Eirik Thorvaldsson Raudi - Eirik the Red - was red of hair and red of beard, bloody of heart and bloody of hand. He was a murderously bad neighbor, a scoundrel on a grand scale, a heathen to the core, and to the last of his life he remained unregenerate. Yet, he was a towering figure of a Viking. And others would follow him to the end of the world and live with him at the end of human existence.

Cast out by his own society and driven by the forces of his own nature, Eirik thrust boldly toward the western horizon, where, on the perilous rim of Greenland’s great permanent ice cap, he founded a settlement that would survive for nearly five centuries as a monument to human endurance. Eirik’s son Leif was less of an outcast. Yet within him stirred the same burning desire to reach westward beyond the wilderness of the ocean - and that hungering took him to the apogee of Norse explorations: America, which Christopher Columbus was not to encounter for another half millennium.

Thus, step by step - from Norway to the Faroes to Iceland, Greenland, and finally to America - the Vikings traversed the formidable North Atlantic, a perilous distance of more than 3,000 miles from the fjords of Norway, entrusting their lives to their own seamanship and their doughty little vessels. The sagas’ accounts of the Norse adventure in America - or, as Leif named it, Vinland - are obscure, fragmentary, and often exaggerated. Precisely where the Vikings went, how long they stayed, what they did, and why they left are pieces of a tantalizing puzzle. Equally baffling is the sudden and still unexplained disappearance of the Norsemen from the Greenland settlements they had clung so tenaciously to for so long. Yet whatever the immediate (and perhaps inconsequential) details, the Norse withdrawal from Vinland and then from Greenland was part of the wormwood process of decay that brought an end to the great age of the Vikings.

Just as the Viking colonists faded into the mists of the sagas, so the Viking warriors, those “valiant, wrathful, purely pagan people” of the early Irish lament, gradually found themselves tamed and assimilated by the very peoples they had conquered in both east and west. Viking traders, too, saw themselves superseded by more powerful and sophisticated rivals. And though no one ever sailed more beautiful ships, the master builders of other lands constructed crafts that were so much larger and more useful that the Viking knarr and longship passed from the seas.

Eirik the Red was a sign and symbol of the famed Viking age and of its demise. He was born around 950 on a farm in southwest Norway. His violent nature found an early outlet. While Eirik was in his late teens, he and his father Thorvald plunged - joyously, in all certainty - into one of the innumerable and interminable blood feuds that so fortified yet depleted Viking manhood. In the offhand words of a saga, there were “some killings.” Eirik and Thorvald were outlawed, and, like so many outlaws before them, they followed their fate to Iceland.

They arrived late. By then, in the 960s, all of Iceland’s good land had been taken, and what was left for recent outcasts was a rocky, hardscrabble tract on the cruel northwestern coast. Thorvald soon died, and Eirik was left to fend for himself - which he set about to do with a vengeance. He married Thjodhild, daughter of a prosperous family and, as it turned out, one of the few persons on earth whose willfulness matched Eirik’s.

Eirik moved south and - probably with the help of his in-laws and perhaps by force - took and cleared land at Haukadal, an area of grass and birch woods on an arm of the Breidafjord. But Eirik was never much for peaceful coexistence. Violence was always surging in his soul, and soon another feud resulted in the bloody deaths of two of his neighbors. Again Eirik was forced to flee. He dismantled his house, timber being too valuable in wood-scarce Iceland to leave behind, and moved on Oxney, on a Breidafjord promontory about fifty miles west of Haukadal.

Shortly after he arrived, in a rare moment of neighborliness, he loaned some of his house beams to a man named Thorgest, who wanted them briefly for his farmstead. But soon came the inevitable day when Eirik decided where to settle. He began to put up his own house and demanded the return of his beams. Thorgest refused, thereby setting off yet another terrible feud. This one embroiled the entire countryside and brought violent death to two of Thorgest’s sons. The vicious quarrel finally was resolved at the local assembly. Though his cause, for once, was just, Eirik and his supporters were voted down by Thorgest’s allies, and Eirik the Red was sentenced to three years’ banishment from Iceland.

According to custom, he was given a few days to pack up his belongings, and he used his time well. Thanks mostly to the affluence of his wife’s family, he bought and provisioned a knarr, then set about collecting desperate men to accompany him on a desperate adventure. They were not hard to find. A few years before, Iceland has suffered a famine in which, according to a chronicler, “men ate ravens and foxes, and many loathsome things were eaten that should not be eaten, and some men had the old and helpless killed and thrown over the cliffs.” The famine passed, but it left destitute many families, mostly the owners of marginal lands, whose strong sons and husbands were not eager to seek new fortune in a new land.

Eirik knew - more or less - where he wanted to go. More than fifty years before, sometime between 900 and 930, one Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakason had been scooped up by a tremendous gale while he was sailing down from Norway to Iceland, had missed his destination, and had been storm-tossed far to the west. Eventually he sighted a cluster of tiny rock islands, and he spied in the dim distance beyond them the looming, shadowed form of an immense land mass. But the place was not in the least inviting to Gunnbjorn. After naming the islets Gunnbjarnarsker, after himself, he put them in his wake the moment the wind turned fair, returning to his home in the same Breidafjord pocket of Iceland where, long after Gunnbjorn’s death, Eirik the Red found his final Icelandic refuge.

Icelandic mariners had talked and speculated often about Gunnbjorn’s islands, and at least one attempt had been made to explore this new corner of the earth. A man named Snaebjorn, seeking to escape retribution for murder, had sailed in that direction with a number of companions in two boats. He found a little shelf of land at the edge of the monstrous icecap of Greenland, and there he built a dwelling. The arctic winter came howling down on the settlers, burying their house so deep in snow that they had to dig a tunnel upward to get out to the surface, so they could make their way down to their boats. They caught enough fish to keep them from starving. But, cooped up in the fetid darkness, they allowed old rivalries and grievances to awake. Before they could get away in the spring, three men, including Snaebjorn, had been killed.

Eirik, of course, had heard the tale of Gunnbjorn’s errant voyage, and of Snaebjorn’s. The huge, mysterious mass sighted by Gunnbjorn could only have been the answer to Eirik’s pagan prayers. In 982, at about thirty-two years of age, Eirik Thorvaldsson Raudi set forth.

The way was not particularly long, some 450 miles, and easy enough with favorable winds. Eirik sailed from under the Snaefellsnes, a glacial promontory that, like a giant index finger, points due west from Iceland’s western coast. Moving steadily before the prevailing easterly breezes of early summer, Eirik tracked carefully along the sixty-fifth parallel, sighting the sun by day and Polaris by night. What Eirik and his crew beheld after four days or so of sailing was horrifying. Before them, blinding in their brilliance beneath the sun, were cliffs that fell sheer from a monster icecap. As they approached, the Vikings could see the tips of enormous mountains peeking above the ice. The bravest men might have been excused for turning back. But Eirik the Red coasted south. He may have headed out to sea and rounded Cape Farewell at the southeastern extremity of the new land. More likely, knowing that if grazing land existed it would be found along the banks of the fjords, Eirik turned off, probing and feeling his way for mile after forbidding mile through a labyrinth of narrow, intersecting waterways until, at last, he made his exit on the western coast.

There he steered north, tracing along the twists and turns of the coastline, his sturdy knarr bobbing and weaving through the islands of an archipelago where the cliffs echoed the screams of millions of sea birds. Their cacophony was occasionally interrupted by a more ominous sound from starboard: the reports, like cannon fire, of gigantic icebergs broken from glaciers that overran the mainland’s edge into the sea.

Yet, for all the glaciers, the permanent icecap itself did not reach to the western shore, which was instead fissured by countless fjords thrusting deep - in some cases, more than 150 miles - into the interior. Their waters teemed with fish. Along their banks grew emerald grass; the ground was springy with moss and carpeted by a profusion of wild flowers - harebell, angelica, buttercups, and pink wild thyme. It was at such a place, at the head of a broad and beautiful fjord that he naturally named after himself, Eiriksfjord, that Eirik the Red built a home.

Alone on the vast expanse of what was - although he could not know it - the world’s largest island, Eirik and his followers soon found traces of previous human habitation. House ruins, fragments of boats, and stone implements - all bore witness to an earlier, non-European culture. Indeed, man had been there as early as 2000 B.C.: A Stone-Age, reindeer-hunting people had lived there. They were succeeded around the beginning of the Christian era by people of the so-called Dorset culture, nomads who had neither kayaks nor dogs and whose survival depended on following the seals that provided them both food and clothing.

Eirik and his fellow Norsemen, then, were at least the third race to inhabit the vast island - and, as it turned out, the third to vanish from its face. But while they were there, the Vikings gave it a magnificent try. Eirik spent the remaining years of his exile from Iceland exploring the territory and subdividing land among his followers. The forbidding place apparently enthralled him, and, when, at the end of his banishment, he returned to Iceland to collect his wife, Thjodhild and drum up more settlers, he gave his new country a name that carried monumental disregard for the truth. He called the island Greenland - on the theory, as he acknowledged, that “men would be drawn to go there if the land had an attractive name.”

Early in the summer of 986, Eirik the Red, thrice an outlaw and now the proud father of a Viking colony, sailed from Iceland at the head of a fleet of twenty-five ships filled with men, women, children, and all their goods and chattels. The expedition was caught along the way by a storm - as so often happens, the saga fails to recount the harrowing details - that wrecked some of the vessels and forced others to turn back. But at last, fourteen arrived safely, and nearly 400 people went ashore to begin the colonization of Greenland.

Immediately, these hardy pioneers went to work. Unlike Iceland, Greenland had good stone for building, and the houses were thick walled with sod roofs. The homesteads were scattered along a 120-mile stretch of fjord-riven shoreline on the west coast. In time, the settlers came to call this region the Eastern Settlement to distinguish it from the later - by ten years - Western Settlement, some 300 miles to the north on a westward sweep of land. The Greenland colonists soon adopted a constitution, established a national assembly, and decreed a code of law, all based on Icelandic examples.

Although Eirik the Red may not have held official title, he was certainly the community’s ruling patriarch. “His state was one of high distinction,” acknowledges a saga, “and all recognized his authority.” The Eastern Settlement eventually came to accommodate 190 farms; of them all, Eirik’s Brattahlid, which was able to support fifty cows against an average of ten to twenty on other farms, was by far the finest. The Western Settlement eventually grew to encompass more than ninety farms, providing food and fiber for a total population that in the year 1100 A.D. reached about 3,000 people.

These were not warriors like Eirik but mostly solid yeoman farmers, crowded out of Iceland by implacable population pressures. They did so well that word - perhaps colored by Eirik’s far-reaching boats - spread back to Norway. “It is reported,” wrote a chronicler there, “that the pasturage is good and that there are large and fine farms in Greenland. The farmers raise sheep and cattle in large numbers and make butter and cheese in great quantities. The people subsist chiefly on these foods and on beef; they also eat the flesh of various kinds of game, such as caribou, whale, seal, and bear.”

But the farms alone could offer little more than a bare subsistence - and the Greenlanders had need of much else. They were in need of iron for all purposes and especially for weapons. Although grain grew on a few sunny slopes, it was in piteously short supply. Beer and wine were required to satisfy the prodigious Viking thirst, as were European-style clothes and adornments to answer the craving for luxury items.

Most of all, the Greenlanders were extremely short of timber - essential if only for building and maintaining the ships that were their life line to the world. The local dwarf birch was useless for heavy duty, and the reliance on driftwood, most of which followed the ocean currents on a long, looping route from Siberia, was chancy.

As it had been in Iceland, trade became a way of life. The farms could provide the fleece for Greenland woolen cloth, which counted as a valuable commodity in the trading towns of Scandinavia and elsewhere. In his only recorded lapse into moral turpitude, Eirik’s son Leif, while journeying to Norway, once dallied awhile in the Hebrides, where he got a local highborn maiden pregnant. When she mentioned marriage, Leif paid her off with Greenland woolens and departed forthwith.

But the greatest natural trading treasures were to be found away from the farms in the wastelands of the far, far north, especially around Disco Bay on the seventieth parallel. Rough and hardy Norse hunters built rude stone shelters there, and they set about reaping a precious harvest of wildlife.

With canoes and harpoons, they hunted the mammoth Greenland whale, which grew up to seventy feet long and could yield vast quantities of flesh and oil. There were even greater herds of ivory-tusked walrus and fat seal than in Iceland, and polar bears, only accidental in Iceland, were native to Greenland. The flocks of eider ducks were immense beyond belief and provided vast amounts of down for the quilts of Europe. And in the northern hunting grounds could be found the pure-white falcons so prized by medieval nobility.

The markets for such goods were in Europe, especially the Scandinavian trading towns, and commercial sailing routes were soon established. One was deemed worthy of detailed description in a saga: “From Hernar in Norway one must sail a direct course west to Hvarf in Greenland, in which case one sails north of Shetland so that one sights land in clear weather only, then south of the Faroes so that the sea looks halfway up the mountainsides, then south of Iceland so that one gets sight of birds and whales from there.”

No matter how many times the trip was taken, it remained dangerous, and the sagas make frequent if passing mention of ships lost at sea. In addition to all the usual hazards, there lurked a phenomenon that one chronicler called “sea hedges,” writing that it seemed “as if all the waves and tempests of the ocean have been collected into three heaps, out of which three billows have formed. These hedge in the entire sea, so that no opening can be seen anywhere; they are higher than lofty mountains and resemble steep, overhanging cliffs. In only a few cases have the men been known to escape who were upon the seas when such a thing occurred.” Nothing recognized by science exactly fits this description. But the sea floor in the area is subject to earthquakes, which would produce tidal waves and unsettled sea conditions.

The mariners also risked daily death in their icy home waters. One of the most harrowing of the Greenland stories tells of Thorgils Orrabeinsfostri, who with his family (including an infant son) and some companions were shipwrecked in a storm that swept him onto the island’s bleak east coast. Thorgils fashioned a crude boat from the wreckage of their craft. The castaways rowed hundreds of miles through icy channels and, when it became choked beyond passage, dragged their lifeboat across vast expanses of ice and snow. One by one the travelers dropped of cold and hunger, a grave-mantle of snow quickly covering their stiffening bodies. Thorgils’ wife was among those who perished.

Finally, as his own end and that of his son drew near, Thorgils killed a polar bear with his sword, then clung grimly to its ears to prevent the great beast from slipping off the ice and sinking into the sea. With the meat of the polar bear in their bellies, Thorgils and his son survived.

Many other Greenland sailors in similar circumstances did not. One called Lika-Lodinn actually earned a living by collecting the dead bodies of shipwrecked seamen, boiling the flesh from the bones to make for lighter transportation, and carrying the skeletons back to the settlements for decent burial. For his efforts, he understandably became known as Corpse-Lodinn.

Still, despite all the hazards and hardships, the Greenland settlements not only continued to live and to grow, but even entered into a period of shaky prosperity. On his fjord-side farm at Brattahlid, Eirik the Red had cause for satisfaction. Yet, the late 990s, as he neared his fiftieth year, were for him a time of discontent. The place was becoming crowded; at least it appeared so to a man with a taste for open space. Moreover, civilization in the form of medieval Christianity was coming to Greenland - and Thjodhild, Eirik’s wife, was one of the first and most passionate converts. To halt her nagging, Eirik finally permitted Thjodhild to build a chapel - on another fjord. As for being baptized himself, Eirik the Red drew a resolute line, much preferring to identify his own spirit with that of Thor and Odin. For his failure to take up the cross, Thjodhild barred him from her bed.

Small wonder, then, that Eirik Thorvaldsson Raudi longed for his lost youth and yearned for still more new lands to the west. In fact, such lands existed - and Eirik knew it.

Almost from the very time of Eirik’s expedition to Greenland, an odd tale of exploration had been circulating among the Vikings. In late 985, a young Icelander named Bjarni Herjolfsson had made a trading voyage to Norway, wintered there and in the summer of 986 headed back to Iceland with a cargo of goods consigned to his father, Herjolf. By a matter of days, Bjarni arrived too late. Herjolf, evidently and impetuous sort, had sold his Iceland farm and accompanied Eirik the Red’s little armada to Greenland. Dismayed but not daunted, Bjarni followed after his father, sailing due west for three days. Then a dense fog rolled in, followed by a north wind, and Bjarni’s ship was tossed by storms for uncountable days in the gathering arctic winter.

When the storm finally abated, Bjarni sighted low, flat land covered by thick woods. This did not fit any description of Greenland given by Eirik to the Icelanders, so Bjarni sailed on, heading north. He came upon more land, similar to the first, and this time his crew, wishing to do a bit of exploring, clamored to go ashore. No, replied the single-minded Bjarni. He was searching for Greenland, which had glaciers, and here there were no glaciers. On Bjarni sailed, carried by a southwest wind for three days until he came abreast of bare, black cliffs rising like vertical slabs from the sea. There were plenty of glaciers here, stupendous ones, looming up in the distance and disgorging into the sea through breaks in the cliffs.

Bjarni did not even lower his sails. “This land looks good for nothing,” he pronounced, and now he steered to the east, where, after four more days, he finally came upon a land that perfectly matched the description of Greenland that he had been carrying around in his head.

He rounded a cape. There was his father’s ship, and there was his father. Bjarni Herjolfsson delivered his cargo and, his filial duty done, settled down to a quietly productive life on Greenland. He never knew that he had discovered America.

Now, at the turn of the millennium, Eirik the Red had been hearing the story of Bjarni’s voyage for nearly fifteen years. To a man of his disposition, fretted by domestic annoyances, the call of the mysterious land to the west must have sounded as strongly as ever. He was, however, an old man by Viking standards, and he might not be able to survive the trip. But his son Leif could and did.

Leif was a golden Viking. One saga describes him as “a big, strapping fellow, handsome to look at, thoughtful and temperate in all things.” He also was a splendid seaman, his reputation already firmly established as the first Viking shipmaster to make direct voyages with trade goods between Greenland, Scotland, and Norway and back again. These were bold ventures, accomplished by sailing along the sixtieth parallel for 1,800 miles without sight of land. But his courage was tempered by prudence, and he was not a sort to sail blindly into the unknown. Instead, before questing Bjarni’s new lands, he sought Bjarni’s advice, soliciting information about routes and landmarks, winds and currents, rocks and shoals. Only then, in the summer of 1001, after purchasing Bjarni’s ship and collecting a crew of thirty-five, was Leif ready. Eirik had meant to go along and even to assume national command. But on the way to the shore where the ship awaited, his horse stumbled and threw Eirik, and the old fellow broke his leg. “I am not meant to discover more countries than this one we are now in,” he said to his son. “This is as far we go together.”

Because he had been wind-blown and lost during the first part of his 986 voyage, Bjarni Herjolfsson had been able to provide Leif with specific sailing instructions only about the last leg. Leif followed Bjarni’s route in reverse, first sailing due west until he came upon the dismal, glacier-topped rock pile that Bjarni had deemed useless to anyone. Leif anchored briefly, going ashore for an inspection and concluded that Bjarni had been correct. After naming the place Helluland - Flatland - he got under way as swiftly as possible and sailed south, leaving behind him what was surely Baffin Island, most easterly of the islands of the Canadian arctic archipelago, and separated from Labrador by 250 miles of the Hudson Strait.

Leif next put his ship’s boat ashore at the place where Bjarni had refused to stop, despite the persistence of his crew. “This country,” relates a saga, “was level and wooded with broad white beaches wherever they went and a gently sloping shoreline.” The Norsemen, accustomed both in Scandinavia and in the western settlements to cramped and rocky shores, called these beaches Wonder Strands. Behind the beaches was another marvel: vast stands of gigantic trees tall and sturdy enough to make a timber-poor Greenlander’s heart soar. The physical description given in the sagas corresponds to a thirty-mile stretch of fine beaches backed by spruce woodlands along the Labrador coast in the vicinity of Cape Porcupine. Leif named it Markland, or Land of Forests.

Enticing though Markland must have been, Leif was determined to explore further. Relates a saga: “After sailing two doegr, they sighted another shore and landed on an island to the north of the mainland.” In this case, a doegr, a measure of both time and distance, probably meant a two-day journey of about 165 miles. The island on which they landed was doubtless Belle Isle, about fifteen miles north of Newfoundland and northeast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There, Leif and his men found the grass heavy with dew, which they collected and drank - “and thought they had never known anything so sweet as that was.”

“Then,” the saga continues, “they returned to the ship and sailed through the channel between the island and a cape jutting out to the north of the mainland” - almost certainly Cape Bauld, Newfoundland. “They steered a westerly course past the cape and found great shallows at ebb tide so that their ship was beached some distance from the sea.” When the tide rose, the adventures towed their knarr off the sandbar, and they “took their leather sleeping bags ashore and built themselves shelters. They decided to stay there during the winter and set up large houses. There was no lack of salmon either in the river or in the lake, and these salmon were bigger than any others the men had ever seen. Nature was so generous here that it seemed to them that cattle would need no winter fodder but could graze outdoors. There was no frost in the winter, and the grass hardly withered. The days and nights were more nearly equal than in Greenland or Iceland. On the shortest day of the winter, the sun remained up between breakfast time and late afternoon.”

The saga was almost surely exaggerating the benignity of the Newfoundland climate. Nevertheless, it may well have seemed like Elysium compared to what the men had experienced on Greenland in the dark months. In fact, all through the winter, Leif sent out parties of exploration to investigate the surrounding countryside. One evening, the man Leif called his “foster father failed to return from a scouting expedition. He was a Germany crony of Eirik the Red’s named Tyrkir, and his role, as was customary among well-positioned Vikings was to serve Leif as a sort of stand-in father on the voyage, seeking to protect him from harm, offering him counsel and tutoring him in various ways. Naturally, Leif mounted an anxious search, and finally Tyrkir was found in a condition of utter excitement. “I have some real news for you,” he cried. “I have found grapevines and grapes!”

“Is this possible, Foster Father?” asked Leif.

“Certainly,” replied Tyrkir, “for I was born where there is no lack of either vines or grapes.”

So saying, he led Leif to the place where he had made his astonishing find - and there they were, laden with fruit. “And,” the saga relates, “it is said that they loaded up the afterboat with grapes, and the ship itself with a cargo of timber. When spring came, they made the ship ready and sailed away. Leif gave the country a name to suits its product. He called it Vinland” - Wineland.

Tyrkir’s grapes would confound future generations. Were it not for them, there would likely be little dispute about the location of Leif’s Vinland as being at L’Anse aux Meadows in the Sacred Bay area at the northern tip of Newfoundland. Geographically and in physical details, the place fits the sagas: It is an inlet of Sacred Bay, is shallow, with rocks that would hang up a Viking knarr at low tide; the natural meadow is among the largest in northern Newfoundland. Nearby, curving to the sea, is the Block Duck Brook, up which salmon run to spawn in the spring. South of the meadow stands an extensive spruce forest. Finally, and seeming to clench the case, the remains of what were almost certainly Norse buildings have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows and nowhere else in America.

But how to explain the grapes? In plain fact, grapes could not have grown in the vicinity of L’Anse aux Meadows or anywhere else so far north. Because of this discrepancy, frequent and serious efforts have been made to place Vinland along the east coast of America from Nova Scotia as far south as Florida. Other attempts, often ingenious and occasionally persuasive, have sought a semantic solution. Thus, for example, if a scribe had been confused between the Norse words vin (long i), for “wine,” and vin (short i), for “pasture,” that might account for the conflict - were it not that the sagas specifically mention clusters of grapes (vinber) from which wine could be made.

It is possible that the sagas used the word grape in only the loosest of senses - to mean a roundish fruit. In that case, Tyrkir’s “grapes” may have been squashberries, gooseberries, cranberries, or currants, all of which could be made into wine and all of which grew in the north. There is no Old Norse name for any of these fruits. But vinber translates literally as “wineberry,” and thus it could have applied to a number of plants in addition to grapes.

Strangely, throughout decades of debate, the simplest explanation of the grapes has been largely ignored. Leif was, after all, the son of Eirik the Red - the man who had attracted settlers to one of the bleakest places on earth by touting it as a lush Greenland. With that remarkably successful example in mind, Leif could hardly have been above gilding his American discovery by calling it Vinland and saying that he returned with a cargo of grapes.

That he intended eventually to establish a permanent settlement in Vinland is beyond doubt. But Leif himself would not be one of the settlers: Shortly after his return to Greenland, Eirik the Red died and Leif assumed the duties and responsibilities of running the farm at Brattahlid. His seafaring days were done. However, his brother Thorvald, arguing that more exploration was needed before any attempt at colonization, outfitted his own ship and took on a crew. He followed Leif’s route and wintered at Leif’s temporary huts in Vinland, living mostly on fish.

In spring and summer, he scouted up and down the coast in the ship’s tender, finding little of note and spending a second winter in the old camp. Next summer, he probed the coastline again, this time in the ship itself. A storm drove it ashore on a promontory - it could have been any one of several between Cape Bauld and Cape Porcupine - breaking the keel. Thorvald effected repairs with local timber and set the broken keel erect in the sand to serve as a landmark.

Despite this mishap, the expedition had so far been rather well managed. But now, at another cape, came one of those senseless outbursts of savagery that so flawed the Viking character. After spotting three skin boats, overturned on the beach with three men sleeping beneath each, the Norsemen killed all but one, who escaped. In this murderous fashion, the Vikings introduced themselves to the Skraelings - an obscure term that may have meant “wretches” or “weaklings” or “screechers” or any one of several other epithets of low regard. They may have been either Eskimos or Algonquin Indians - both lived in the area. Whoever they were, they soon appeared in raging, overwhelming force at the scene of the killings.

Fleeing to their ship, the Norsemen took their customary defensive position behind a gunwale hung with shields. The Skraelings loosened a hail of arrows, a number of which penetrated the barricade and one of which struck Thorvald in an armpit. It is not recorded whether the arrow was dipped in poison or some other septic substance. In any case, the wound festered and proved mortal. The survivors buried their slain leader between two crosses at the site of the keel-landmark, wintered again at Leif’s stopping place and finally returned to Greenland, as a saga laconically put it, with “plenty of news to tell Leif.”

Another of Eirik’s sons, a lad named Thorstein, set out to retrieve his brother’s body. But he managed only to get himself caught in a series of storms that flung him hither and yon - at one point east past Iceland almost as far as Ireland - for an entire summer.

At last, in 1009, a determined attempt was made to establish a settlement in Vinland. Curiously, it was led not by a Greenlander but by an Icelander: Thorfinn the Valiant, as he came to be known. He was a young merchant who, in plying his trade between Norway and Greenland, got to know Eirik’s sons and married Gudrid, the attractive widow of Thorstein, Leif’s brother, who had since died of a fever. Through them, he became fascinated with Vinland. Thorfinn organized a full-fledged expedition, with three ships carrying 250 people, including some wives, relates a saga, “all kind of livestock, for it was their intention to colonize the country if they could.”

Taking the route established by Leif, Thorfinn and his followers found Vinland and took residence in - and doubtless built additions to - Leif’s houses, where Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri, the first European child born in America.

After a cruel winter, during which they were forced to fight and kill ravenous forest bears, the settlers sailed southward until they came to a sheltered place with abundant pasturage that they named Hóp, an old Norse word for a small, land-locked bay. There they met and entered into trade with another tribe of Skraelings, filthy creatures with, says a saga, “ugly hair on their heads, big eyes, and broad cheeks.” To their immense gratification, the Vikings discovered that these Skraelings were willing to trade valuable furs for cow’s milk or a span of red cloth to wrap around their heads. As if that were not enough, the Vikings, says a saga, delightedly compounded the swindle: “When a cloth began to run short, they cut it up so that it was no broader than a fingerbreadth, but the Skraelings gave just as much or more.”

The Skraelings were not as simple as they seemed. They perceived the Vikings’ metal swords were far superior to their own stone weapons, and they were vastly annoyed when Thorfinn forbade his men to trade any of their swords. Inevitably, a Skraeling tried to seal a sword. Just as surely, he was killed. A screaming mob of Skraelings attacked in overwhelming force and with a weird weapon of psychological warfare. It was described in a saga as “a pole with a huge knob on the end, black in color, and about the size of a sheep’s belly, which flew over the heads of the men and made a frightening noise when it fell.” This strange object panicked the Vikings; the knob was probably nothing more than an inflated moose bladder. Thorfinn and his men in short order were driven to a last stand with their backs against a cliff. There they certainly would have been massacred had it not been for Freydis, a bastard daughter of Eirik’s and as bloodthirsty a character as can be found in the sagas. She ripped open her bodice, pulled out a breast, and slapped it with the flat of a sword as if infusing it with some magical power. The primitive Skraelings, astounded by this display and thinking her some sort of female warrior-god, turned and fled in terror.

Although the would-be settlers lingered in America for two more years, they lost heart in the face of the Skraelings’ continuing harassment and finally departed. “It now seemed plain,” explains a saga, “that though the quality of the land was admirable, there would always be fear and strife dogging them there on account of those that inhabited the land.” Thorfinn’s was the last significant Norse effort to settle America, although as late as 1341 there was a report of a Greenland ship making a trip to Labrador, probably on a timber-cutting expedition.

By then, Greenland itself was in the throes of terrible troubles. After 1200, the entire North Atlantic area entered the so-called Little Ice Age. Glaciers began growing bigger, and sea temperatures dropped drastically. For the Greenland settlements, the result was disastrous: There was a vast increase in the ice drifting south with the East Greenland Current and, as a result, the island’s sea approaches, always difficult, were rendered perilous in the extreme. In the middle of the thirteenth century, a chronicler reported: “As soon as one has passed over the deepest part of the ocean, he will encounter such masses of ice in the sea that I know no equal of it anywhere else on earth. Sometimes these ice fields are about four or five ells thick” - that is, eight feet - “and extend so far out from the land that it may mean a journey of four days or more to travel across them. There is more ice to the northeast and north of the land than to the south, southwest, and west. It has frequently happened that men have sought to make the land too soon and, as a result, have been caught in the ice floes. Some of those who have been caught have perished.”

The Greenlanders’ trading economy, precarious at best, could withstand little such disruption, and, in 1261, the desperate islanders sought succor, surrendering their precious independence to Norway in return for various trade concessions - which the Norwegian kings, whether by neglect or malice, never lived up to. A year later, Iceland, under the same pressures of declining trade and increasingly bitter cold, also sought help from Norway - with much the same result, though the Icelanders survived in the end while the Greenlanders did not.

Besides ice, the cold brought a new menace to Greenland in the person of Skraelings - this time Eskimos of the Thule culture, who in an epochal migration had moved from Alaska across northern Canada to Ellesmere Island and thence, in their pursuit of the cold-loving seal, to the northernmost reaches of Greenland.

Relations between the two peoples soon turned violent. Few records of the fighting survive, but there is little doubt that it was bloody - and uneven. The Eskimos were in their natural element, all but oblivious to the cold and wise to every way of the north. The Viking hunters, no matter how skilled with their weapons, were alien to this brutal land. They suffered from the cold, from lack of proper food at times, from Eskimo ambushes. The Norsemen slowly withdrew before the Eskimo advance until they finally abandoned the Western Settlement and moved to the Eastern Settlement, where they prepared for a last stand. The sagas do not say whether the Western Settlement was abandoned in haste under attack. But it may have been: Many years later a Norwegian investigator sent out to examine conditions in Greenland reported that the Eskimos in control of the settlement had “many horses, goats, cattle, and sheep.”

For some reason, perhaps because the seal herds led the way, the Eskimos’ advance took them to the southeast, all the way to Cape Farewell, bypassing the Eastern Settlement, which clung grimly to life until about 1500 - when complete silence fell upon the community founded by Eirik the Red. Whether the Norsemen were wiped out by returning Eskimos, by pirates then roaming the North Atlantic, or by some natural disaster is unknown. History records only that, in 1586, the English explorer John Davis, seeking the Northwest Passage, put into a Greenland fjord along whose banks a Viking settlement had once burst with energy and throbbed with hope. He may have found some ruins, but no living person - “nor anything, save only gripes, ravens, and small birds, such as larks and linnets.”

The last traces of life in the Eastern Settlement have been found on a farm located on the next fjord over from Eirik’s Brattahlid. There was a barrel with the bones of a hundred mice that had climbed in when it still contained milk and had starved to death when there was no more. Nearby in the farmyard were the bones of a Norseman. He may have been the last descendant of Eirik the Red. Since there was no one left but him, his bones remained where he lay down to die.

The disappearance of the Greenland settlements was only part of a long and sweeping evolution that finally closed out the age of the Vikings. At least in part, the Vikings fell victim to their own extraordinary success.