I love history – all of it – so my mind likes to place myself in a certain place and time and imagine myself there as an observer.
Imagine seeing North America for the first time.
Not from 35,000 feet while approaching Toronto or New York. Not on a map, satellite image or television screen. Imagine standing aboard a wooden ship in the North Atlantic sometime around the year 986 and seeing an unfamiliar coastline emerge from the mist.
You don’t know what’s there or how far the land extends or that you’ve just seen a continent. You don’t know whether anyone lives there. If people do, you don’t know whether they are friendly, hostile or technologically more advanced than you are.
That was roughly the situation facing Bjarni Herjólfsson, one of those fascinating people who played an important role in history without becoming particularly famous for it.
Herjólfsson was a Norse merchant sailing from Iceland to Greenland to visit his father when his ship was blown off course. After several days of poor weather and uncertain navigation, his crew spotted land.
It wasn’t Greenland.
The landscape was forested and didn’t match descriptions of their destination. They sailed on, encountered more unfamiliar coastline, and eventually reached Greenland.
And here’s what makes Herjólfsson’s story so intriguing.
He didn’t get off the boat.
There was no landing party or flag planted on the beach. No heroic expedition into the wilderness. Herjólfsson looked at this mysterious new land and essentially said, “That’s interesting, but we’re going to Greenland.”
From our perspective more than 1,000 years later, that seems almost incomprehensible.
Go ashore! Take a look around!
You may have been the first European to see North America!
But Herjólfsson didn’t know that. And I think that’s what makes his story so wonderfully human. Put yourself on that ship.
You’ve been blown off course in the North Atlantic, which wasn’t exactly a forgiving place for sailors in the 10th century. There are no radios, GPS satellites, weather forecasts or Coast Guard helicopters coming to find you if something goes wrong.
Then you see an unknown land. Maybe there is smoke rising somewhere in the distance, or something moves along the shoreline. Maybe there is absolutely nothing.
Either possibility would be eerie.
Is anyone there? Are they watching us? What happens if we go ashore?
And perhaps the biggest question of all: Where the heck are we?
We now know, of course, that North America wasn’t an empty wilderness waiting to be “discovered.” Indigenous peoples had lived throughout the continent for thousands of years. Herjólfsson simply had no idea what existed beyond that shoreline.
His decision to keep sailing also probably cost him lasting fame. According to The Viking Herald, his crew wanted to go ashore.
Years later, Leif Erikson heard the story. Unlike Herjólfsson, Erikson wanted to investigate. According to the sagas, he bought Bjarni’s ship and headed west, eventually exploring lands the Norse called Helluland, Markland, and Vinland.
Archaeology has since confirmed a Norse presence at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the year 1000.
Leif Erikson became famous. Bjarni Herjólfsson became a historical footnote.
That’s how history often works.
We remember the person who finishes the journey, develops the invention, wins the battle or turns an idea into something consequential. The person who first glimpsed the possibility can disappear into the background.
Christopher Columbus would eventually eclipse both Norse explorers in popular history because his 1492 voyage began sustained contact between Europe and the Americas. Yet nearly 500 years earlier, Herjólfsson had apparently been staring at the coast of North America from the deck of his ship.
And then he sailed away.
I love something about that story.
Maybe it’s because history usually looks inevitable when we read it backward. Columbus, Jacques Cartier, and others were going to cross the Atlantic. Europeans were going to reach North America and the world was going to become connected.
Except none of it was inevitable to the people actually living through it. To Herjólfsson, that coastline wasn’t part of a historical timeline, but rather, something strange appearing through the mist.
He couldn’t Google it or ask what lay beyond those trees. No map showed a gigantic continent stretching thousands of miles to the south and west.
There was just land where he didn’t expect it. Do I explore it or keep sailing? Bjarni Herjólfsson kept sailing.
More than a millennium later, I wonder what he thought as that mysterious coastline slowly disappeared behind him.
Did he realize he’d seen something extraordinary and did he regret not going ashore?
Or did he simply look ahead toward Greenland, relieved to have survived another day at sea?
We’ll never know. But somewhere around the year 986, a sailor whose name most people have never heard stood aboard a ship and looked toward one of the largest continents on Earth without knowing what he was seeing.
Talk about a “what the heck?” moment.
