Leifr Eiríksson (Leif the Lucky)

Leif Eriksson — Leif the Lucky — is the discoverer of Vínland, the Norseman who reached North America five centuries before Columbus. Erik the Red's son, he sailed from Greenland to the court of King Olaf Tryggvason, took Christianity there, and was charged by the king to carry the new faith home to Greenland. On that voyage — blown off course, or following up Bjarni's earlier sighting — he came instead to a new land in the west: a country of flat stone, then of forests, then of a mild coast where vines and self-sown wheat grew, which he named Vínland, the wine-land. He wintered there, took home a cargo of timber and grapes, and earned his by-name 'the Lucky' by rescuing shipwrecked sailors on the way. Leif made the landfall but did not stay; it was for others to try and fail to hold it. The man who first set Norse feet on a new continent — and then sailed home.