Born around 970 in Norse Iceland

Leif Erikson was the Norse explorer who reached North American shores roughly five hundred years before Columbus. His life is known through two Icelandic sagas composed in the thirteenth century: the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red. Born around 970, he was the son of Erik the Red, the outlaw who founded Greenland's Norse colony after exile from Norway and then Iceland.

According to the sagas, a merchant named Bjarni Herjolfsson had been blown off course west of Greenland and sighted unfamiliar coastline without going ashore. Leif bought Bjarni's ship, assembled a crew of thirty-five, and sailed west to find the reported territory.

Sailing south and west, he first reached a barren coast of flat rock and glaciers that he named Helluland, likely modern Baffin Island. Continuing south he found a forested shore he called Markland, probably Labrador. Finally he landed on a temperate coast where wild grapes grew and named it Vinland. The crew built timber houses, spent one winter gathering resources, then returned to Greenland with a full cargo of wood.

Leif never returned to Vinland. He became a chieftain in Greenland and, at the request of Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, introduced Christianity to the Greenland settlers. He died around 1019. His siblings Thorvald and Freydis led subsequent Vinland voyages, establishing small settlements that failed due to conflict with indigenous peoples and the colony's isolation from Greenland.

For centuries the voyage survived only in manuscripts and oral tradition. In the 1960s Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated Norse ruins at L'Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland's northern tip, proving that Norse sailors reached North America around 1000. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today October 9 is Leif Erikson Day in the United States, honoring the Norse achievement.