WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA?

MOVE OVER, COLUMBUS; THE VIKINGS ARE COMING TO CRASH THE FESTIVITIES.

Standing on the deck of a longboat under full sail through the seemingly
impenetrable fjords of Norway, one begins to appreciate the Vikings' marauding
conquests across Europe, and why they came to be the first settlers of the New
World 500 years before Columbus. One look at Norway's snowy, forested,
mountainous terrain-with barely 3 percent arable land-will quickly reveal the
need to take to water and conquer new lands: Iceland in 860, Greenland circa
930, and finally North America in the year 1000. From Greenland it was an
easy 17 days sail to L'Anse au Meadow in Newfoundland.

The introduction to The Vinland Sagas, two medieval Icelandic sagas that
documented the discoveries, describes how the outlawed Eric the Red fled from
Iceland to Greenland and established a colony; how a young merchant called
Bjarni Herjolfsson, headed for Greenland, was blown off course across the
Atlantic and sighted unknown lands; and how some 15 years later, Leif Ericson,
son of Eric the Red, bought Herjolfsson's ship and steered it back to the New
World to investigate Herjolfsson's chance sighting. According to the sagas,
Ericson and his crew of 35 found "wild grapes in profusion, rolling grasslands,
vast stretches of towering timber, an abundance of game of all kinds, rivers
teeming with giant salmon, meadows rich with a harvest of wild wheat, and a
climate so kind that winter frosts were hardly known." A Norse settlement
established at L'Anse au Meadow lasted at least 20 years.

North America's present inhabitants may be forgiven for experiencing something
of a deja vu, when, like a dawn raid out of the mists of time, Viking ships will
again be sighted offshore this autumn. True to form, those pesky old Vikings
have again taken to their longboats in a bid to steal the thunder of next year's
elaborate Columbus fivehundredth anniversary celebrations. "Quite simply, the
idea was, Bugger Columbus, the Vikings got there first," says Judy Lomax, who
together with her husband, former BBC film director David Lomax, is working on a
film and book about the voyage. The Lomaxes first thought of the idea of
retracing the Viking voyage and then discovered that the celebrated Norwegian
seaman Ragner Thorseth was involved in a project to build exact replicas of
three original Viking ships found perfectly preserved under burial mounds. One
replica ship, Gaia, piloted by Thorseth, departed Bergen in Norway on May 17.
Two other replicas, Osberg and Saga Siglar, were freighted to Halifax, Nova
Scotia. The three ships will sail together from there.

Ports of call along the East Coast include Boston (September 11), Newport, Rhode
Island (September 20), New York (September 25), and Washington (October 9--Leif
Ericson Day). The ships will remain in each port for several days.

Central to the voyage of Gaia is a campaign, first proposed by Iceland's
president, Vigdis Finnbogadittir, to protect the earth's fragile environment.
The message has found a strong supporter in shipping tycoon Knut Kloster, who
has financed the whole voyage at a cost $2.5 million. "Why are we doing this?
It's really to show that today we need the spirit of exploration and discovery,
the willingness to take risks, to set a ne course," Kloster says.

The obvious question: How much did Columbus know about the Viking voyages 500
years before his "discovery"? A lot, perhaps. Some historians speculate that
the Viking voyages to the New World were known in certain circles in the
fifteenth century. But before the descendants of the Vikings or Columbus grab
all the glory for themselves, remember there's a legend that America was
discovered in sixth century by the Irish monk Saint Brendan the Navigator.

But as one observer notes "There may have been other people before Columbus, but
when Columbus discovered the New World, it stayed discovered."