The first-ever European settlers in North America came to Canada first.
TRUE DISCOVERY AMID TALL TALES
In 982, Erik the Red reached Greenland, and in about the year 1000, Erik’s son Leif Erikson, following up on reports of a land farther west, landed in what is now Newfoundland and established a colony. Some 75 years later, the chronicler Adam of Bremen created the first surviving account of this colony, with additional details later written down in the Norse sagas—thrilling adventure stories that medieval Scandinavians wrote about their Viking ancestors. Of course, the sagas also say that one Viking was killed by an arrow shot by a hopping creature with only one leg, so people were inclined to take the idea of Norse settlement of the New World with a large grain of salt.
JONSSON’S GAMBIT
The first scholar to argue that the Vikings had discovered America was the 16th-century Icelander Arngrim Jonsson. The idea that Vikings had discovered America became a point of pride with Scandinavians. In the 19th century, the works of the Danish historian Carl Rafn began a veritable craze for “Viking runestones” in the States, perhaps the best known of which is the Kensington Runestone, “discovered” by a farmer of Swedish decent in 1898 in Kensington, Minnesota. All of these were demonstrably fake.
The Viking colonization of the New World was nothing more than a legend until, in 1960, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad simply asked the fishermen of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, if there were any ruins about. They pointed him the first incontrovertible proof of Norse settlement on the American mainland. Today, L’Anse aux Meadows is a Viking archaeological site, with well-preserved artifacts of what life was like 1,000 years ago.
So, why did the Vikings leave? Why don’t Canadians speak Norwegian today? In the later Middle Ages, the climate changed and the sea routes closed off. It was no longer possible for Greenland to be used as a staging base for the Americas. It took another century for the New World to be “rediscovered”—not by Columbus, but by Basques from northern Spain fishing for cod off the Grand Banks.
Canadian Arctic Archipelago consists of 36,563 islands.