Who, besides the indigenous peoples from Asia who crossed the Alaskan land bridge in prehistory, arrived in the Americas before Columbus? The question has fascinated generations of scholars. Could a Chinese tribute ship, as Gavin Menzies proposed in 2002, have departed from the rest of the Ming fleet in East Africa in 1421 and sailed to North and South America, Australia and the Arctic? Could fishing vessels from the British port of Bristol, as David Beers Quinn suggested in 1974, have followed schools of cod across the north Atlantic and reached the fishing grounds off the Canadian shore in 1480 or 1481? No persuasive evidence supports the claim about the 15th-century Chinese. The voyages of the Bristol cod fishermen are more likely, but no documentation concerning them predates 1492, possibly because they wanted to keep the location of the fishing grounds secret.
The most credible claim – that the Vikings reached North America around the year 1000 – deserves more attention. It arose in the 19th century, following the publication of C C Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanae (1837), which proposed that the place the Icelandic sagas called Vinland (meaning ‘vine land’) was located somewhere near Cape Cod in Massachusetts, or the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. (The Vinland Sagas refers to two different orally transmitted sagas about these early voyages: Erik the Red’s saga was written down shortly after 1264, and the Greenlanders’ saga was copied into a collection of different materials in 1387.)
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