CHRONOFRAME
Leif Erikson found Vinland. A few years later an Icelandic merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni tried to live there, with women, children and livestock, nearly five centuries before Columbus.
The first Norse voyages to North America were scouting trips. Leif Erikson sailed west from Greenland around the year 1000, built a few houses, gathered timber and went home. What came next was far more ambitious. According to the Icelandic sagas, a wealthy merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni set out to do something no European had tried: settle permanently on the far side of the Atlantic.
A merchant with a plan
Karlsefni came from a prominent family in northern Iceland. His nickname means something like "the makings of a man," a compliment to his character. He arrived in Greenland as a trader, spent the winter with Erik the Red's family, and married Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the widow of Erik's son Thorstein. Over that winter, the talk at Erik's farm kept returning to Vinland, the rich land Leif had found to the southwest.
The Saga of Erik the Red says Karlsefni's expedition sailed in three ships with about 160 people. The Saga of the Greenlanders gives a smaller number, sixty men and five women. Both agree on one detail that set this voyage apart from every earlier one: they brought livestock. Cattle, including a bull, went aboard. You do not carry cows across the North Atlantic for a summer visit. This was a colony.
Down an unknown coast
The saga describes the route in stages. First came Helluland, a land of flat stones, which most scholars place on Baffin Island. Then Markland, a forested land, usually identified with Labrador. Farther south the travellers passed long beaches they called the Wonder Strands and a cape where they found the keel of an old ship.
They spent their first winter at a place they named Straumfjord, the fjord of currents. It went badly. They had arrived too late in the season to prepare, the hunting failed, and food ran short. Only in spring did conditions improve. Some of the party, led by a man named Thorhall the Hunter, gave up and sailed north to look for Vinland on their own. The saga says a storm drove them all the way to Ireland.
The land at Hóp
Karlsefni took the rest south to a lagoon they called Hóp. Here they found what Leif had promised: wild grapes, fields of self-sown wheat, rivers full of fish and woods full of game. In the saga's words, no snow fell there that winter, and the cattle grazed outdoors.
For a while it worked. The colonists met local people, whom they called Skraelings, and traded with them. The Norse offered red cloth and milk; the visitors offered furs and pelts. Archaeologists believe the people they met were ancestors of the Indigenous nations of Atlantic Canada, though which group is still debated.
A bull changes everything
Then came a moment that sounds almost comic in the telling. During one trading visit, Karlsefni's bull broke out of the woods, bellowing. The visitors had never seen such an animal. They ran to their boats in terror. Weeks later they returned in much greater numbers, and this time they came to fight.
The battle went badly for the Norse. The saga describes a strange weapon that flew overhead and landed with a terrible noise, and the colonists fled up the shore. Two Norsemen died, along with several of the attackers. It was in this fight that Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Erik the Red's daughter, made her famous stand.
The first European child born in America
In the middle of this, the colony gained its most famous member. Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri Thorfinnsson. He is the first child of European descent known to have been born in the Americas, centuries before Virginia Dare, who is often given that title in American schoolbooks.
Why they left
Karlsefni realised that a few dozen settlers could not hold the land against people who lived there in large numbers. The land was good, the saga explains, but the colonists could never live there without fear of attack. After about three years in Vinland, the expedition loaded its ships and sailed back to Greenland.
Karlsefni and Gudrid later returned to Iceland and farmed at Glaumbær in the Skagafjörður valley. Their descendants included several medieval Icelandic bishops. Snorri, the boy born in Vinland, inherited the farm.
What the evidence shows
No Norse site has yet been found at Hóp or Straumfjord. The only confirmed Norse settlement in North America is L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which seems to have been a base camp and ship repair station rather than a farm. Butternuts found there show that its occupants did travel farther south, to lands where those trees grow. Karlsefni's attempt to settle Vinland may be the story of that wider world: a real expedition that came, stayed a few years, and decided the price was too high.
Sources: The Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders; Parks Canada, L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Thorfinnr Thordarson (Karlsefni)".
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