Standing at the helm of the Viking longship Islendingur, Eggertsson recalls the emotion of seeing L’Anse aux Meadows from the water for the first time. "I was touched because there are Icelandic houses. And to come to New-found-land [he pronounces every syllable like many ‘come from aways’], to a place like L’Anse aux Meadows, that’s really something for an Icelander."

L’Anse aux Meadows is special to Icelanders because at the turn of the last millennium, in the year 1000, Eggertsson’s direct ancestor Leif Eriksson sailed a Viking longship into the bay here. Eriksson brought 30 people with him to establish a settlement on the island almost 500 years before Columbus sailed to the New World.

A thousand years later, L’Anse aux Meadows can still feel like a land that time has forgotten. Mossy partridgeberry and bake-apple plants cover a boggy shelf along the rocky shoreline. Cow parsnip, which looks like prehistoric Queen Anne’s lace, stands as tall as the centuries-old dwarf trees. The only noticeable sounds are the cry of seabirds, the wind and slapping waves on the rock and pebble-strewn shore. In the shallow water near the original settlement, rows of jagged rock jut out of the calm, clear water like giant ancient teeth waiting to bite a boat’s underside.

Archaeologists believe the area of L’Anse aux Meadows looks much today as it did a millennium ago, save that the tree line was closer to the shore in Eriksson’s time.

It became Gunnar Eggertsson’s millennium project to return, with a crew of friends (seven men and one woman), to Newfoundland as latter-day Vikings. A boat builder and licensed fishing captain, not to mention experienced longboat sailor, Eggertsson left Iceland on June 24 of this year. "It took us only about seven days to sail to Greenland and then another six to sail from there to Canada," says the 45-year-old Eggertsson, his face reddened by winds, waves and sun. "So you can see our ship was really fast. Speed isn’t a problem for a Viking ship."

Eggertsson’s project was part passion, part mission; he wanted to rehabilitate the reputation of the Norse people – technically, Vikings were Norsemen who went on raids, although the term "Viking" is often used more broadly today to include all Norsemen (the Viking period lasted from AD 800 to 1050). "Not all Norsemen were rapists and pillagers. They were farmers, they were settlers, they were really clever people who were very advanced in their technological thinking."

This is not the image that many people have of them, however, thanks largely to Hollywood, which has painted a picture of wild men in horned helmets terrorizing the world. While it’s true Viking warriors did raid and terrorize much of coastal Europe, the Black Sea and Mediterranean, the fact remains that the majority of Norse were not warriors but livestock farmers.

There are many Hollywood-created myths surrounding the Vikings, says Dr. Birgitta Wallace, a retired Parks Canada archaeologist. For example, they did not send their dead off in burning ships to seek Valhalla – by AD 1000, most Vikings had converted to Christianity and were generally buried in consecrated ground. "And the horns on the helmets are a fabrication of 19th-century romantic fiction," she adds.

The Vikings’ advanced technological understanding manifested itself not only in superior ships – their famous dragon boats were flexible enough to survive in rough seas – but in innovative tools. "When you look at their tools, you realize there was little difference between those used by, say, a Viking farmer or carpenter and their counterparts in Europe or North America just 150 years ago," explains Wallace.

Just how advanced the Vikings were was made clear to Eggertsson during the 12 months he spent building the Islendingur, using as a model an AD 890 longship, which is now in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. "The Norse were really clever," emphasizes Eggertsson. "They thought about amazing things, like enabling a ship to create air bubbles in front of it so it would sail more smoothly."

Viking design allows the ship to ride waves like a surfboard, rather than sit in the water and push against them, which is why Vikings were able to travel as far and as fast as they did.

While Eggertsson had to make some compromises to the original design (adding sleeping quarters, two engines and communications devices) before officials would let him leave Icelandic waters, he and his crew were still able to experience sailing as Leif Eriksson and his shipmates did, encountering challenges Eriksson might have and using their wits to overcome them. "We were stuck in ice for 10 hours because of black fog and an inaccurate weather forecast. It told us that the ice was about 35 nautical miles out from Cape Farewell [Greenland], but the ice was actually about 60 nautical miles out. We were really lucky to get the ship out of the ice field in one piece. There were heavy currents, strong winds and, that night, the fog. Everything was just about as difficult as it could be for sailors."

While the Islendingur was equipped with modern navigational equipment, Eggertsson and his crew did at times use a húsasnotra, or sun-shadow board, the 1,000-year-old sextantlike instrument on which the Vikings relied. A simple wooden disc with two wooden rings positioned on an arm, the instrument, Eggertsson explains, "tells you the height of the sun, and from that you can find, pretty well, your latitude." Determining longitude, he says, would have been more difficult. (A precise way to measure longitude was not found until the late 1700s, when the Englishman John Harrison invented the marine chronometer.)

"At night, they had the stars and the moon, birds, currents, sea and winds," says Eggertsson, explaining that Eriksson’s crew would have used these environmental elements to determine location and the optimal route. "The Norse were very clever at this," he emphasizes.

LIKE ALL ICELANDERS, Eggertsson grew up hearing the old Viking sagas. "Every Icelandic child knows these," he explains. "We are proud of our history and of being Icelanders."

It wasn’t until 1837, when the sagas were published in Latin, that scholars outside Scandinavia learned that Vikings had come to North America. A year later, when the stories were translated into English, curious Victorians embraced the mystery of the Vikings and where they had gone in the New World. "Everyone had a theory," chuckles Wallace.

Fuelled by the speculation, people began looking for evidence. An old stone windmill in Rhode Island, for example, was thought by some to be a Viking tower – it had, in fact, been built in the 17th-century by a governor of the state. There were other misinterpretations and even hoaxes, but, nevertheless, the idea of a Viking expedition to what is now North America survived in the public imagination, and the search continued.

Like detectives reading a crime scene, explorers and archaeologists pored over the sagas, looking for clues to the whereabouts of Norse settlement on this continent. Wallace has studied 79 possible sites – only L’Anse aux Meadows could be authenticated, although other evidence of a Norse presence in North America has been uncovered. A coin found in Maine, for example, has been identified as a Norse penny from between AD 1065 and 1080. Also, there are some 100 objects dating from the late 13th century that were found at a Thule site (the Thule predated the Inuit) on eastern Ellesmere Island. While authentic in themselves, however, these do not provide conclusive evidence that a settlement existed at the location – there may, for example, simply have been a shipwreck.

In 1978, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) named L’Anse aux Meadows the first World Heritage Site, a designation recognizing "the exceptional universal value of a cultural or natural site that deserves protection for the benefit of all humanity."

Currently, there are 630 such sites, including the pyramids of Egypt, designated in 1979, and the Great Wall of China, designated in 1987.

Outside the visitor centre at L’Anse aux Meadows, there is a plaque that states: "The Norse travelled here around 1000 AD. The archaeological remains of their sod buildings are the earliest known European structures in North America. Their bloomery, or ironworks, is the site of the first known iron working in the New World. The site itself is the base from where they launched expeditions resulting in the first contact between aboriginal North Americans and Europeans. L’Anse aux Meadows ranks among the major archaeological properties of the world."

FINDING THE LOCATION of Viking settlements in North America meant much more than solving one of the earth’s mysteries; it represented the identification of the last link in the human encirclement of the planet. Scientists believe the human race originated in Africa. Between 150,000 and 250,000 years ago, some tribes travelled to eastern Asia, while others went west and north to Europe and Scandinavia. The descendants of the east Asian tribes are the indigenous people of North America; the Vikings’ arrival in Newfoundland represents the first time the two arms of the human race reunited.

According to Birgitta Wallace, L’Anse aux Meadows was inhabited for only a few years and was not meant to be a permanent colony but merely a convenient outpost from which Leif Eriksson could explore what would be known, more than 500 years later, as the New World. Weather conditions dictated that the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans were only open to Eriksson for a few months each year. Having a western settlement gave him more time for exploration. All summer, groups of Vikings would explore the region along the coast of Newfoundland, Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Each fall, they would return to L’Anse aux Meadows to wait out the winter in their tiny community, which included three steep-roofed halls (the largest of which could house 20 to 30 people as well as store provisions); three huts and a small house, which together probably quartered slaves and people of lower rank; and a smithy. All the dwellings were timber frame and sod-covered.

Wallace says the Vikings followed the classic immigration model. "People established bases, and looked for and made inventories of resources," she says. "The French did this too – they were looking primarily for coal and lumber." The Norse came in search of lumber, which they found in abundance. They also found wild grapes, which appealed to them so much that they named the area encompassing the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and eastern Quebec "Vinland." Wine, a great luxury that only those of high rank could afford, had to be imported by the Norse into Greenland, Iceland and all of Scandinavia from the Rhineland and France.

ACCORDING TO THE Viking sagas, Vinland was the last of three areas the Vikings came upon. The first was said to have been "Helluland" (Baffin Island) and the second "Markland" (central Labrador). As in the story of Goldilocks, the third, Vinland, proved just right, with sweet-tasting, dew-covered grass, salmon bigger than the Norse had ever seen and a place where no winter fodder would be needed for livestock because there were no heavy frosts and the grasses stayed exposed (research suggests that areas of the northern hemisphere were at the time experiencing a warm period, which lasted several hundred years and saw agriculture expand northward).

While explorers had been searching the coastline of North America from Rhode Island to the Arctic since the mid-1800s, looking for evidence of Viking settlement, it wasn’t until 1960, when George Decker, a Newfoundland fisher, showed the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad the strange mounds on which local children played, that anyone realized these could be the remnants of Leif Eriksson’s camp.

Lloyd Decker chuckles as he recalls Ingstad’s words when the explorer saw the mounds for the first time. "‘George, you make sure no one touches these,’ he said to my father when he realized what they were," explains Lloyd.

"‘This is Crown land,’ Dad replied. ‘I don’t have any authority to stop people from coming here.’ Ingstad looked at him and said, ‘It won’t be long before you’ll have authority.’

"The next day, Dad got a telegram. It was from Joey Smallwood, who was premier of Newfoundland then. ‘Site Ingstad believes to be Viking, don’t let anyone trespass.’ This was Dad’s authority. Joey’s word was law."

Lloyd went to work for Ingstad in 1961, cutting and rolling up sod and cleaning off the top layers of dirt from the site. Also working on the team were Anne Stine Ingstad, Helge’s archaeologist-wife, and Birgitta Wallace. Clayton Colbourne, a Parks Canada guide at L’Anse aux Meadows who played at the site as a child, says, "When Dr. Ingstad started digging here in 1961, nobody believed he was right about the site. I was 13 years old, and I can remember the cynicism. People thought he and his team were a bunch of fools just digging around in the muck."

But with every sliver of nonindigenous wood, evidence mounted and local cynicism was dispelled as one of the world’s great stories of discovery, adventure and reunification unfolded. Eventually, the archaeologists reconstructed the settlement, piecing together a picture of the life and culture of the Vikings in North America.

Gunnar Eggertsson reflects on why his ancestors might have chosen to settle at L’Anse aux Meadows. "It’s a beautiful land, Newfoundland," he says simply. "It doesn’t amaze me that they were fond of it 1,000 years ago."

Photography by T.W. Hall, Shane Kelly/Parks Canada; Bruce Kemp; James Steeves/Atlantic Stock Images; Thorkell Thorkelsson, Andrew Vaughan/CP Picture Archive; map by Richie Tripp