Question: Who was the first European to discover the Americas? Christopher Columbus? Afraid not. John Cabot? Do me a favour. Today I have found out an astonishing fact, it's worldview-altering effects bettered only by my earlier discovery that the fat one from Blue has OCD. The answer is, glibly glossing over debates over the definition of what is and isn't European: The Vikings! That's right:
The Vikings sailed to and settled in North America.
I came across this information while 'researching' an entirely different discovery: that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis to Europe. As this article demonstrates, however, this is an argument about as watertight as a Kevin Keegan back four. It basically speculates that syphilis probably came from the New World (i.e. places that have been inhabited for millennia but that we had only just started indiscriminately pillaging) and that Chris Columbus returned to Italy from the Caribbean at around the same time that syphilis gripped the city of Naples (Naples is always gripped by something, it seems), suggesting that ol' Chris had in fact been on a very different kind of voyage. Anyway, the train of thought is that syphilis might have come from the New World, and Columbus went there, so it's all his fault. As the academic in the article astutely claims, 'it's a grainy photograph'. As said image apparently concerns the origins of STDs, let's keep it that way.
Anyway, it was while I was browsing a few other Columbo-facts (incuding that the nation of Colombia is named after him [should've worked that out before], that he never set foot in the USA, and that Latin Americans are getting a bit tired of having to celebrate some bloke from Genoa who pretty much destroyed their indigenous way of life) that I discovered that he was among the first Europeans to reach the Americas, after the Vikings. Wait a minute. Vikings? I thought all they did was invade Gateshead, drink mead and write Beowulf. But no, they did indeed settle permanently in Greenland, as well as having settlements on the Eastern Seaboard, generally thought to be either in New England or Newfoundland, Canada.
The historical name for the Viking community is Vinland, thought to mean either: 1. wine-land (bit obvious), 2. a misspelling of Finland (bit tenuous) or 3. pasture-land (third time lucky, eh historians). If you wish to further your studies of Vinland, land of wine and air guitar, here is a quite rubbish Viking map (what staggers me is the enormous difference in accuracy between Europe and North America). Vinland has also been given a natty green flag, which suggests that the Vikings may have been partial to a cream tea or two. And finally - the Vinland flag was devised not by Viking historians, but instead (wait for it) the rock band Type O Negative. You couldn't make it up.
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