Iceland was settled by Vikings from Norway in 874. In the year 876, 616 years before Columbus set foot in the Americas Gunnbjøor Ulfson visited Greenland. He described the highest mountains in the area where he landed so well that one if officially named after him today. After one disastrous attempt to colonize the area, Eric Thorvaldson (Eric the Red) started a successful settlement with 600 Icelanders in 982. It was his son Leif Ericsson (970-1020) that made the first European landing in North America. Leif was born in Iceland, grew up in Greenland and visited to Norway in 999. According to the saga of Eric the Red, Leif made his discovery of North America after losing his way on the return to Iceland from Norway in the year 1000. Another account (in the Saga of the Greenlanders) has him organizing an expedition from Greenland sometime between 1000 and 1002 to investigate a sighting of land with plenty of wood to the southwest of Greenland made by Biarni Heriulsson in 986, when he was blown off course on a voyage. The primary aim of the expedition was really to find building materials since neither Greenland or Iceland had any trees. Leif made three landing on his trip at Helluland (the land of flat stones), Markland (woodland) and Vinland. Wineland was in old likelihood located in what we today call New England. In these sagas Leif Eriksson describes his landing in an area of ample pastures, grapevines and salmon. The northern limit for wild vine is in Maine and the southern limit for salmon is in Rhode Island. Unfortunately there are no archaeological finds to back up any Norse settlements in New England (except for a few proven fakes that you an read about in Erik Wahlgren’s The Vikings and America, Thames and Hudson, London 1986). An educated guess would locate Leif’s settlement Leifsbudir to the Passamaquoddy bay right at the USA-Canada border. Leif’s brother Thorwald spent two summers at Leifsbudir and encountered a band of natives that he killed resulting in his own death in a later attack. The Icelandic sagas detail six trips to Vinland, but until any archaeological finds in New England can back up the obvious, most scientists weave their Vinland theories around the proven Norse settlement in L’anse aux Meadows in labrador where no vines are known to have existed. L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland was discovered by the Norwegian archaeologist Helge Ingstad in 1960, after years of searching for proof that the Vikings and to columbus were the first Europeans to reach North America. A carbon 14 test revealed that some Scandinavian-looking ruins of sodhouses in a meadow could be dated to about 1000 AD. Inside the rectangular sod-houses were slightly raised seats and sleeping platforms along the walls. The discoveries of a ring, bone needle and iron rivets leave no doubt about the Norse settlement on mainland North America. More proof of Viking settlements on the North American mainland rests no doubt in the Vatican archives. Leif Eriksson became a Christian in Norway and his mother built the first church on the continent of North America. The Greenland settlement was so established that the Vatican even sent a bishop with the name Arnald to the Icelandic settlement in 1126 who built both a residence and a cathedral with glass windows here three hundred years before Columbus reached the continent