Who Discovered America Before Columbus?

Short answer

The first Europeans known to have reached the Americas were the Norse, who sailed from Greenland to a land they called Vinland around the year 1000, almost five centuries before Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage. The Norse exploration is described in two Icelandic sagas, and the only confirmed Norse settlement, L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, was discovered in 1960 and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The principal explorer of the sagas is Leif Erikson, son of Eirik the Red, the founder of the Norse colony in Greenland.

The saga evidence

The story of the Norse discovery of America is preserved in two related Icelandic sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga) and the Saga of Eirik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða). Both were written down in the thirteenth century, but they are based on older oral traditions and contain a strong core of historical fact. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, Leif Erikson set out from Greenland around the year 1000, intending to sail to Norway, and was driven off course to the southwest. He and his crew made landfall on a coast they called Vinland because of the wild grapes they found growing there. They explored three areas: Helluland (“Flat-Stone Land,” identified with Baffin Island), Markland (“Forest Land,” identified with Labrador), and Vinland (“Vine Land,” identified with Newfoundland).

The Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eirik the Red give different accounts of the discovery. The Saga of the Greenlanders attributes the discovery to Leif Erikson; the Saga of Eirik the Red attributes it to Bjarni Herjolfsson, a Norse sailor who was driven off course on a voyage from Iceland to Greenland and who saw the coast of North America but did not land. Leif’s voyage, on the Saga of Eirik the Red account, was the result of Bjarni’s report. In either case, the Norse were aware of the lands to the southwest of Greenland by the year 1000, and they established a brief settlement on the coast of what is now Newfoundland. For the wider story of the Norse expansion, see the Viking raids and expansion.

L’Anse aux Meadows

The archaeological evidence for the Norse presence in North America was discovered in 1960, when the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, identified the remains of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The site contained the foundations of several buildings, including a longhouse, a smithy, a sauna, and a small forge, as well as a great quantity of Norse artifacts. The architecture is unmistakably Norse, and the radiocarbon dates place the site at around 1000 AD, exactly the period described in the sagas.

The discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows was a landmark in the history of the Americas. It confirmed the saga accounts of the Norse voyages and provided the first physical evidence of a pre-Columbian European presence in the Americas. The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978, and it is now a major tourist attraction. The archaeological work has been continued by Parks Canada and by a number of Canadian and international teams, and the picture of the Norse presence at L’Anse aux Meadows has become increasingly detailed.

The L’Anse aux Meadows site was not a colony; it was a small base used for the repair of boats and the overwintering of small parties of explorers. The site shows signs of extensive iron working, suggesting that the Norse were repairing their equipment and producing the iron nails they needed. The site also shows evidence of contact with the indigenous peoples, in the form of some artifacts that may have been of Native American origin.

Why the settlement was abandoned

The Norse Vinland settlement was abandoned after a decade or so. The sagas describe violent encounters with the indigenous inhabitants, called Skrælingar (an Old Norse word for “wretches” or “barbarians”), and it is clear that the Norse were not numerous enough to hold the territory against an organized resistance. The site is also too far north for the cultivation of grapes and wheat described in the sagas, and the Norse seem to have been in a marginal environment, dependent on the sea and on occasional contact with the Greenland colonies.

Other factors may have contributed to the abandonment. The Greenland colonies were themselves a small and vulnerable population, and the supply of ships and men to support a distant settlement in Vinland was limited. The Greenland colonies also entered a period of climatic cooling in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which made agriculture more difficult. By the time the sagas were written down in the thirteenth century, the Vinland settlement was already a distant memory.

Other pre-Columbian contacts

The Norse were the first documented Europeans in the Americas, but they were not the only pre-Columbian visitors. The archaeological record of pre-Columbian transatlantic contact is sparse and contested. The Kensington Runestone in Minnesota, which purports to be a record of a Norse exploration in 1362, is generally considered a forgery, but other possible Norse artifacts have been the subject of more serious debate.

The case for other pre-Columbian contacts, including the possibility of pre-Norse Irish voyages, is more controversial. The story of St Brendan’s voyage, in which an Irish monk is said to have reached a far western land, has been the subject of much speculation, but the archaeological evidence is lacking. The Norse voyages, by contrast, are well documented in both the sagas and the archaeology, and L’Anse aux Meadows is now generally accepted as the first documented European settlement in the Americas.

Columbus and the Norse legacy

The Norse voyages to Vinland were largely forgotten in the centuries between the end of the Norse Greenland colony and the modern rediscovery of the saga literature. The Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eirik the Red were known to scholars from the seventeenth century, but they were not taken seriously as historical sources until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows in 1960 confirmed the saga accounts and made the Norse voyages to America a permanent part of the historical record.

Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage was the beginning of a permanent European presence in the Americas, and the voyages that followed in the wake of Columbus changed the world. Columbus himself was aware of the Norse voyages, and he believed, correctly, that his own voyage to Asia would encounter lands that had been visited before. The Norse voyages to Vinland were a remarkable achievement, but they were not the beginning of a continuous European presence in the Americas. The Norse are, however, the first Europeans known to have reached the Americas, and the story of their voyages is an important part of the history of European exploration. For the related story of Leif Erikson himself, see who was Leif Erikson.