The Man who Found The Vikings in America

As schoolchildren we all learned the words. 'In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.' And while the Italian explorer who sailed for Spain did, in fact, cross the Atlantic Ocean that year he wasn't the first to do it. He wasn't even the first white man to do it and that's the trouble Helge Ingstad got himself into when he discovered the ruins of a 1,000-year-old Viking settlement in Newfoundland.

It was 1960 and Ingstad, along with his wife Anne, an archaeologist, had already spent a lot of time searching for a place called Vinland that had been written about in old Viking sagas. An expert on Viking history, Ingstad had been looking for Viking ruins in Nova Scotia and along the eastern seabord of the United States, but to no avail. Then one day he came to a small fishing settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows on the coast of Newfoundland.

A local fisherman said there were some Indian ruins about so Ingstad asked to see them. But they weren't old Indian ruins and Ingstad knew it right away. Over the next few years he and his wife led seven archaeological expeditions to the site. They brought along a team of experts from the U. S., Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. Eventually they had what they felt was irrefutable proof; the ruins of eight turf houses of the same type that had been found in old Viking settlements in Iceland and Greenland. They dug up artifacts and used radiocarbon dating that placed them somewhere between 860 A. D. and 1060 A. D. It was time for Christopher Columbus to step aside.

Ingstad died last March at the age of 101. He remains a hero in Norway and something of a legend in Canada, the land he adopted back in 1926 when he left his job as a lawyer in Bergen and chose to live with aboriginals in the harsh Canadian North. "I could have been a rich man," he told me when I came to visit. "But I didn't want to just take a job to make money." And so he quit law and became a hunter and trapper in a hostile environment where there were no other white men. He lived with the native tribes and learned how to survive. Later on he even wrote books about his experiences. 'The Land of the Feast and Famine' is about his four years as a trapper in northern Canada while 'East of the Great Glacier' is about his time as governor in east Greenland. The books are known today to virtually all Norwegian schoolchildren. East Greenland was the same area where noted Viking explorer Eric the Red once lived.

The Viking sagas say that Eric the Red was the son of Thorvald, an exiled murderer who fled from Norway to Iceland. In 982 Eric left Iceland and discovered Greenland where he built houses of stone and turf in the fjords of the southwest coast. Later his son, Leif Ericson, traveled to Baffin Island and called it 'Helluland' which means land of flat stones. He then went south and reached a forested coastline with white sand beaches. This was Labrador and he called it 'Markland' or Woodland. Next he explored down the coast and stopped at a place with good grazing ground, timber and salmon. He built houses and called the area Vinland. According to the sagas, the year was 1001

Armed with his ample knowledge of the Vikings and with seven expeditions at L'anse aux Meadows under his belt, Helge Ingstad was able to construct the story. The Vikings had indeed established a settlement on the coast of Newfoundland at the turn of the millennium. They remained a few years and were driven away by natives, but concrete evidence of their stay remained. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't take very kindly to such a story, especially Italian-Americans and Spanish-Americans for whom the name Columbus is not to be meddled with.

Sigrid Kaland was a student on Ingstad's 1968 dig and one of the things she found on that expedition was a small ringed pin made of bronze. It was used by Vikings to fasten their robe so they were able to draw their sword. The same kind of thing had been found at Viking ruins in Iceland and to Kaland this was evidence of their landing in Newfoundland. But then things got nasty.

"People said the Ingstads were forging evidence," says Kaland who is now an archaeologist and Senior Curator at the Department of Archaeology, University of Bergen, Bergen Museum, in Norway. "They said they had brought these things over from Norway. Who were they? Historians. Well-known historians. Once at a conference I was told to my face that these objects were fake and that really upset me."

But Kaland says Ingstad eventually set the record straight and that was because of his familiarity with the Canadian North. She said he could put himself in the shoes of a Viking which is why he looked for Vinland not from the seaside, but from the landside, and that was how he had found L'Anse aux Meadows in the first place.

When I met Ingstad at his home in the spring of 2000, it was one of the last interviews he ever gave. His voice was frail and his body weak, but his mind was sharp and his memory crisp. The home was in rolling hills outside Oslo and just about everything inside -- including all the furniture -- was made of wood.

There were shelves full of books about the Vikings and the Canadian wilderness, photographs of Canadian Indians and native people all over the walls, and hanging over the doorway to his favorite room the head of a muskox. It was one of Ingstad's hunting trophies and there were many of those. Outside, just beyond the front entrance to the house, was a stable with horses. All in all, it was a beautiful scene and Ingstad was used to it; he'd been living there for half a century.

He spoke with affection about the aboriginals and said their intelligence is at least equal to that of the white man, the implication being that maybe they were even smarter but he didn't come out and say so. However, he did bemoan their losing their culture. Then the talk turned to L'Anse aux Meadows and though Ingstad had been down this road many times before it was obvious he still relished relating the story. He told me about the Newfoundland fisherman who first took him to the ruins thinking they were Indian ruins, and how he and his wife Anne led all those expeditions that flew in the face of the proverbial discoverer of America. But Ingstad got his just desserts; in 1978 L'Anse aux Meadows was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and that made his claim official.

Last summer a series of events was held to mark the millennium of the first North American landing by the Vikings. A Viking village was recreated at Grand Point, Newfoundland, which is near L'Anse aux Meadows. It was filled with 100 actors in period costume who demonstrated Viking crafts and trades. They cooked real Viking food and took part in mock battles. There were even authentic replicas of Viking ships out on the water.

During my stay in Norway I had the honor of paddling on one of these ships myself and it didn't take long to gain appreciation for the task at hand. The paddles were huge -- and heavy -- and were tied to the boat by thick ropes. A few minutes of paddling was more than a casual workout but get a few men doing their thing in tandem and the boat really cut through the water. The one I was on was called the Mjosen Lange, a 33-foot replica of a real Viking ship; the only difference was a compartment for an outboard motor which may have been added just in case modern-day rowers wore themselves out.

In Olso the Vikingship Museum, which is ensconced in the middle of one of the city's most beautiful residential areas, houses three ships as well as countless artifacts found on them. The ships are the Gokstad, an 80-foot monster with room for 32 oarsmen, the Oseberg, 75 feet long with room for 30 oarsmen, and the Tune, a smaller craft that is dwarfed by the other two. They all date from the ninth century which is easy to determine from the number of rings in the wood

Several replicas of Viking ships took part in last year's celebrations in Newfoundland which brought great personal joy to Ingstad. It meant that the naysayers -- all those who doubted his claims -- had finally been outdone.

Last spring Ingstad, then a spry 100, took his last cross-Atlantic trip when he visited Washington, D. C. as the guest of honor at the opening of a $3 million exhibit called 'Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga'. He even made a speech at the opening and this is what he said:

"Down through the centuries the great question was 'Where was Vinland located?' Since the sagas repeatedly mention grapes, it was generally thought that Vinland must have lain fairly far south, in the area where wild grapes grow. Among the suggestions were Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York. A number of investigations were carried out, but no Norse settlements were found. I was one of the few who thought that the descriptions of the grapes and wine were a later addition, with no historical foundation. This was backed up by my countryman, Fridtjob Nansen in 1911 and the Swede Sven Soderbeg in 1898. I also came to the conclusion that Vinland must have been somewhere on the east coast of Newfoundland."

Ingstad handed me the text of his remarks and then elaborated on his great discovery from the comfort of his armchair. "The ruins at L'Anse aux Meadows were very much like the ruins I had seen from the west coast of Norway," he said. "My wife felt pretty certain about it after our first year of exploration. You could tell from the type of the houses. The buildings. It was similar to Viking houses in Iceland and Greenland. Afterward we made finds and radiocarbon dated them to about the year 1000 and that was when Leif Ericson is supposed to have made his journey."

And what about the problems convincing people of the authenticity? Ingstad, a centenarian then but still with enough spirit to engage in a laugh, delivered a hearty one. After settling down, he explained. "A number of archaeologists accepted that this was a Viking settlement from about the year 1000. But there were quite a few people who did not accept it. We were always certain."

And Columbus? What about him? Bergen archaeologist Sigrid Kaland, much to her chagrin, says there are still people even today who won't accept that the Vikings arrived some 500 years before Columbus. "I can never understand why they refuse to believe it," she said. "They were taught that Columbus discovered America and that's what they think. But I dug up these artifacts myself."

As for Ingstad, he told me that he never wished Columbus any disrespect. "Look, Columbus made a wonderful discovery," he said almost apologetically. "But he was a few hundred years later. He didn't discover America. He rediscovered it." Ingstad, a man whose remarkable life could easily be translated into a film, is gone now but the legacy he left us is huge. One might even say the case is closed.