The Greenlanders continued to make occasional voyages to Markland to get timber, but after the Freydis mission in 1020, they pretty much gave up on ever dealing with Vinland again. Sure, grapes were great, but Vinland was about as far away as Norway, and it was populated by an unknown number of hostile people who resisted Viking occupation in a wide variety of violent ways. It totally wasn’t worth it to mess around with them. Europeans wouldn’t return for another four centuries.

The Vikings stopped worrying about Vinland; they didn’t make many (if any) more trips there, and over time, it was forgotten about to the point where many historians wrote the Vinland Sagas off as works of fiction.

That is, until nine hundred years later, when confirmed Viking houses and artifacts were unearthed in Newfoundland, Canada, and scientifically dated to 1020.

PROVING THE DOUBTERS WRONG

In an effort to silence all the modern-day haters who said there was no way in heck that a Viking ship could ever make it across the North Atlantic, in 1893 a Norwegian dude named Christen Christensen built a full-scale replica of an ancient Viking longboat using the exact same tech Leif Eriksson had in the year 1000. Andersen sailed the ship from Bergen, Norway, all the way to Newfoundland. The trip took twenty-eight days and carried Christensen through freezing, dangerous waters, but he and his crew made it with little or no damage to their vessel. The ship that made the incredible journey was shown off at the World’s Fair in Chicago later that year.

Replica Viking ship arriving in Chicago, 1893

KNOW YOUR VIKINGS

NAME:

Leif “the Lucky” Eriksson

RANK:

Jarl of Greenland

RELIGION:

Catholic (converted around 990)

BORN:

Iceland, around 970

DIED:

Unknown causes, probably in Greenland around 1020

AREAS OF OPERATION:

Iceland, Greenland, North America

NOTEWORTHY:

First European to set foot in North America