Wherever Vinland really was, scholars are more certain that Leif's expedition was not the last Norse venture to North America. The Icelandic sagas claim that three or four more voyages to that region took place between 1000 and 1030. Leif's brother Thorvald was in charge of one of these voyages. He had the second Viking encounter with Native Americans (the first being between the Greenlanders and Eskimo). Thorvald and his followers called them "Skraelings," meaning "wretches." "They were small and evil-looking," Thorvald claimed, "and their hair was coarse. They had large eyes and broad cheekbones."70 For reasons that remain unclear, Thorvald and his men attacked the first natives they saw, and that led to at least two bloody battles. In the last one Thorvald himself was badly wounded and soon afterward died.
Thorfinn Karlsefni, a Viking mariner who lived in Iceland, led the next voyage to North America. Hoping to plant a permanent colony, he brought along more than sixty men, five women, and a large number of sheep and other animals. Thorfinn found Leifsbudir, and he and the others wintered there. During their stay, his pregnant wife had a child, a boy named Snorri, who had the distinction of being the first known person of European stock born in the Americas.
Thorfinn had no less trouble with the natives than Thorvald had. At first the two peoples traded peacefully with each other, but it was not long before they came to blows. Several people were killed on both sides. Probably the continuing danger these natives posed was the primary reason that in the spring, Thorfinn made the decision to abandon the mission and return to Greenland.
Poor relations with the Native Americans was not the only reason that the Vikings eventually gave up on colonizing North America. Evidence shows that the climates of both Newfoundland and Greenland were rapidly growing colder. Also, the Greenlanders came to realize that most of the natural resources they had found in North America could be imported more cheaply from Norway.
In addition, living in Greenland was a difficult struggle in and of itself. The small habitable sections of that island lacked the resources, both natural and human, to maintain, in addition to itself, a large colony lying hundreds of
A modern painting depicts one of the battles between Vikings and American Indians mentioned in the Norse sagas. The Vikings called the Indians "Skraelings."
Miles away. And sure enough, in time the Vikings largely vacated Greenland, too. The last recorded contact between Iceland and the Greenland settlements was in 1410, and those few Viking farmers who stubbornly refused to leave the larger island died not long after that.
By that time the vast majority of Europeans had completely forgotten that those faraway Scandinavian colonies had ever existed. And when a Portuguese explorer, Gaspar Corte-Real, reached Greenland in 1500, he thought he was the first European person to see it. It was he who named it "Terra Verde" (Portuguese for Greenland). Gaspar and his crew certainly had no inkling of the once great era of Viking westward exploration. As scholar Irwin Unger puts it, "As far as Europe was concerned, it was as if the Norse discoveries had never been made."71
World History
