From the Standard American Encyclopedia 1937:
Vinland, the name given to the chief settlement of the early Norsemen in North America. It is undoubtedly represented in modern times by part of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The first that saw it was Bjarne Herjulfson, who was driven thither by a storm in the summer of A.D. 986, when making a voyage from Iceland to Greenland, of which country his father, Herjulf, and Eric the Red were the earliest colonists. But Bjarne did not touch the land, which was first visited by Leif the Lucky, a son of Eric the Red, about A.D. 1000. One part of the country he named Helluland ("Stoneland"); another Markland ("Woodland"), the modern Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; a German in his company having found the grape (most probably the Vitus vulpina) growing wild, as in his native country, Leif called the region Vinland. The natives from their dwarfish size they called skraelings. Two years after Leif's brother, Thorwald, arrived and in the summer of 1003 led an expedition along the coast of New England S., but was killed the year following in an encounter with the natives. The most infamous of the Norse explorers, however, was Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, who had married Gudrid, widow of Thorstein, a son of Eric the Red, and who in 1007 sailed from Greenland to Vinland with a crew of 160 men, where he remained for three years and then returned, after which no further attempts at colonization were made. Rafn, in his Antiquitates Americanae, published the first full collection of the evidence, which proves the pre-Columbian colonization of America. Both he and Finn Magnusen labor to show that Columbus derived his first hints of a new world from the accounts of these old Icelandic expeditions. Finn Magnusen is believed to have established the fact that Columbus did visit Iceland in 1477, 15 years before he undertook his expedition across the Atlantic and so may have heard of the long-abandoned Vinland.
From the Standard American Encyclopedia 1937:
Vinland, the name given to the chief settlement of the early Norsemen in North America. It is undoubtedly represented in modern times by part of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The first that saw it was Bjarne Herjulfson, who was driven thither by a storm in the summer of A.D. 986, when making a voyage from Iceland to Greenland, of which country his father, Herjulf, and Eric the Red were the earliest colonists. But Bjarne did not touch the land, which was first visited by Leif the Lucky, a son of Eric the Red, about A.D. 1000. One part of the country he named Helluland ("Stoneland"); another Markland ("Woodland"), the modern Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; a German in his company having found the grape (most probably the Vitus vulpina) growing wild, as in his native country, Leif called the region Vinland. The natives from their dwarfish size they called skraelings. Two years after Leif's brother, Thorwald, arrived and in the summer of 1003 led an expedition along the coast of New England S., but was killed the year following in an encounter with the natives. The most infamous of the Norse explorers, however, was Thorfinn Karlsefne, an Icelander, who had married Gudrid, widow of Thorstein, a son of Eric the Red, and who in 1007 sailed from Greenland to Vinland with a crew of 160 men, where he remained for three years and then returned, after which no further attempts at colonization were made. Rafn, in his Antiquitates Americanae, published the first full collection of the evidence, which proves the pre-Columbian colonization of America. Both he and Finn Magnusen labor to show that Columbus derived his first hints of a new world from the accounts of these old Icelandic expeditions. Finn Magnusen is believed to have established the fact that Columbus did visit Iceland in 1477, 15 years before he undertook his expedition across the Atlantic and so may have heard of the long-abandoned Vinland.
(post is archived)