A leaf from Leif
Columbus might have been a Viking disciple

BY BRUCE B. AUSTER

Pirates attacked Columbus's ship west of Gibraltar, as he headed north to England. The young Italian crewman, his vessel ablaze, gripped an oar to keep from drowning and swam to shore. He caught the next ship to the end of the Earth.

Fifteen years before his mission to the New World, the story goes, Columbus reached Iceland, the land known in legend as Ultima Thule, the farthest possible place in the world, where "land, water, and air are all mixed together." The mysterious island boasted volcanoes, lava-black beaches, and snowy white landscapes. It may also have been the birthplace of Columbus's bold leap to America. Historians continue to search for new documentation to prove that Columbus reached Iceland and, if he did, whether his stay there, at age 25, stirred the adventurer to imagine that a passage to China lay to the west, across the Atlantic.

Some 500 years earlier, the Vikings had set sail from Iceland and ultimately reached the New World. Could Columbus have heard the stories of Leif Ericson's voyage to the place called Vinland? If the story is true, "Columbus would have learned from Icelandic sailors that there was land to the west," says William Fitzhugh, a curator of the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit "Vikings," which opened in April in Washington and will travel for two years throughout North America.

We're No.1. It is no coincidence that historians in Scandinavia are cheerleaders for the Columbus-in-Iceland saga while those in Italy turn up their noses. If the Viking backers are right, Columbus not only arrived in America after the Vikings, he borrowed their idea. The Vikings did beat Columbus to America, an accomplishment no longer in dispute. Forty years ago, archaeologists discovered evidence of a Viking set­ tlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. No other Viking sites have been found despite exhaustive, and sometimes ridiculous, efforts. But the ruins of buildings discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows confirmed the essential details of the Vinland Sagas, the two oral tales that describe the journeys of Eric the Red to Greenland and Leif Ericson and others to North America.

Scholars cannot be sure Columbus even reached Iceland. The case isn't ironclad because only one fragment of evidence from Columbus's day remains: The explorer's son, in his biography of his father, cites Columbus's memoirs, in which he describes the voyage of February 1477. For years, historians did not know what to make of the account. Many details were accurate: The winter that year was mild, so waters in the north were navigable. Others were wrong: Columbus badly misstates Iceland's latitude. But the errors, because they reflect the limited knowledge of the time, are now seen as proof of the memoir's authenticity. In 1484, just seven years after he is believed to have stopped in Iceland, Columbus proposed to the king of Portugal that he could reach China by crossing the Atlantic.

Small world. No single spark lighted the explorer's imagination. Before his voyage, Columbus would have known of Marco Polo's journey to China. He is also believed to have studied Ptolemy's Guide to Geography, a brilliant Roman-era work by the Greek astronomer who argued that the sun revolved around the Earth. His Geography, though influential, vastly underestimated the size of the Earth. That led Colum­ bus to believe a shorter route to China and India could be found to the west. Ptolemy's teachings may have only confirmed what he knew from the Viking sagas: that a westward passage was possible.

That Columbus wasn't first to America is unthinkable to many. Ken Feder, debunker and author of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, gets the most hate mail from Columbus lovers. "I expect psychic archaeologists to get on my case, not the Columbus appreciation society," he says. Others suggest the Viking discovery had no lasting importance. "It is unquestionable that the Vikings got there first, if getting there is all that matters," says historian David Henige, who analyzed the journal of Columbus's first voyage. "But Columbus catalyzed settlement of the New World." Might the Vikings have the jump there, too? New evidence being gathered by archaeologists may prove that the Vikings maintained elaborate trade relations with native North Americans for some 350 years. "If the Norse were huddling in Greenland trying to survive, that's one thing,'' says the Smithsonian's Fitzhugh. "But if they were exploring, meeting natives, and trading, then that's a new chapter in American history that hasn't been explored."

Paolo Emilio Taviani entitled his biography of Columbus The Grand Design. But the adventures of Columbus and the Vikings, five centuries apart, suggest how both will and chance shape history. Columbus's design was grounded in error and miscalculation–but it succeeded brilliantly. Olafur Egilsson, a former board member of Iceland's historical society who believes that Columbus reached Iceland, thinks the visit could have been crucial. "It might have given Columbus confidence to know there were lands on the other side of the ocean," he says. Perhaps that's why, when the crew of the Santa Marķa nearly rebelled, afraid the winds would never turn and blow them home again, Columbus calmed them, then kept sailing west.