HOW EUROPE LOST NORTH AMERICA
BY JAMES R ING A DAMS A 1,000th 38 AMERICAN INDIAN SPRING 2015
nniversary-happy media are missing a really big one. This is the year, more or less, since Europe lost North America. Norsemen from Iceland,
who without serious doubt were the first Europeans to make a foothold on the new continent, ended 15 years of off-and-on settlement, driven out by their crimes against the Native population and against each other. The true first contact between Europeans and North American natives almost cer-
tainly took place around 1000 A.D. along the Newfoundland and Labrador coastline, where Norse explorers encountered the people they called the Skrellings. The honor of “discovering” America belongs to Biarni Heriulfson, a Norse trader who was try- ing to visit his father, Heriulf, at the Greenland settlement founded by Eric the Red around 986 A.D. Biarni was blown off course and sighted several coastlines, including a level, wooded shore, before he turned back and finally enjoyed his family reunion. The Greenland settlement on its treeless southwest coast needed timber and, about
14 years later, Eric’s son Leif Ericsson decided to retrace Biarni’s inadvertent voyage. He bought Biarni’s knarr, an open trading vessel more rounded than the raiding long boats, pulled together a crew of 35 men and set out in the summer of 1001.
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