Replica Ship Retraces Historic Viking Voyage to North America

A Maine-built replica of a Viking ship completed an 87-day voyage from Greenland to the New World on Tuesday, retracing Leif Eriksson’s voyage of discovery to Vinland nearly 1,000 years ago.

The open, single-masted Snorri and its 10-member crew landed this morning at L’Anse aux Meadows, the oldest known European settlement in the Americas, a spokeswoman said by telephone from the Canadian historic site on the tip of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula.

The expedition was led by travel writer W. Hodding Carter, son of the U.S. State Department spokesman who served under President Carter.

“I think I’m going to take a long hot bath and kiss my wife as much as she’ll let me,” Carter, of Beckley, W.Va., said in a telephone interview.

He said the crew had to row against the wind through the night to make Tuesday’s landing. Unreliable wind was the crew’s greatest frustration, he said.

The wooden ship, a type known as a knarr, was built at the Robert Stevens boatyard in Phippsburg, Maine, about 30 miles north of Portland. It was powered only by a single square sail and oars. The crew slept under a canopy on deck.

Carter planned to donate the Snorri to L’Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking settlement in the New World, which the Vikings called Vinland for grapes that were found there.

The voyage began June 28. The Snorri sailed up the west coast of Greenland, across 250 miles of open water in the Davis Strait and then down the shore of Baffin Island and Labrador toward L’Anse aux Meadows. The crew’s basic diet of beans and rice was supplemented by fish caught along the way and caribou and whale meat provided by native people along the route.