Erik the Red Discovers Greenland

In the early 980s, an Icelandic-based Norseman named Erik Thorvaldsson, known as Erik the Red, explored the coast of an unknown land to the west and later led settlers there. He called it Greenland. The voyage opened the way for roughly four and a half centuries of European settlement in the Arctic and set the stage for the later Norse journeys to North America. The year 982 is the traditional date given by the sagas, though it should be treated as approximate.

Erik was born in Norway, and his father was outlawed for killing someone, which led the family to emigrate to Iceland. There Erik himself became embroiled in violent feuds. According to the Icelandic sagas, chiefly the Saga of Erik the Red and the Book of the Icelanders, he was outlawed from Iceland for three years after killings connected to a dispute with neighbors. Iceland had been settled only a century earlier, and good farmland was already scarce, which gave ambitious men extra reason to look elsewhere. Sailors had also reported sighting land to the west, most notably a man named Gunnbjorn, whose earlier sighting is mentioned in later accounts.

Erik used his exile to explore. The sagas say he sailed west, rounded the southern tip of the new land, and spent the three years investigating its fjords and coasts, naming places and judging where farming might be possible. The southwest of Greenland had sheltered fjords with grass, driftwood and abundant seabirds, seals and fish. When his sentence ended, he returned to Iceland and encouraged others to follow him. The name "Greenland" was, according to the saga, a deliberate piece of marketing meant to attract colonists, though some scholars think it may also reflect the real lushness of the fjord heads in summer.

Around 985, a fleet of settlers sailed under Erik's leadership. Not all the ships arrived, since some were lost or turned back, but those that did established two main clusters: the Eastern Settlement and the Western Settlement, both on the southwest coast. Erik took up an estate called Brattahlid. At their height the colonies probably held a few thousand people, who raised cattle and sheep, hunted walrus and seal, and traded walrus ivory and other Arctic goods with Europe.

The legacy is considerable. Erik's son Leif is traditionally credited with a voyage to a place called Vinland, and archaeology at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland confirms a Norse presence in North America around the year 1000. The Greenland colonies endured until the 1400s, then faded, probably because of a combination of climate cooling, shrinking trade and other pressures, though historians still debate the exact causes.