Leif Erikson makes landfall in Vinland

1000

Blown off course from Greenland, the Norse captain stepped ashore on a wooded coast where wild grapes hung thick enough to name the place. Archaeologists would one day uncover the sod houses at L'Anse aux Meadows, the first proven European settlement in the Americas, predating Columbus by nearly five centuries and rewriting the story of transatlantic contact.