L'Anse-aux-Meadows and the Vikings
By Cal Coish

L'Anse-aux-Meadows is a small fishing community near the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula. It is situated between Cape Onion and Cape Bauld. About 40 people live year-round in the community of L'Anse-aux -Meadows.

Many people believe L'Anse-aux-Meadows is the place the Vikings called Vinland. Around 1,000 A.D., Leif Ericsson, who is also known as Leif the Lucky, is believed to have landed at L'Anse-aux-Meadows. The next spring, Leif and his crew returned to Greenland with a load of timber and grapes. Some people think the "grapes" might have been berries. Bakeapples, blueberries, and partridge berries grow in many parts of Newfoundland and Labrador. The next year, Leif's brother, Thorvald, made a voyage to Vinland. This trip lasted three years. Thorvald was murdered by the natives.

About 10 years later, a Norwegian sea captain brought sixty people, along with livestock and supplies, to Vinland. Later that fall, his wife gave birth to a son named Snorri. Snorri was the first white child born in North America. The Vikings again clashed with the natives and gave up this attempt to settle at Vinland.

Helge Ingstad is a Norwegian explorer and author. In 1960, a fisherman named George Decker led the explorer to a site local people called "the old Indian Camp" in Sacred Bay. For the next eight years, Ingstad and his wife uncovered the ruins at L'Anse-aux-Meadows. They found the remains of several houses, including one eighty feet long. They also found a sauna, a cooking pit, a charcoal pit and smithy, and several shallow depressions which could have been Norse boatsheds. The Ingstads and their workers also dug up a stone lamp, a spindle whorl (spinning stone), a bronze pin common to Norse cultures of the eighth and ninth centuries, a bone needle, and iron nails and fragments. Around 2,400 items have been found at the site.

In 1968, the Canadian Government declared L'Anse-aux-Meadows a site of historic significance. In 1977, Parks Canada took control of the find and declared it a National Historic Site. The United Nations declared L'Anse-aux-Meadows a World Heritage Site in 1978. In the summer of 1988, a Viking ship called the Gaia, crossed the Atlantic from Iceland and anchored off L'Anse-aux-Meadows. The Viking site at L'Anse-aux -Meadows now has several sod houses like those used by the early Vikings.