Helge Ingstad
Helge Marcus Ingstad was born in 1899 on Norway's west coast. Like many coastal Norwegians, he had a strong streak of adventure and preference for isolation and after working as a lawyer in his youth, in 1926 he gave up his career to spend four years as a trapper and hunter in Canada.
In 1932 -33, he served as governor for a portion of Greenland that was briefly claimed by Norway in the 1930s. This was the genesis of his later quest; because the area was the same one in which Eric the Red had lived and built encampments.
During World War II, he served first as a leader of a relief action in Norway and then as a member of the underground resistance movement. In 1941 he married Ann Stine-Moe, a respected archaeologist. They became professional collaborators and her scholarly approach was to balance his intuitive sense of how explorers and adventurers lived and worked, to produce one of the great finds of the twentieth century.
In the 1950s, the couple gained familiarity with Ancient Norse ruins from excavations in Greenland. Ingstad studied the original Icelandic sagas, and examined every available interpretation minutely for clues as to the actual locations of places mentioned in them. Saga means story, and these lengthy oral histories about heroic exploits and trials of Viking Age ancestors, which were written 200 years after the exploits occurred were once viewed as legendary rather than actual events. However, Ingstad decided that they were truly factual accounts, written not Latin, but in the language of the people, Old Norse. He discovered that a Newfoundland businessman William Azariah Munn, had used the old sagas to theorise that the site of Vinland was just 10 miles from where Ingstad ultimately found it.
Though many doubted that the fishing village he selected - L'Anse aux Meadows - represented Lief Ericson's fabled Vinland, expeditions led by Ingstad and Stine eventally uncovered houses of Norse origin. Ingstad described how his hunch paid off. He walked the territory of Newfoundland, trying to look on it as a Viking might have and when he thought he’d found the right place, he asked a fisherman, George Decker, if there was any strange ruins in the vicinity.
‘Decker took me a little west of the village to a beautiful place with lots of grass and a small creek and some mounds in the tall grass,’ Ingstad said in an interview with The New York Times. ‘It was very clear that this was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen assumed it was an old Indian site. Bu Indians didn't use that kind of buildings and houses.’
Ensuing digs confirmed that the ruins were Vinland, although grapes never grew in Newfoundland – in fact Vinland is believed to be a corruption of the ancient Norse word for pasture. The place seems to have been a base used by Vikings to spend winters, repair boats and mount expeditions to what are now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In addition, archaeologists later found butternuts, a white walnut considered a delicacy by the Vikings, buried there in caches. The closest place where butternuts actually grow is New Brunswick, showing that the Vikings harvested and stored food from along the coast. Ingstad had proved that the Vikings landed in North America 500 years before Columbus.
He died aged 101, in 2001.Other Great Explorers
tenzing, Vancouver, Almagro, Alvarado, Balboa, burton, clark, drake, eriksson, grant, heyerdahl, hillary, humboldt, ingstad, james cook, livingstone, magellan, Piccard, Raleigh, Scott, Shackleton