I suspect I’m revealing a shocking historical ignorance with this question, but what’s the answer? How did the knowledge of Vinland disappear from the European consciousness? The Vikings were literate and surely kept some records. There was never a wholesale destruction of their language and culture that I’m aware of. Were there people in, like, Sweden, that were still aware of a landmass out beyond Greenland at the time of Columbus, or did the norse somehow completely “forget” over the generations?
Well, if you also consider that various Western European fishermen were fishing the Grand Banks throughout the 1400’s and and sometimes making camp on Newfoundland, it seems somebody in Europe remembered the Vikings story. The Vikings did have chronicles of their voyages west that have survived. It’s how we know the details of the life of Lief Eriksson and the rest. The big reason the Norse didn’t go back the Canada (and abandoned their colonies on Greenland) is that around 1000 years ago the Earth got colder, making these places less inhabitable.
And that’s not even getting into the whole “Columbus set out knowing exactly where he was going” story, but I’ll let someone better equipped answer that half of the question.
Darn that oral record. Same reason we have no idea what Viking music sounded like.
For one thing, navigation was an extremely inexact science in these days. No compass, no sextant, no maps. People would get blown off course all the time and make landfall (if lucky) on some unknown coast. There must have been a huge amount of stories floating around for the navigators of the time to keep track of - and probably a huge desire to keep the tricks you’ve learned safely within your tribe. No coincidence that the steersman’s part of the loot was 7 times that of an oarsman’s.
Also, I’m afraid you’re overestimating the literacy and record-keeping ability of the Viking culture. There are practically no contemporary written sources, with the exception of runestones, owner’s names on objects, kings names on coins and the like.
Literacy was probably not very widespread, and there was a lot of superstition around runes - “passing runes” has survived as a term for magic use. The Vikings didn’t learn about the Roman alphabet until they adopted Christianity (Danish king Harold Bluetooth being a champion of that religion) - and that wimpy-ass religion was arguably the beginning of the end for the Vikings, anyway.
Some of the better written sources - the Icelandic sagas (a good read, btw.) were penned centuries after the events they describe.
I’m sure that the stories floated around in Scandinavia for centuries, but there was probably little reason to act on them. Without resupply bases on Greenland (and the milder weather enjoyed by Leif Eriksson), stretching across the North Atlantic was a huge reach for the shipbuilding technology of the age.
You have to understand also that the American excursions were staged from Greenland, which was a colony of Iceland, which was a colony of Norway. The Greenland colony collapsed in the 14th or 15th century (or thereabouts). So, the links back to “mainland Europe” might have been a bit more complicated than you think. Various theories abound about why the Greenland colony dispeared, but no one knows quite for sure, although the “Little Ice Age” noted above is comonly thought to have playe a part.
Check out The Greenlanders for an interesting fictional account of that period.
Of course some people think Columbus was aware of the Viking voyages, but that’s not clear. Physical evidence of their landing was not discovered until the 1960s. Before that, it was somewhat controversial whether the Vikings actually did land in the New World.
Apparently, Columbus made a trip to Iceland sometime before 1492. There’s been a lot of fruitless speculation about him learning about Greenland and/or Vinland on that trip. It’s all a waste of time, though.
Greenland and Vinland were not the kind of places he was interested in discovering. Assuming he did learn of them, what he would have known was about them was that they were northern lands with lots of ice and wilderness. What he was interested in discovering was a new way to the far east and the source of the spices.
As far as Eurpean fishermen fishing the Grand Banks in the 15th century, I don’t know if this has been definitely established. They may have, but I don’t think any definite records have been uncovered that establish this without question.
DTILQUE:
“Apparently, Columbus made a trip to Iceland sometime before 1492”
Do you have a cite for this? I’d be surprised if this was generally accepted to be true.
I don’t know if I would trust Charles Van Doren as a source, but in A History of Knowledge, he suggests that the Northern European fishermen kept quiet about the Grand Banks for the same reason recreational fishermen keep their favorite spots a secret today, they didn’t want anyone else to get their fish,
Samuel Eliot Morrison, in his Admiral of the Ocean Sea notes that Columbus reported having gone to Iceland and 100 leagues beyond in 1477. Morrison indicates that there was a steady trade among the mariners of Lisbon, the Azores, Bristol, and Iceland at that time and Columbus noted that he left from Lisbon and that at Iceland, (which he called Tile (Thule)), he encountered trade goods from Bristol.
There are some other odd comments in that part of his memoirs, but as far as I know, that Icelandic trip is generally accepted as a real event in the life of Columbus.
That he probably heard about Greenland, there, is likely, although irrelevant, as he does not seem to have attached any importance to it. (Morrison says that Greenland appeared on several European maps of the era–although usually as a long peninsula extending from Asia.)
The “official” discovery of the Grand Banks is credited to John Cabot during his 1497 voyage, after which one of his claims was that he had found enough fish to remove England’s dependence of Iceland for their fish.
There are persistent speculations such as those of Van Doren, but they have, as yet, had no supporting evidence.
If he did, would he have not had a better idea that he didn’t land in Asia?
I dunno. If Greenland was considered part of Asia, that would tend to lend credence to his theory that Asia was fairly close to Europe. (I have not seen a picture of those maps, but I recall the “Greenland peninsula” being described as very long. And, of course, being closer to the pole, it did not need to extend quite so far out as if it had been coming directly from Japan or China.)
One of the peculiar aspects of the story of Columbus and Isabella was the way that he seriously underestimated the size of the Earth. When he was sent to make his case before a panel of scholars, he insisted that the Earth had a diameter of 6,000 miles while they (correctly) insisted that it was closer to 8,000. He managed to talk Isabella into funding the voyage (the “she sold her jewels” story) over their objections. It is a matter of much speculation that he knew that the Earth was as large as it was but feared that he would never get funding from anyone if they believed that he was going to need to sail for 10,000 miles, or so, to get to Cathay. Hitting the Antilles at 4,000 miles made future exploration more palatable.