Leif Erikson

Leif Erikson, also known as Leif the Lucky and living from around the 970s to sometime between 1018 and 1025, was a Norse explorer thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental North America, roughly half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at a place called Vinland, usually interpreted as a stretch of coastal North America, and ongoing archaeological speculation links that settlement to the remains of a Norse site found at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, which was occupied roughly a thousand years ago. Leif's exact place of birth is unknown, though it is assumed to have been Iceland, and he was raised in Greenland, where his father, Erik the Red, had founded the first Norse settlement. Following his voyage to Vinland and his father's subsequent death, Leif became chief of the Greenland settlement, a position later inherited by his son Thorkell after Leif himself had another son, Thorgils, born in the Hebrides.