The Man Who Discovered The Americas Before Columbus

A painting by Hans Dahl showing Leif Erikson discovering America.

Wherever one looks, whether it be in textbooks, the internet, or in articles, it is usually established that Christopher Columbus, in 1492, was the one that discovered the Americas. However, very little people know that long before that, a Norse explorer by the name of Leif Erikson had already discovered the Americas.

Leif Erikson was born around the year 970 in Iceland, and he was the son of Erik the Red, who had founded Greenland’s first Norse settlement in 985. Erik the Red had been banished from Norway and then Iceland for manslaughter before he explored Greenland’s western coast and set up the colony, naming it to draw in more Norse settlers. In Norse lore and stories, Leif Erikson is sometimes referred to as “Leif the Lucky.” This nickname for him likely came from his reputation for successful voyages and fortunate discoveries.

In 1000, Leif sailed west from Greenland, at least according to the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red. These two medieval manuscripts were written in Iceland during the 13th century, and they tell the stories of Norse explorations with various details. Anyway, Leif had departed with a crew that consisted of 35 men on a single ship, and he landed in a place called “Vinland,” which was described as having wild grapes, timber, and mild weather. The ship he used for this voyage was probably a knarr, which was a sturdy, 50-foot long Norse cargo vessel built for heavy loads and long journeys on sea. This whole voyage had been inspired by an earlier sighting of land by Bjarni Herjólfsson in 986 CE, but nothing really came of this earlier trip. Bjarni had been a Norse merchant who got blown off course while heading to Greenland and saw an unknown shore, though he didn’t stop to check it out.

Archaeologists found proof of Leif’s trip in the 1960s at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, where they dug up a Norse settlement that’s been dated to around 990–1050 CE using carbon tests on old wood. The site had eight buildings, like longhouses and a forge, plus stuff like iron slag and 99 nails that show the Norse were there working for a while. But unlike Columbus, who kicked off a big wave of European settlement after 1492, Leif’s find didn’t stick around in the same way. The Norse in Greenland, with only about 2,000 people at their peak, didn’t have the manpower or goods to keep Vinland going.

The sagas also mention run-ins with locals they called “Skrælings,” who might’ve been ancestors of the Beothuk people, and that probably didn’t help either. Plus, since they didn’t find gold or anything flashy, the Norse didn’t make a big deal of it, and the story stayed in their sagas until way later. Nowadays, that L’Anse aux Meadows spot is a UNESCO World Heritage site, named in 1978, and the U.S. even has a Leif Erikson Day on October 9, set by Congress in 1964, though it’s still not as famous as Columbus’s story.