Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, lies within the Gulf of St Lawrence, surrounded by Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Labrador and the island of Newfoundland.
OLAF Tryggvason became a Christian while visiting the Isles of Scilly in 988,* and after he came to the throne of Norway in 995, he entrusted Leif Ericson, a royal bodyguard and a fellow-Christian, with the conversion of the Orkneys and of Greenland, Leif’s home.
However, Leif’s ship was driven far off her homeward course.* When at last he sighted land, it was not Greenland, nor anywhere he knew. But he remembered that his father Eric’s friend Bjarni Herjólfsson had reported seeing land far out west. More curious than Bjarni, Leif came ashore, and found two fellow-Scandinavians there, survivors of a shipwreck.*
On his return to Greenland, Leif mounted a full-scale expedition in Bjarni’s ship: his brief glimpse had promised salmon, maples for timber, and vines, and he was not disappointed. Leif established a permanent outpost there at the Gulf of St Lawrence, in what he called Vinland, and his merchants became the first European settlers in North America.
Olaf was an exile, and a former soldier at Novgorod in the service of Vladimir of Kiev. In 984 his wife Geira died, and Olaf went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage around the British Isles. His wrath having cooled a little, he visited the Isles of Scilly, where was converted by an unnamed hermit and baptised.
For a map of the Europe-wide spread of the Vikings from the eighth century to the eleventh, including Leif’s expedition to Vinland, see Voyages of the Vikings. The city on the Black Sea marked Miklagard is Constantinople, or Istanbul. See our post Welcome to Micklegarth.
These two shipwrecked mariners were the first recorded Europeans to set foot in North America, not Leif Ericson, nor Home Page in 1497.
Précis
Leif Ericson was a Viking from Greenland at the turn of the 11th century, who was commissioned by the King of Norway to evangelise his homeland. On his voyage home, he was blown off course to Newfoundland. He soon returned there to establish a trading post, making him the first European known to have founded a settlement in North America. (60 / 60 words)
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