Columbus wasn't the first European to reach the New World or explore it. The Vikings beat him to it.
Five centuries before Christopher Columbus discovered the Caribbean islands in 1492, the Vikings had established a colony in Greenland and discovered Canada.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, Viking raiders left Denmark, Sweden and Norway to attack the British Isles and northern Europe. They established colonies in the Orkney and Shetland Islands above Scotland and as far down as the northern coast of France (now Normandy). Viking raiders then explored further west across the Atlantic, discovering Iceland (Thule) and settling it between 860 and 874 C.E. They displaced Irish monks who had previously explored the northern Atlantic.
Iceland soon filled up with colonists, prompting some restless Icelanders to explore further west. In 984 C.E., two Icelanders, Erik the Red and his son Leif, discovered Greenland (Ultima Thule). They named it "Vinland". At the time, the Medieval Warm Period made the northern Atlantic much more habitable than today.
Though farming proved difficult, the explorers made a decent living on pasturage, while trading walrus ivory and hides, furs and falcons back to Europe. The colony did not exactly thrive, but it turned enough of a profit that the Greenlanders could continue to explore west and south.
How far west and south they went remains highly controversial. They probably explored down the Labrador coast and at least the northern coast of Newfoundland. But stories that they made it as far south as New England or even the Caribbean remain unproven.
The sudden climatic cooling that began in the late 13th century spelled the end of the colony. The annual supply ships (called the "royal knarr") could not get through as the pack ice formed earlier and melted later each year and the climate became untenable for any kind of farming or even pastoralism. The settlements might have survived if they had adopted the much more successful tactics of Inuit explorers who had spread across Canada from Alaska. But the settlers were contemptuous of the Inuit and their hunter-gatherer culture, calling them "Skraelings" or "wretched" people.
Even so, some Icelanders may have joined the Inuit after the supply ships failed. The last attempt at contact in 1341 by the Bishop of Bergen's emissary, Ivar Baardson, showed only abandoned settlements. A century and a half before Columbus, the first known European culture in the New World had failed.
