For that matter, he failed to establish trade with the lands he visited, or to found any lasting settlements there. Today we may note that he didn’t know he had discovered America, but thought instead that he was many thousands of miles away in India. The established view of history sets out that in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out from Spain with three ships, sailed across the unknown ocean with his sailors in fear of falling off the edge of a flat world, and discovered America. Viking Greenland emerges as the starting point for exploration of three widely separated areas of the American continent: the east coast, the far north and Hudson Bay. Furthermore, 1,000 miles west from Greenland in Hudson Bay and its vicinity we have evidence of Viking presence, and can place the Vikings at the centre of the North American continent.

Today we must accept the evidence of that the Vikings, against all expectations, in fact reached the High Arctic. Here Viking archaeological remains have been found in some of the most unlikely locations, in lands no-one would have dreamed the Vikings could ever have reached. A thousand miles north from Greenland the Vikings reached the High Arctic. A thousand miles south from Greenland is the archaeological site of L’Anse aux Meadows, a staging post on the journey to what they called Vinland, east-coast America. From their base in the Viking colony of Greenland – itself strictly part of the American continent – we now know that the Vikings explored in three different directions. And, he argues, the name the Vikings gave to this New World was America.įor the Vikings did a lot more than just visit a few places in Newfoundland or elsewhere on the American east coast. From New York's Long Island to the Canadian High Arctic, the New World was a playground for Viking adventurers. For four centuries or more, from their first visits around AD 1000 to the eve of the Columbus voyages, the Vikings explored and settled thousands of miles of the coasts and rivers of North America. In this groundbreaking new work by the author of The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland, the true extent of the Viking discovery and colonization of the eastern seaboard of North America is fully examined, taking into account the new archaeological, linguistic, and DNA evidence that supplements the historic account. When Columbus claimed to have discovered America in 1492 and the Borgia pope declared it a New World for Catholic Spain, the Vatican started a five-hundred-year conspiracy to conceal the true story of Viking America.

Discover the evidence that Vikings walked on American soil-centuries before Columbus.

Vikings in America by Graeme Davis