Leif Erikson

Leif Erikson was the son of Erik the Red, a Norse chieftain who had been outlawed from Iceland and founded the first European settlements in Greenland around 985. According to the Icelandic sagas written down two centuries later, Leif sailed to Norway around 999, where King Olaf Tryggvason persuaded him to become a Christian and to bring the faith to Greenland. Around the year 1000, having heard of land seen to the west by another sailor, Bjarni Herjólfsson, Leif sailed west with about thirty-five men. He passed a rocky land he called Helluland and a wooded land he called Markland, and spent the winter in a place where grapes or berries grew, which he named Vinland. Other Norse voyages followed, but the settlers fought with the native people, whom they called Skraelings, and did not stay. For centuries these stories were thought by many to be legends, but in 1960 the explorers Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remains of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, proving that the Norse had reached North America.

Faith: Commissioned by King Olaf of Norway in 1000 to proclaim Christianity in Greenland. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) (via Wikisource)