“They were people who took risks”: the Vikings who reached the Americas 500 years before Christopher Columbus

The Norse discovered Iceland around 870 and Greenland 100 years later. From there it was just 200 miles across Davis Strait to Baffin Island in modern Canada, which they called Helluland, the Land of Slabs. According to the sagas, they followed the coast south to Labrador, or Markland, the land of forests, then further south to what they called Vinland, the land of vines. “The sagas describe not only these guys stopping in one place, but also in multiple places,” Emily Lethbridge of the University of Iceland said on Timewatch in 2016. “And they were gone for several years. They had a whole new world to explore.”