Thorfinn Karlsefni

Thorfinn Karlsefni led the serious attempt to settle Vinland, about a decade after Leif Eriksson first reached it. He was a wealthy Icelandic trader who came to Greenland and married Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the widow of Leif's brother Thorstein and one of the most travelled women of the age. Around 1010 he sailed west with something like sixty to a hundred and sixty people, depending on which saga is followed, along with livestock, intending to found a colony rather than to explore. The expedition wintered somewhere on the North American coast, traded cloth and milk with the people the Norse called skraelings, and then fell into fighting with them. That was the difficulty the sagas keep returning to: a few shiploads of Norse settlers three weeks' sail from Greenland could not hold ground against a populous country. After two or three years they gave up and returned. His son Snorri, born in Vinland, was the first child of European parents known to have been born in the Americas. Karlsefni went home to farm in northern Iceland, and his descendants included several bishops, which is part of why his voyage was written down at all. The excavation at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in the 1960s confirmed a Norse presence and made the sagas, which had been treated as literature, evidence. The sagas that record him were written two centuries after the voyage and disagree with each other on numbers, routes and even which brother did what, so the detail is unreliable while the fact of the settlement is not. A statue of him by Einar Jonsson stands in Philadelphia, erected in 1920 and toppled into a river in 2018 in a dispute about how the voyages should be commemorated.

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