Since I live on that island, I should point out that it is not offshore of Canada, but rather that it is part of Canada, and offshore of the Canadian and North American mainland.
Maybe the travel time it took the Norse to reach America was effectively a quarantine period. By the time you got there you were either healthy or had died on the voyage. The Greenland colonies were possibly too small and scattered to maintain a reservoir of many infectious diseases.
I’m quite surprised that there has been no previous mention of the gradual ending of the Medieval Warm Period that allowed the Vikings to found prosperous settlements in Greenland and from there move on to islands closer to mainland North America. As the weather cooled, the in-between settlements slowly became depopulated, leaving no ability for settlements in Vinland to connect back with the main source of new settlers. Recall that the first few colonies of English settlers didn’t do so hot either; it took a lot of time and determination to found settlements that lasted. If the warm weather had lasted, the Vikings could quite easily have slowly poured into North America through what is now a way-too-cold route.
Don’t forget the original motive: trade. Spain and Portugal weren’t trying to go to America - they wanted to go to Asia and buy spices.
The Vikings had no interest in trading with Asia. For them, L’Anse aux Meadows was just a remote small island on the route to nowhere.
The Vikings seem to not have had much of a cultural desire to conquer other lands. They didn’t even seem to start colonies or settlements very often. Despite all their travel to England, France, and the Mediterranean (Spain, southern France, North Africa), they seemed to simply do raids & looting, and then head home, without any effort to found permanent settlements.
Contrast that with the Romans, who nearly always held onto any land they conquered, and made it part of the Roman Empire. Or even later European powers, like the British, French, or Spanish – they conquered lands and created colonies all over, most of which stayed under their control until about WWII time.
Actually the Vikings conquered and settled a lot of land in Ireland, England, France, Russia, and even Sicily.
The Normans, for instance, with 1066 and all that, were descended from a Viking settlement in Northern France.
Vikings were, really, much more concerned with trading and much less concerned with raiding than is popularly supposed. They founded Dublin and York because they found things to trade for profit there. They stayed in Normandy and Russia for the same reason. But they found nothing worthwhile to trade for in Greenland or that one island of North America, so those colonies were always living on borrowed time.
The Romans were on the far end of the scale, so comparing the Vikings to them isn’t really meaningful. As note already, the Vikings did plenty of conquering, and the specific Vikings we’re talking about here (Eric the Red et al) were famous colonizers-- Iceland and Greenland.
That’s a hypothesis about why the Greenland colony eventually died out, but I don’t think it really applies to the Americas. As far as we can tell, their footprint here was tiny. They were in Greenland, though, for hundreds of years. And, of course, the Iceland colony never went belly up. The Americas would have been much more similar to Europe than either Iceland or Greenland were.
Anyone interested in a fictionalized account of this should read The Greenlanders. Very enjoyable book.
It’s a bit of a shame for the Indians that the Vikings didn’t actually infect them with European diseases. Even if 90% of the population had died, the Norse still wouldn’t have been able to hold on to their colony, and by the time the Spanish reached the continent 500 years later the population would probably have reached its former levels - and it would have been much more resistant.
So… they came to the new world, turned around and went home, said they were coming back but then planned a press conference to say they were still undecided but then cancelled the “still undecided” press conference, then texted some of their teammates to say they couldn’t wait to come back but told a call-in show that they really weren’t up for it. Then the harvest season starts, and hey, no Viking hordes. Does that mean they’re not coming? But the latest rumor was that they were negotiating with the natives, and someone had seen them sneaking off of a longboat, and maybe it’s just that they hate harvesting, so they’re laying low until after all the grain’s in and working on that rotator cuff so maybe in a week or two we’ll see a phalanx of Viking shields descending on us for some serious pillage/rapage, but by then none of us will care any more about the big drama queens.
There was nothing to pillage.
The vikings didn’t have firmly established nation states with kings sending them out to gain colonies and power. Most of the pillaging was private enterprise and even when it was the king and his forces going out, conquering established land in Europe was what was attractive. Establishing colonies far away in unsettled land was barely enough to keep the settlements alive, much less an unrealised profit opportunity.
Large scale colonisation just wasn’t technologically or politically viable.
Mere propaganda. He’s always been nice to me.
The bottom line was that it was just too far away and didn’t have the resources, trade or wealth (to steal) to support any great colony. Now if there had been a Skraeling Kingdom with gold and gems to loot, they would have come flooding over in the hundreds and thousands.
So, what you’re saying is that they just didn’t go far enough south? Because there was plenty of Skraeling loot to be had in some parts of the Americas.
I want to second Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” and it’s chapter on Greenland/ Iceland, which mentions the several problems - lack of iron, supply chain problem, end of warm period - in details and with cites.
Only if you extend the word to mean all Amerindians, not just the Inuit and Beothuk that the Vikings were in contact with. In any case, regions with major loot to be had were thousands of miles away from the areas the Vikings knew. It took even the Spanish almost 30 years to reach these areas from their Caribbean base.
A lot of the discussion of disease is taking place in the context of the 20th Century “giving smallpox blankets to the Indians” meme/myth in which the colonizers intentionally take advantage of disease, differing resistance, etc. I highly doubt that the Vikings would have recognized or even implicitly been able to take advantage of a differential-disease-resistance factor, given that Western Europeans (I mean the doctors and scientists, not the rough-hewn longboat captains) didn’t really figure out the definitive relationship of what caused diseases and how they were and weren’t transmitted until the late 1800s. It’s more than a bit of a stretch to imply that the Vikings “should have” taken advantage of a hypothetical disease-resistance advantage to conquer a continent that posed plenty of other cost:benefit challenges given their logistics.
They used that term for the natives they encountered in North America, so I’d say it’s reasonable to extend to all of the Americas. But the point being that the post I was responding to implicitly assumed that there was no “kingdom” with gold and gems to be plundered in the Americas.
Sure, if you go down to Central America, but that requires many more thousands of miles past large areas of inhabited land and you have to go the right direction to find it. Then you’re half-way around the world from your own lands and there aren’t enough of you to conquer the place.
I meant there was no kingdom of wealth and populace within the bounds of the territory they were exploring, which meant there was no reason for thousands of them to come over and attempt to conquer it.