First Arctic Norse voyage to Markland recorded

1118

Icelandic sources from this period mention a bishop of Greenland's Gardar see sailing west to Markland - probably Labrador - on diocesan business. The voyages to the North American mainland continued sporadically from the Greenland colony, two centuries after Leif Erikson. These journeys were likely motivated by the need for timber, a scarce resource in treeless Greenland, where driftwood alone could not sustain a Norse settlement indefinitely.