The Greenlanders seem to have set up trading posts in the Canadian Arctic: Tanfield Valley. Of course Baffin Island is, if anything, less inviting than Greenland, so there was no mad rush of fortune hunters there. But the walrus ivory and furs did make it back to Europe.
‘Discovery’ is also a pretty ropey and culturally variable concept that may not have figured much in Viking ways of geographical thinking. While they discovered Iceland, because it looked like no one had got there first, when they reached North America it was already full of other people. Also who was to say that it was anything more than an another island?
It took a very long time to confirm that North America was firstly a single continental sized landmass, and then that it was not conjoined to Eurasia [Bering early 1700s]. I remember reading that it was only ?Cook ?Vancouver in the 1770s who was able to do the last bit of NW American coastal survey that also confirmed that Alaska was part of North America and thaat it was not an intermediate island.
Also, there are major fisheries off the coast of North America (even recently, there are disputes between nations about them). It’s quite believable that Vikings would want to keep secret the location of productive fishing areas – here in Minnesota with 10,000+ lakes, there are many fishermen who are very secretive about their special fishing spot. And they’re mostly fishing for fun, not to feed their families.
Note that Iceland already had some monks on it when the Norse showed up.
Look in the other direction, to the eastern far north. People in that era “knew” about people and lands around the White Sea such as the Kola peninsula and such.
But it was a lot of rumors and myths, especially regarding the people.
Going even further east, the knowledge of educated Europeans about the N. coast of Russia fell into the “not even myth” category. And this was part of Europe! No long distance ocean voyage required.
Europeans in that era didn’t really think in terms of “Oh, I hear there’s some land waay over there, let’s go see if it has resources we can grab, land we can farm on.” They had their own issues in their immediate area.
Greenland and Vinland, even if something was known about them, just didn’t have anything that would appeal to someone looking for riches to repay the cost of the trip. Full scale colonization of far off lands just flat out wasn’t a thing to most people. (A lot of the settlement of Iceland and Greenland was due to religious/political disputes back home. And the number of people involved was quite small.)
There was a huge amount of the Old World the Europeans knew very little to nothing about and they were happy with that.
I don’t suppose there were any late medieval or Renaissance translations of the Vinland Sagas into Latin or the Romance languages? I’ve searched but couldn’t finds any reference to it. Given the bardic traditions of the Vikings, I just assumed that their stories would have passed down the generations in countries where they settled. But it is possible that their traditions of saga-writing weakened the further they migrated from Scandinavia. But if the Vinland Sagas were only available in Icelandic??, then I imagine that they would scarcely have been read by the Normans or settled Danes in Britain or Ireland.
The mind-set where “new lands=gold and riches” did not exist at the time.
When Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he had promised a lot of gold to Ferdinand and Isabella, and if he could not deliver… one does not disappoint medieval monarchs. So he exaggerated the meagre amount of gold he found vastly. And published that heavily. Several copies of the letters he wrote about it still exist.
And then he lucked out again, and there really were lots of precious metals in Mesoamerica. That, and the flood of riches into Spain from the Americas was what generated the massive interest in faraway lands in Europe.
As has been pointed out, at the time of the Vinland colonies, Europe knew about north-western Russia which seemed to be much the same thing and much closer. Not very interesting.
Vinland was not unknown at all. There were expeditions, Greenland had its own bishop who communicated with the Vatican. And when the western settlement went dark, it was generally assumed they’d reverted to paganism and fled to Vinland. The King ordered an expedition to follow them. (The Black Death only a couple of years after wiped out all records though)
Don’t. Diamonds writings on Greenland is a perfect example of why you should at least collaborate with a professional if you want to write science outside your field.
That didn’t do Columbus himself much good, since the Mesoamerican societies weren’t discovered until more than a decade after his death. (Ironically, if Columbus hadn’t been convinced he was in Asia he might have discovered the Aztecs himself. On his fourth voyage, when he reached Central America he decided to sail south instead of north because he was looking for the Straits of Malacca and the passage to India. If he had gone north he would have reached Mexico.)
If Viking colonization of the Americas had been a smashing success, they probably WOULD have spread the news. But since nothing much came of it, they forgot about the Americas quickly themselves.
Even if they knew, why would they care, if there wasn’t some expected economic return? The Age of Exploration beginning in the late 15th century was dedicated to the idea of finding a sea route to known resources - the spices of India and points east, so they don’t have to pay Arabs and Turks on the Silk Road as middlemen. They weren’t looking for Terra Incognita. There’s no money in that.
Not just fishing locations (although rumor has it the Basques were quiet about the Newfoundland Grand Banks for decades if not hundreds of years.) Certainly, nobody was going to put out a bulletin - handwritten, and widely distributed - says “hey, there’s a lot of fish/lumber/whales/seals/whatever free for the taking”. They want to claim what they can occupy and hold, and keep secret their occasionally visited spots.
As was touched on earlier, most “Vikings” were busy trading with the Byzantine empire, principally in slaves, and forming the beginnings of states in Russia and eastern Europe. Our impression of the Vikings as brutal seafaring raiders of the British Isles is an artifact of who told the history. Most of them were busy making insane amounts of money trading with the Byzantines as well as serving as mercenaries for them. As a culture they were much more focused on their east and south than their west and most Vikings, if they knew about the voyages to the New World at all, would not have given a shit. More hoards of Byzantine coins have been found in Viking lands (ie, what’s now Russia/Ukraine/Belarus) than in the former Byzantine lands.
Plus, in the centuries before Snopes and Straighdope, there were plenty of word-of-mouth stories about mythical lands in every direction as well that were rich beyond belief where a visitor could help himself to a king’s ransom (if they could get by the fierce beasts that guarded the treasure) and so on.
“What’s in that remote land?”
“Grapes… wild grapes.”
Tangentially, I wonder why the Vikings did not spread old world diseases to the locals in the Arctic? I think it is accepted they made it as far as Newfoundland, and it is accepted there was some contact between peoples. It would seem very lucky if none of them were carrying small pox or measles. I am just thinking how deadly those diseases were when other Europeans eventually made landfall further south in more populated areas. Maybe the Vikings and Inuit just avoided each other for the most part and there was not a lot of contact to spread disease, but I would imagine there would be some trading and other contact going on when the Vikings were present in Greenland and on Baffin Island.
Infectious diseases need a certain population density to spread very far. The Norse population in Greenland and the native populations there and in Labrador were just too sparse for diseases of any great mortality to spread. Also, given the rigors of the sea voyage and in Greenland itself, it’s unlikely that a sick person would survive the ocean crossing in the first place.
Smallpox didn’t really take hold in the Americas until it was introduced during Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs into the the very dense populations of Mexico. (It was supposedly introduced via an infected African slave.)
I always wondered about this, myself.
Could there have been groups of people entirely wiped out that we know nothing about?
Makes sense. I suppose also that trading networks were the primary vector for the diseases in Mexico, whereas in the Arctic those networks were few and far between. It’s probable that an infected Inuit died before he returned to his village, as opposed to Mexico where, as you say, the population density was such that it spread easily among the local population, and then further afield along the trading networks in the region.
I’m not aware of archaeological data that indicates any large groups disappeared as a result of contact with the Norse. Some small villages could have. The Dorset culturedisappeared during the time period the Norse were in Greenland, but did so from west to east, suggesting this was more due to the invading Thule (Inuit) culture that came from that direction.
Pity this website doesn’t offer any sources.
Although the Vikings never returned to America, their accomplishments became known to other Europeans. Europe, however, was made up of many small principalities whose concerns were mainly local. Europeans may have been intrigued by the stories of the feared Vikings’ discovery of a “new world,” but they lacked the resources or the will to follow their path of exploration. Trade continued to revolve around the Mediterranean Sea, as it had for hundreds of years.
The damage done by infectious diseases seems to have been most pronounced, as others mention, in the denser populations. Thus it spread across the mainland USA too, mainly the eastern areas and south where there were heavily populated agricultural settlements. Odd groups of hunter-gatherers as found in Newfoundland, and tough travelling across the Island, would probably mean any group would die off before they managed to encounter and infect another group. I presume if they were dead for several weeks before being found, there would be no infection to pass on? Plus any survivors who did encounter other groups would no longer be infectious.