Archaeologists have confirmed that the stories of Vikings sailing to the New World around 1000 CE. This is thanks to the discovery of a Viking-style settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland in the 1960s, and other scattered archaeological evidence in this region of Canada.
But before this archaeological confirmation, there was talk of a legendary Norse settlement called Norumbega in the modern-day Boston area. It appeared on various 16th-century maps. Some claimed that it was a city founded by the Vikings that emerged as a rich mixed Viking and Native American community. One man even claimed to have found the remains of this great city. But did Norumbega really exist?
Early Expeditions to the New World
According to the Norse Sagas, Leif Erikson, the son of Erik the Red, the leader of Greenland, found his way to the New World around 1000 CE. There, he found resources such as wood needed back in Greenland, so over the following decade, several expeditions were sent to the New World, called Vinland by the Greenlanders, mostly by members of Erikson’s family.
In one famous expedition, his sister Freydis scared off a group of natives by appearing bare-chested with sword in hand while eight months pregnant. The locals found this image so shocking that they ran off. Freydis also famously betrayed her business partners, resulting in bad luck for herself and her family.
While the Vikings established a small settlement in the New World, probably at identified at L’Anse aux Meadows, voyages to the region stopped after a few decades. The costs and dangers associated with making the trip just weren’t worth the return on investment. They could make more by raiding nearby countries, getting the locals to pay them off to stop raiding, while also kidnapping them to sell on the lucrative slave markets.
Origins of the Legend
Apparently, a shipwrecked English sailor named David Ingram trekked from the Gulf of Mexico to New England in 1568 and saw a spectacular city. He said that:
“He saw kings decorated with rubies six inches long; and they were born on chairs of silver and crystal, adorned with precious stones. He saw pearls as common as pebbles, and the natives were laden down by their ornaments of gold and silver. The city of Bega was three-quarters of a mile long and had many streets wider than those of London. Some houses had massive pillars of crystal and silver.
Ingram was illiterate, so his story was written down later by Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth I. While many of the stories that Ingram told Walsingham about his journeys seem fanciful, some, which were unbelievable at the time, turned out to be true. For example, he seems to have been the first non-native to report seeing a bison. Of course, the description seemed unbelievable to anyone who had never seen one.
Norumbega on the Map
Though he made no specific mention of Vikings in his tale, Ingram was probably inspired to call the city he claimed to have visited Bega by Norumbega, which first appeared on a map of the New World by Giovanni de Verrazzano in 1529. He seems to have coined the name Norumbega, believed to derive from one of the native languages spoken in the New England region at the time. It seems to mean “quiet place between the rapids.”
It was later associated with Norse place names and imagined as a city planted by those early Viking explorers, which had grown wealthy and prosperous as a lone outpost over the last 500 years.
Verrazzano travelled from New Brunswick to Florida between 1522 and 1524, including visiting the Arcadia area, where he located Norumbega, so his map was based on his own experience. However, while he noted the location of Norumbega, he didn’t seem overly impressed by it and did not mention it in his letters to the French king. He was more interested in a fertile land occupied by friendly natives that he called Refugio, which seems to correspond to modern Rhode Island.
The region was then revisited by Portuguese explorer Estevao Gomes, who traveled from Nova Scotia to Maine, and said to have encountered a Native community that had:
“… great archers, and wear skins of wild beasts and others. The country contains excellent martens of the sable kind, and other fine fur-bearing animals… They have silver and copper, as they gave to understand by signs. They worship the Sun and the Moon, and share the other idolatries and errors of the natives of the continent.”
Norumbega then appeared again in a 1542 map by Jean Allefonsce, who claimed to have seen the land as he came across a great river as he descended the coast south of Newfoundland.
After this, it often appeared on maps of the New World lying south of Acadia, in what is now New England. It was not long before it was associated with the city from Ingram’s account and the story of a Viking settlement that had grown and thrived in isolation for 500 years since Erikson’s landing emerged.
In 1598, Marquis de la Roche de Mesqouex was appointed lieutenant-general of Newfoundland, Labrador, and Norumbega, even though the location of this final territory was unclear.
In 1604, Samuel de Champlain searched for Norumbega and believed he found the river mentioned by Allefonsce in the Penobscot River. He sailed as far as the rapids at Bangor in Maine, but found only native villages and no sign of the legendary city. It stopped appearing on maps from this point onward.
A Discovery?
Despite no evidence of either Viking settlement or a Boston El Dorado, locals embraced the legend. In the 1870s, a committee, led by Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, was formed to back the erection of a statue of Leif Erikson, claiming that New England was the legendary Vinland, since the Newfoundland site had not yet been discovered. The statue was erected in 1887.
Later, the movement was supported by Eben Horsford, a chemist and science professor at Harvard. He was famous for inventing baking powder and used some of his fortune to search for Norumbega.
In 1890, Horsford conveniently claimed to have found Leif Erikson’s house near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The site is known as Gerry’s Landing and is on the Charles River near what is now Mount Auburn Hospital. He then claimed to have found Norumbega itself further west. He placed a plaque at the first sight and had a stone tower built to commemorate the second site.
Writing to a local judge to authorise the tower, Hosford said:
“It is now nearly five years since I discovered on the banks of the Charles River the site of Fort Norumbega, occupied for a time by the Bretons some four hundred years ago, and as many years earlier still built and occupied as the seat of extensive fisheries and a settlement by the Northmen.”
He also cited linguistic evidence for his claims, stating that:
“Many hundred years ago, the country we call Norway was called Norbegia and Norbega, which are the same philologically – as we have just seen – as Noruega or Norvega, or Norwegs; the b is the equivalent of u, or v, or w.”
He also claimed that some Native Americans in the region were of Norse origin.
While Horsford published several works on the topic, including The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega (full copy available online) and The Defences of Norumbega, he never provided any concrete evidence for his claims. So, while people were excited about the idea at the start of the 20th century, the idea has since been rejected by experts, especially after the discovery of the Newfoundland site.
A Persistent Legend
Both the archaeological evidence and the evidence of the sagas suggest that Viking explorers, principally from Greenland, landed in the New World around the year 1000 CE, about 500 years before other European explorers. However, unlike their settlement of Greenland and Iceland and domination of European neighbors, the trip to the New World was just too dangerous and too expensive to make it a worthwhile investment in the long term. They turned their attention elsewhere.
That hasn’t stopped the idea that Vikings started to settle the New World long before Columbus, largely motivated by large numbers of Norse immigrants bringing the romantic legend with them. Objects like the Kensington Runestone have been found as “evidence.” It was initially believed to be a 14th-century runestone in Minnesota, but now appears to have been a 19th-century hoax. Similar objects of debatable provenance have been found across the United States.
It is not impossible that some Vikings sailed south into the United States after Leif Erikson. They were intrepid explorers, and a band of warriors could certainly have made the journey and never returned to the Norse world to tell the tale. But the existence of an “El Dorado” style Viking settlement near modern Maine seems extremely unlikely.
