Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Eric the Red, a Norseman whose fiery temper matched the color of his hair, was a murderer and outlaw from Norway who had taken refuge among the Vikings in Iceland. In 980, after killing a number of men, he was banished from Iceland as well. Unable to return to Norway, he decided to sail west in search of an unnamed land that had been sighted some sixty years earlier by a Viking sea captain . . . . Three years later Erik returned to Iceland, boasting of a land where the meadows were so lush he called it Greenland . . . Of the twenty-five ships that set out, only fourteen survived the journey to reach the sheltered fjords of southern Greenland in 986. . . . Churches were built and a bishopric founded, but by the mid-fourteen century what meteorologists term 'the Little Ice Age' had set in, gradually extinguishing life in this most remote of settlements on the edge of the Western world." [1001 Days]