Summary During the Middle Ages, in a period spanning 800 AD to 1100 AD, a powerful, seafaring people known as the Vikings came swarming out of the north-lands in their predatory long ships to burn and pillage their way across civilized Europe. But there was another sphere in which the Vikings were to win equally lasting fame. It was the Vikings who completed the Atlantic crossing westward to colonize Greenland. They disembarked upon the eastern coast of North America at a site they called Vinland. Of all of the achievements of the Vikings, it is this venture that has most strongly impressed itself upon the modern imagination. In 1965, a controversial map of Vinland and North America emerged. In the past two months, however, it has confidently been dated to 1440, 52 years before Columbus sailed to the New World. It is believed that Columbus traveled to Iceland in the 1470's. Did he have a copy of the map? Did the map originate with the Vikings as a record of their travels? Or was it created by someone else entirely? The story of how the Vikings discovered North America is one of the most fascinating accounts in the history of exploration. With on-location filming at the ruins of the Viking settlement at L'Anse-aux-Meadows in Northern Newfoundland, the remains of ships unearthed in Norway, and with several fully reconstructed Viking ships, we will see how these voyagers traveled the globe. And we'll present the growing, but still inconclusive, evidence that an explorer dispatched by King Ferdinand of Spain may have used the Vikings' navigational information to reach North America.

• Documentary
• History