Leif Eriksson is (according to a thirteenth-century…

1000 CE

Leif Eriksson is (according to a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga) commissioned by King Olaf to convert the Greenlanders following his own conversion to Christianity in Norway, but he is blown off course, misses Greenland, and reaches North America in about 1000.

Alternately (as described by another saga from the same period), Leif sails on a planned voyage to lands to the west of Greenland that Bjarni Herjolfsson had sighted fifteen years earlier, landing at places called Helluland (“Slab Land,” a land, northwest of Greenland, of bare rock and glaciers: Baffin Island?) and Markland (“Wood Land,” a low, forested land to the south: Labrador?) and wintered at Vinland (“Wine Land,” a land further south with a mild climate: New England?), remaining there a year.

Leif returns to Greenland (and may indeed have helped to Christianize the colonies there).

In any case, Vikings, probably from Greenland, establish a limited number of settlements on Newfoundland after about 1000.

L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, is the site of a Viking settlement dating from about 1000.

The climate in Newfoundland at this time is significantly warmer than it is today.

This may be the semi-legendary Vinland settlement established by Leif Ericson and described in the later Norse sagas, which describe a colonizing attempt led by Thorfinn Karlsefni, with as many as one hundred and thirty-five men men and fifteen women, who used Leifur's camp, perhaps L'Anse aux Meadows, as a base.

Among them is Freydís Eiríksdóttir, half-sister to Leif.

As recounted in the sagas, Leifur set forth from Greenland to search for the land of which Bjarni Herjólfsson had told him.

He found a land rich with grapes, salmon, and a frost free winter, and returned to harvest lumber to take back to tree-poor Greenland.

L'Anse aux Meadows has been variously identified as: (a) the first camp made, (b) the camp made after fleeing hostile Skrælings ("skrælingar;” possibly the later Beothuks, or Dorset people), or (c) a camp not mentioned in the saga.

While it is not possible to verify that L'Anse aux Meadows is indeed the Vinland of Saga, it is certain that a group of Norse colonists lived here around the year 1000.

The site contains at least eight turf-walled houses, one of which is a longhouse seventy-two feet by fifty feet (twenty-two meters by fifteen meters) containing five rooms including a "great hall," and a smithy, where bog iron is smelted.

The site is only used for two or three years.

It is conjectured, based on both literary and archaeological evidence, that poor relations with natives doomed the settlement to abandonment.

Intergroup conflict over women and unexpected weather have both been suggested as the cause for its abandonment.

L'Anse aux Meadows may also be connected to the Algonquin legend of a Kingdom of Saguenay populated by a race of blond men rich in furs and metals, but this may be only conjecture.

The Mi'qmacs, who speak an Algonquian language most closely related to Cree, are probably the first native American society to encounter Europeans, in the person of these Norse colonists. (Newfoundland’s native Beothuk culture may have actually been the first to encounter the Norse, but as the Beothuks became extinct in the early nineteenth century, the question remains unanswered.)