing roughly 200 miles to what is now Baffin Island — Helluland, “the land of slabs” — then tracking the coast to Labrador, or Markland, “the land of forests”, and on to Vinland, “the land of vines”. The voyagers lingered rather than simply passing through, says Emily Lethbridge of the University of Iceland: “They left for several years. They had a whole new world to explore.”
The best known of these settlers, Erik the Red, arrived in Iceland around 960, his family having fled Norway after his father was outlawed for killing a man. Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, founded in 932, met each summer in a natural ravine sitting directly on the fault line between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates — and it was this assembly that banished Erik himself in 982 after a violent dispute with a neighbour. That exile, Lethbridge says, led him to become “the first Icelander to discover Greenland and then make a permanent settlement there”. The colony lasted roughly 500 years and launched voyages to North America by people she describes as having “taken chances and were prepared to undergo huge physical trials, such as sailing in open boats across the Atlantic” — including Erik’s son, Leif Eriksson, who led repeated crossings.
Contrary to the idea that the Norse abandoned Vinland for good, archaeologist Robert McGhee of the Canadian Museum of Civilisation points to evidence of “occasional trips to the New World for the following two or three centuries”. Historian Kirsten Seaver argues such voyages continued throughout the Middle Ages, and that by 1480 sailors tried direct crossings to what they called the Isle of Brazil. She also cites a letter from the winter of 1497-98 in which an Englishman, John Day, told Columbus about John Cabot’s 1497 voyage — mentioning that Bristol sailors had already been making similar trips north “for many years”.
That detail has fuelled theories that Columbus knew of Vinland and deliberately avoided it, sailing directly across the ocean rather than taking the shorter northern route navigators usually favoured. “Perhaps he was trying to avoid Canada. Maybe he was trying to avoid Vinland… I think Columbus’s intent was to bypass America and therefore try to get to the riches of the Far East,” McGhee says. Whatever his reasoning, the crossings that preceded him by half a millennium are easy to forget each Columbus Day.
Source: BBC News