The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500

It’s now typically accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland throughout the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent nearly a thousand years in the past, however what occurred on this huge space in the course of the subsequent 5 hundred years has lengthy been a supply of disagreement amongst students. Utilizing new archeological, scientific, and documentary info (a lot of it in Scandinavian languages which can be a bar to most Western historians), this e-book confronts most of the unanswered questions on early exploration and colonization alongside the shores of the Davis Strait.

The creator brings collectively two distinct however tangential fields of inquiry: the historical past of medieval Greenland and its connections with the Norse discovery of North America, and fifteenth-century British maritime historical past and pre-colonial voyages to North America, together with that of John Cabot. With a view to consider the state of affairs in Norse Greenland on the finish of the fifteenth century (when documented English and Portuguese voyages of northern exploration started), the creator follows the colony’s improvement―its home financial system and international commerce and its cultural and ecclesiastical affinities―from its inception within the tenth century. Within the course of, she appears to be like critically at generally held views which have gone unchallenged till now.

Among the many questions on which the creator units forth new proof and conclusions are: the extent to which Greenlanders explored and exploited North America after Leif Eriksson, the explanations for the baffling disappearance of the Norse settlement in Greenland, the connection between their disappearance and the start of the voyages of exploration that started round A.D. 1500, the routes by which info regarding earlier voyages traveled, the historical past earlier than Cabot of the advance of English fishing fleets from Icelandic waters to the coasts of Labrador, and the affect of the roman Catholic Church on Norse Greenland.