Vinland

Vinland or Wineland, name given to that part of North America first seen in or about 986 by Bjarni Herjólfsson, who was driven there by a storm during a voyage from Iceland to Greenland. The land was not explored and named until several years later, when it was visited by the Icelandic navigator Leif Eriksson, who sailed south along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland (now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador); he called this area Wineland, because of the number of grapes growing here.

Carl Christian Rafn, the Danish philologist and antiquary, in his Antiquitates Americanae (1837), set forth such evidence as then existed regarding colonization in America by the Vikings. To this work may be traced the popular but unfounded belief that the Old Mill at Newport, Rhode Island, the stone inscriptions at Dighton Rock, Massachusetts, and other such signs of habitation can be ascribed to the Vikings. Excavations of an early settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in northern Newfoundland, correspond to Eriksson's descriptions of Vinland.