Leif Eriksson | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

c. 970-c. 1020

Icelandic Explorer

Half a millennium before Christopher Columbus's ships landed in the New World, Leif Eriksson and his crew of Vikings became the first Europeans to reach North America. They landed at several places on the coast of what is now Canada, and even established colonies; however, because they possessed no great technological advantage over the Native Americans, they were not able to hold on to the lands they had acquired.

Leif was the eldest of four children, all destined to travel to North America, born to Erik the Red. The father later moved his family from Iceland to Greenland, where in 986 he founded a permanent colony. Around this time, a Viking named Bjarni Herjolfsson was sailing from Iceland to Greenland when his ship was blown off course. Historians now believe that he was the first European to catch sight of North America; but he did not land.

Unlike his father, who clung to the Vikings' old pagan traditions, Leif accepted Christianity. Though he was probably one of the first Vikings in Greenland to espouse the new faith, Leif's role as missionary has been overstated by legend. In any case, it was as an explorer that he would attain his greatest notoriety.

In 1001, when he was about 30 years old, Leif sailed westward with a crew of 35 men. It is believed that they landed first on the southern part of Baffin Island, then sailed along the coast of Labrador. They reached what may have been Belle Isle, an island between Labrador and Newfoundland which they dubbed Markland, or "forest land." From Markland they sailed to a place they called Vínland, or "land of the vine" (i.e., grapes), probably a spot on Newfoundland's northeastern tip. There they established a settlement they called Leifrsbudir, or "Leif's booths."

Leif's party returned to Greenland in 1002, but his brother Thorvald made a second journey to Vínland in 1003. Thorvald and his men fought with Native Americans, whom they called skraelings, and Thorvald was killed by an arrow in 1005. His crew sailed home the following year, but another brother, Thorstein, returned to the area to recover Thorvald's body. He ran into storms and died upon his return to Greenland.

In 1010, Leif's brother-in-law Thorfinn, who had married Thorstein's widow Gudrid, founded a settlement on Vinland. Thus Gudrid and the other females on this voyage were the first European women in North America, and her son Snorri, born in the summer of 1011, was the first European child born on the continent. The Norsemen traded furs with the skraelings, but later they fell into conflict, and warfare drove them back to Vinland.

Leif's half-sister Freydis (illegitimate daughter of Erik) also traveled to Vinland, where she set up a trading partnership with two Norse brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi. She double-crossed her partners, however, and had them murdered along with their families. When Freydis returned, Leif did not have the heart to punish her, so he allowed her to go free.

By that time, he had settled into his role as leader of the colony in Greenland, and he never sailed westward again. Nor did any of the other Vikings, but their legends were recorded in Erik the Red's Saga and other epic poems describing their voyages.

For many centuries, historians regarded these tales as merely fanciful stories, but in the twentieth century, evidence began to mount that indeed Norsemen had landed in the New World five centuries before Columbus. In the 1960s, nearly a thousand years after the founding of Leifrsbudir, archaeologists found remains of a Norse settlement in Newfoundland.

This is the complete article, containing 598 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).