Author Says Norsemen Made It All The Way to the West Coast. Regular readers of TBR are well aware that the Vikings surely sailed in Hudson Bay and explored eastern North America, penetrating as far as what we now call Minnesota and the Dakotas and as far south as New England. (See the May/June 2012 and May/June 2015 TBR editions.) But wait—did they also navigate along the West Coast of North America? Here author Philip Rife brings us even more evidence of ancient European explorers in old America.
Some evidence of a Viking (Norse) presence in pre-Columbian North America is widely known. Their settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is a Canadian national historic site; Minnesota’s famous Kensington rune stone is housed in its own museum; the Heavener rune stone in eastern Oklahoma has a state park devoted to it; and a series of Viking mooring stones are featured in North Dakota’s tourist literature.
Much less well known is evidence suggesting that intrepid Viking explorers also reached the continent’s Pacific coast.
“Vinland” was the name the Vikings gave to a temperate land they discovered somewhere to the west of Greenland. Most conventional historians speculate that Vinland was located somewhere in one of Canada’s eastern maritime provinces or the Northeastern U.S.
But a few maverick researchers propose a quite different candidate: Maryland-sized Vancouver Island in Canada’s west coast province of British Columbia. [Read the entire article as a PDF…]
Taken from
The Barnes Review, November/December 2016: Viking America
Volume XXII, Number 6