Happy Columbus Day, or Indigenous People’s Day, if you prefer. And if you are in Canada, Happy Thanksgiving! Here is an updated repost of when a Viking longship arrived at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The Exposition was meant to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1492.
As we all know, Columbus didn’t “discover” the Americas. Indigenous peoples lived on these shores for thousands of years before he showed up. Columbus wasn’t even the first European to cross the Atlantic. According to the Norse sagas, Leif Eriksson beat Columbus across the pond by nearly 500 years. And to drive the point home, the replica longship named, appropriately enough, Viking, sailed from Bergen, Norway across the Atlantic, up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal and onward through the Great Lakes to Chicago to crash Columbus’ party.
In 1893, there was no absolute proof that Eriksson sailed to Vinland around the year 1000. The Vinland sagas say that he made the voyage but that was it. It would be another 70 years before the sagas would be confirmed by the remains of a Norse settlement uncovered at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of the Great Northern Peninsula on the Canadian island of Newfoundland.
So while in 1893 there may have been no physical evidence that Norsemen beat Columbus by 500 years, Viking‘s Captain Magnus Andersen and his crew of 11 proved that the voyage was possible.
Viking was a plank by plank copy of the Gokstad ship, a 9th-century Viking ship discovered in 1880 in a burial mound at Gokstad in Sandar, Sandefjord, Vestfold, Norway. The ship was 78 feet long and 17 feet wide with a depth of 6.5 feet.
The arrival of the Viking longship attracted considerable attention at the fair intended to celebrate Columbus’ “discovery” of America. Many doubted that the Norsemen possessed the capacity to make long ocean voyages. The arrival of the longship Viking in Chicago, put these doubts to rest. At the fair, 50,000 visitors waited at the dock when the Viking arrived. Overall, attendance at the Columbian Exposition on the day of her arrival roughly doubled to 135,000.
After the Columbian Exposition, the Viking sailed down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where it spent a winter before returning to Chicago where it was donated to the Field Museum. In the intervening century, the ship has been moved to various locations in and around Chicago. It was restored in 1920 but then was largely neglected. The ship is currently in Geneva, Illinois, outside of Chicago under the ownership and care of the non-profit Friends of the Viking Ship.
Click on the image below to be taken to a short documentary video about the Viking.
I remember sitting in my high school history class, (back in the 1960’s) and our teacher telling us about Lewis and Clark spending the winter with the red haired Mandan Indians. Our teacher said the red hair came from the early Vikings who had settled in North America. I don’t know how correct that is, but it sure fascinated me at the time.
That shape is just so beautiful.You can see it working and taking the weight out of a wave.