INTRODUCTION
Lost at Sea
If at first you don’t succeed … You’re not the only one. In fact, you’re in pretty good company.
The Age of Exploration was an era of discovery. Fearless pioneers set sail into the unknown in search of new lands, adventure, and fortune. At a time when most of the world was still a mystery, these brave souls risked everything to glimpse what lay beyond the horizon. By land and sea, early explorers traveled to the far corners of the globe—and occasionally found themselves hopelessly lost.
On October 7, 1492, Christopher Columbus stood on the rocking deck of the Santa María, gazing out at uncharted waters, with all the confidence of Captain Kirk. Though he was sailing headfirst into unfamiliar territory, Columbus was certain that he’d be setting foot on Chinese land at any minute.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of his eighty-seven crew members. They had been at sea with Columbus for twenty-nine days. That’s twenty-nine days without fresh supplies. Twenty-nine days drifting in the middle of the ocean with nothing but water as far as the eye can see in every direction.
Have you ever been on a really boring car ride? Like, your parents want to visit some park in the middle of nowhere, so you spend all day driving down the highway without anything exciting to look at or anything fun to do except listen to your dad sing a bunch of dorky songs you’ve heard a million times? For the crew of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, traveling with Columbus was kind of like that. Except, instead of eight hours in a car, they’d been at sea for an entire month. Oh, and there weren’t any gas stations to buy snacks, so if they ate all their food, they would starve to death.
“Are we there yet?” one guy may have mumbled as he munched on a stale biscuit, looking with sad eyes at the shrinking pile of food in the ship’s hold.
Throughout the Age of Exploration, the life of a seafarer could be so unpleasant that English writer Samuel Johnson once said it was like being in jail, but with the added possibility of drowning. If the dangers of sea travel weren’t bad enough, the awful conditions aboard the ship might make you want to take your chances in the open ocean.
The food was as terrible as it was limited. The most common food available was barrels of old salted meat and this really gross stuff called “hardtack,” which was just flour and water—basically a rock made of gluten. Scurvy was a constant problem among the crew because of the lack of veggies. Bugs and rats were everywhere, and disease was rampant. Hygiene was nonexistent, and everything smelled horrible. Many people died from minor infections due to minor injuries or by getting knocked overboard while trying to rig up the sails.
The crew worked four-hour duty shifts, day and night, and slept packed together on the floor or in hammocks in the cramped, dark, stuffy space belowdecks. Sea shanties, card games, and gallons of whiskey were all that kept them going at times.
Disobedience was answered with a whipping or time in the brig. Mutiny, if unsuccessful, was met with death.
Now, twenty-nine days into their mission, Columbus’s crew members had all come to the same conclusion—they were almost at the point of no return. These hardened sailors knew the ships were carrying about sixty day’s worth of supplies, and if Columbus didn’t turn back really soon, the crew wouldn’t have enough food to get them all home alive …
CHAPTER 1
Vikings in America
1000–1020
“Leif set sail when he was ready; he ran into prolonged difficulties at sea, and finally came upon lands whose existence he had never suspected.”
—The Saga of Erik the Red
The first European to discover America was a Viking. A Viking named Leif Erikson, to be exact.
The Vikings were fierce and often bearded seafarers who lived in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway between AD 793 and 1066. They are, perhaps, best known today for terrorizing their European neighbors by plundering, pillaging, and burning cities to the ground. The Vikings were tough, terrifying warriors you wouldn’t want to encounter in battle—on land or sea. They were well-known for their skills at sailing and navigation. They spent a good three hundred years striking fear into the hearts of anyone unfortunate enough to come within rowing distance of their awesome dragon-headed longships.
Erik the Red, in particular, is remembered as one of the toughest Vikings in all of history. Which is nothing to sneeze at.
Erik was known as “the Red” not because he’d get so mad that his face would turn crimson, but because he had really long red hair and a huge, bushy red beard. He was born in Norway about 950 and spent his early years putting on armor; grabbing a huge, two-handed battle-ax; and raiding unsuspecting European villages—reducing them to charred rubble. Things went well until, in 980, Erik and his dad got into a fight with their neighbors that resulted in, as the sagas put it, “some killings.” Convicted of murder, Erik and his pops were kicked out of Norway. They boarded a wooden ship and sailed west to the recently colonized Viking realm of Iceland.
Erik and his dad were pretty happy in Iceland for a while. (It’s actually green and lush and not as miserable as it sounds.) Erik got married, had some kids, one of them being the intrepid Leif Erikson, bought a farm, and captured a bunch of Irish and English villagers to work as his slaves. But he still wasn’t a particularly chill dude, so it wasn’t long before his old life caught up to him. One day, some of Erik’s slaves were working in a field when they accidentally caused a rockslide, which crushed the house of Erik’s neighbor. The neighbor got mad and killed the slaves, which wasn’t very smart, because Erik became furious and killed him with a sword. The dead neighbor’s best friend was Hrafn the Dueler, who, as his name might suggest, challenged Erik to a duel. So Erik killed that guy, too. A few weeks after that, Erik lent some benches to a different neighbor, a guy named Thorgest. Thorgest didn’t return the benches, and when Erik went over to ask him about it, Thorgest got mad. Swords were drawn, and in the ensuing fight, Erik went berserk and killed Thorgest, both of Thorgest’s adult sons, and “certain other men” (whatever that means).
Naturally, Erik was exiled from Iceland for three years.
Unsure where to go next, Erik decided to sail west, toward a “bleak land of ice” that hadn’t truly been explored before. Erik braved a storm, dodged ship-destroying icebergs in his wooden boat, and sailed to a mysterious new world. He spent his exile in this bleak land of ice all alone, living off the land, discovering fjords and forests and mountains, and naming pretty much everything he found after himself. Everything, that is, except the island itself. He decided to call that Greenland, because, in his words, “people would be more eager to go there if it had a good name.”
Upon his return to Iceland, Erik the Red, a man convicted of murder more than once, somehow convinced four hundred people to travel to a land covered completely in ice and build a colony at a place he named Eriksfjord.
Unexpectedly, Erik settled down after this, ruling over Eriksfjord as a jarl (a minor lord) for a few more decades without killing anyone. He had three kids—Leif, Thorvald, and Freydis. All three would go on to have adventures in North America. From this unlikely beginning, the discovery of America began.
Erik’s oldest son, Leif, went first. When Leif was just a boy, a man named Bjarni Herjolfsson came to Erik’s court with an interesting tale. Bjarni had been sailing to Eriksfjord, but he had gotten lost during a storm and accidentally discovered a mysterious land far to the west. Realizing he wasn’t in Greenland, Bjarni quickly turned around and found his way to Eriksfjord.
Leif’s mind was blown by this story. What was this mysterious land? It didn’t appear on any map. It was vast, strange, and uncharted. An awesome place for a young adventurer to make his name.
Years later, Leif Erikson bought Bjarni’s boat, hired some of his crew, and grilled Bjarni for detailed information and maps about where this land might be. Then, in 1000, Leif Erikson and thirty rowers took Bjarni’s ship and rowed it west into unknown, uncharted waters.
In an open-topped, multi-oared longship with snarling dragons carved into its sides, the Vikings rowed through freezing waters, intense winds, driving rain, and deadly waves. The sky was black, and storms hammered the ship, sometimes for days at a time. Many men worried about sea monsters eating them, being lost forever at sea, or even falling off the edge of the earth. But then, amazingly, after days of rowing, an incredible thing appeared on the horizon:
North America.
Leif Erikson and his crew first landed at a place we know today as Baffin Island, Canada, but Leif Erikson had a different name for it: Helluland. It means “Slab Land,” because Leif thought it looked like a big slab of miserable nothingness. It was boring, and he didn’t like it. He told his crew to get back on the ship and start rowing south. After a brief stop in another boring place, which he named Markland, meaning “Wood Land,” because it had a bunch of trees, Leif finally landed in an area different from all the others.
It was a vast, sunny land full of forests, green meadows, golden fields of wheat, and clusters of wild grapes that could be turned into wine. Leif called this place Vinland, meaning “Wine Land.” He was so pleased with it that he pulled over the ship and had his men build a settlement there. They constructed turf-roofed houses and built a blacksmith shop, a lumberyard, a winery, and even a sauna. They repaired some wear-and-tear damage to their ship, relaxed in the hot springs, and spent the entire summer chilling out in their North American party pad. And when the following spring came along, the Vikings sailed back, and every man on the adventure returned home to Greenland a hero.
Unfortunately, when Leif got home, he received some bad news—Erik the Red had died while Leif was gone. Leif was now the jarl of Eriksfjord, and that meant he couldn’t go on any more expeditions. So, instead, he sent his siblings, Freydis and Thorvald, to continue exploring Vinland.
Unfortunately, Freydis and Thorvald’s expedition wasn’t nearly as successful as their brother’s. When their expedition reached Vinland, they ran into some unexpected guests: a group of terrifying warriors they referred to as skrellings.
Now, skrellings is just the Norse word for fairies, elves, leprechauns, and basically anything else the Vikings couldn’t identify. Today, we’re pretty sure these skrellings weren’t Dark Elves but were in fact either Beothuk or Mi’kmaq Native Americans.
Now, though a handful of men claimed to have “discovered” the Americas, before any intrepid explorers landed on its shores, millions of people populated the continent: hundreds of tribes of indigenous Americans. They may not have had gunpowder, steel, or marble statues of dudes in togas, but they did have agriculture, complex trade networks, and sophisticated political structures long before any Europeans arrived.
The Native Americans approached the Vikings with their war paint on, wielding bows, spears, and tomahawks, and they spoke a strange language the Vikings had never heard before. The Beothuk weren’t happy that these Vikings were building structures on their land, and the Vikings weren’t exactly easy people to get along with, so naturally, as you might expect, a fight broke out—Native American warriors versus ferocious Vikings in a brutal life-or-death battle.
The Beothuk took the advantage, because the Vikings were unfamiliar with the land and these strange warriors. Thorvald was killed by an arrow, and when he fell, the Vikings ran for it. But Freydis refused to retreat. She pulled a bloody sword from the hand of a dead Viking warrior, pounded her chest, and ran screaming toward the attackers. Freydis was approximately eight months pregnant at the time, and the Beothuk didn’t really know what to make of this. When they slowed down, the Vikings regrouped and forced them to retreat. Freydis would later go on to kill five women with an ax in an argument over grapes, so it’s probably a good idea they didn’t try to mess with her.
The Vikings would stay in Vinland for three more years. The first European child born in the New World was Freydis’s son Snorri, who was born a few weeks after the fight. At one point, up to a hundred Vikings were living in Vinland, and they had even begun to make peace and trade with the Beothuk. Ultimately, however, the travelers decided that Vinland was too far from home and that it wasn’t worth all the fighting with the Beothuk. So by 1020, the Vikings packed up and returned to Greenland. No European would set foot in the New World for five hundred more years, and the land Leif discovered vanished off the maps until Columbus rediscovered it.
Interestingly, the Vikings wrote all this down in an old book they called The Saga of the Greenlanders. The story had been told since the 1000s, but over time, so many people forgot about the New World that eventually historians and scholars dismissed the saga as a legend—a work of fiction. In fact, nobody believed Leif’s story was true until 1960, when a group of researchers found ruined Viking structures and artifacts at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. Carbon 14 testing confirmed these items had been placed there around the year 1020.
The Vikings truly had been to North America. And they’d gone there over 450 years before Columbus.
Text copyright © 2019 by Erik Slader and Ben Thompson