The ancients had said the world was a globe. Hundreds of years before Christ, Greek philosophers were sure the world was round. One of them, Eratosthenes, calculated the earth’s circumference to be 40,000 kilometers (amazingly enough today, within 9 kilometers of the meridional figure!) And Strabo, a geographer who lived in the first century, recorded that if it were not for lack of sailing equipment to negotiate the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean one could travel from Spain to India by keeping to the same parallel.
Of course this did not agree with the teachings of the scriptures which spoke of the “four corners of the earth.” All during the dark ages ignorant clerics of the Church preferred to think of the world as a flat platter and pretended to forbid a contrary conception because it did not conform with the Bible. The low level of western culture had blindly accepted the thesis that the inner edges of this platter-like world were inhabited by monstrous creatures, and beyond the edges—a bottomless gulf!
On such grounds most people of the western world still resisted any notion that the world was round. But there was a question in the minds of many.
The Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Arabs had navigated the waters of the Atlantic—so had the Irish and the Vikings who long since discovered and colonized “islands” across the western sea—all without falling off the edges of the world. The Arabs, even now, were making the globes they had made for centuries for their sailors and traders. Many learned men in the west, geographers and scientists, were confident that the world was round; only recently at scholarly Nuremberg a fine globe had been completed showing Asia right across from Spain.
If there were “islands” they could be skirted, large though some of them might be according to the legends and the sagas of ancient mariners. Christopher Columbus, the Genoese sailor, must have heard about these western islands at Iceland when he visited that old Irish-Norse settlement in 1477. Certainly he must have heard much about Greenland.
Greenland, a continent-like island in the west, had been colonized by several thousand Norsemen in the tenth century under the leadership of a red-headed, murderous Icelander named Eric Thorvaldson. From there two of his sons, Leif and Thorvald, an illegitimate daughter named Freydis, and a former daughter-in-law, Gudrid, with her new husband Thorfinn Karlsefni, set out on even more daring trading and colonizing expeditions to other great islands—“the western lands of the world.”
First, Leif, whose conversion to Christianity against his pagan father’s will may have had something to do with his wish to get away, made landings in America in 1003. To Leif it was “White Man’s Land” or “Great Ireland,” for he knew that Christian Irish had preceded him there. There is in fact some evidence today that Celtic missionaries in staunch, hide-covered coracles, and others too, had been crossing the sea and making settlements in America for five hundred years before Leif Ericson sailed west from Greenland. But Leif’s visit is recorded with much more credibleness.
In the tradition of his Viking ancestors Leif and his crew of thirty-five men visited Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and appear to have made their camp for the winter on Cape Cod where they built a good house. There they leisurely cut timber and gathered vines for cargo back to treeless Greenland. Some of the crew shaped a new mast from a tall tree for their dragon ship. Others collected peltries. All marvelled at the mildness of the new country’s climate.
Leif called the land surrounding his camp site “Vinland,” probably because of the abundance of the greenbrier vines which grew there. These made strong, flexible rope material when stripped of their thorns and stranded together. On the other hand the name “Vinland” may have been derived from the grape-vines and wineberries discovered there by Leif’s family retainer, a “southerner” called Tyrker. If this slave came originally from the Mediterranean area as his name might indicate he may well have been the first to recognize grapes and demonstrate their usefulness.
One thing is certain however; the addition of wine to Leif’s already valuable cargo, when he embarked for Greenland the following year, made his expedition most exciting—one to be emulated!