In case you missed it, October 9th was Leif Erikson Day.  Since 1964, Public Law 88-566 by Congress recognizes that Nordic Americans were “believed to have been” the first Europeans to settle in America. 

This year’s Proclamation of Leif Erikson Day was issued by President Joe Biden in seven paragraphs extolling the contributions of 11 million Nordic Americans and their Scandinavian homelands.  Nary a word appeared about harming Indigenous people or of crimes against humanity.  Compare that to Biden’s half-assed praise of Italian Americans in his Columbus Day proclamation that included 135 words accusing that momentous day of ushering in “a painful history of wrongs, atrocities, devastation, violence, displacement, theft, disease, and more.”

Despite the hoopla, Leif Erikson’s sojourn in Newfoundland – where archeologists claim Viking ruins dating to AD 1021 are evident – made absolutely no impact on Indigenous people, the environment, American history, or even European history.  In short, Leif’s Canadian beachhead was about as earth-changing as a colony of migrating walrus.

And how convenient, that scientists, only this month, were able to date some old “Viking” wood at the ruins to precisely AD 1021 – exactly one thousand years ago.  Odin and Thor must have guided these scientists who were “unable” to date the wood using the usual Carbon-14 method.  Instead they applied a “Solar storm” method which entails using hearsay from a German observer in AD 992 who wrote that “light like the Sun shone from the North [in Europe].”  Such a cryptic sentence sounded like a “solar storm” to experts, who then counted the wooden artifact’s tree rings from AD 992 and, voilà, the wood was miraculously dated 1021.  Columbus is eclipsed in 2021, Erikson’s sun conveniently rises.

Compare the inconsequential arrival of Vikings in Canada with Giovanni Caboto’s similar feat in 1497.  Indigenous people never accused Cabot of any crimes.  Historians haven’t defamed him.  He didn’t plant any colonies there – just a couple of trips across the North Atlantic.  But those two trips led to the discovery of the immense cod fishery on the Grand Banks, to the first-ever map of the East Coast and to England’s claim on North America. If Congress can celebrate a mysterious Viking visit that produced nothing of value – not even a map – it can hail 1497 as the birth of the American enterprise and the reason we all speak English.  It would surely be more relevant than the assertion by the NYTimes that dates our great enterprise from the arrival of the first Black slave in 1619.

But why give Italian Americans yet another notch in their belt, unless you can demean it in some way?  Congress and the media need to find another ethnic group to counter our numerous explorers – Colombo, Caboto, Vespucci, and Verrazzano.  More importantly, they need to be non-European – a tough assignment.

A few years ago, President Erdogan of Turkey pedaled the tale that Muslim travelers arrived before Columbus.  His imaginative stretch was based on a sentence attributed to Columbus on his first voyage describing a mountain in Cuba: “[it] has another little hill on its summit, like a graceful mosque.”  From that metaphor, Muslims around the world were expected to accept that there was an actual mosque in Cuba in 1492.  How about a joint Turkey-U.S. Presidential Proclamation?

Not to be outdone, the Chinese would like to believe that the great voyages of Admiral Zheng He (1405 – 1433) magically crossed the Pacific and landed in California.  One fanciful book by an English huckster had the fleet stopping in Venice and launching the Renaissance.  In reality, He’s so-called Treasure Fleet only sailed around the Indian Ocean for three decades.  Why not award a Congressional day for “participation” to Chinese Americans?  It is truly bizarre how history has become so malleable in the service of political correctness. 

One can only stand in awe of those wooden ships sailed by iron men, risking their lives on unknown seas.  PBS recently had a docudrama on Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese navigator who led a Spanish fleet in 1519 looking for a way around South America.  Not only did he find the way – the Straits of Magellan – but one of his ships actually circumnavigated the globe for the first time in history.  Magellan didn’t make it – natives killed him the Philippines – but we know the whole incredible story because of an Italian scholar who journeyed and suffered with him – Antonio Pigafetta.

Perhaps Leif Erikson needed an Italian witness. -JLM