In September 2002, archaeologist John Steinberg of the University of California at Los Angeles announced that he had uncovered the remains of a turf mansion in Iceland that he believes is the house where Thorfinn, Gudrid and Snorri lived out their days. Just where the family ended up in Iceland has been a mystery that historians and archaeologists have long tried to clear up. (Archaeologists have found arrowheads with the remains of buried Norse explorers.) After sailing to Greenland and then Norway, Thorfinn and his family settled in Iceland, Thorfinn’s childhood home. About three years after starting out, Thorfinn-along with his family and surviving crew-abandoned the North American settlement, perhaps in a hail of arrows. Thorfinn and his band found their promised riches-game, fish, timber and pasture-and also encountered Native Americans, whom they denigrated as skraelings, or “wretched people.” Little wonder, then, that relations with the Natives steadily deteriorated. Snorri, the son of Thorfinn and his wife, Gudrid, is thought to be the first European baby born in North America. Following the route that had been pioneered some seven years before by Leif Eriksson, Thorfinn sailed up Greenland’s coast, traversed the Davis Strait and turned south past Baffin Island to Newfoundland-and perhaps beyond. Roughly 1,000 years ago, the story goes, a Viking trader and adventurer named Thorfinn Karlsefni set off from the west coast of Greenland with three ships and a band of Norse to explore a newly discovered land that promised fabulous riches.
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