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Saturday 2 October 2021

Why didn't the Vikings settle further south in the United States

 Allan:

Because they foolishly came into conflict with the Native people who already lived there.

The Vikings thought that they were the superiors of the Natives who they encountered and their actions demonstrated that they did not respect them. 

Unfortunately for the Vikings, they didn’t come in large enough numbers and bring enough weapons to make that perceived superiority evident to those Natives. As a result they spent much of their time battling the locals when they should have been making friends.

After less than a decade it became clear that their colony was never going to expand and that they were going to be unable to ward off the Natives in the future. 

The colonists who survived mostly returned to Greenland or Iceland and as their culture was changing, they began to farm and become more fishermen than explorers and conquerors. 

They still returned to the Grand Bank to fish for cod; however there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that following the end of the colony in what is now Newfoundland that they ever returned as colonists.

Additionally the plagues that afflicted Europe in the 13th and 14th century killed substantial portions of the population in Iceland and Norway which were the sources of population for Greenland (where the plague MAY have reached). 

Even if the Vikings had wanted to launch new efforts at colonization, they lacked the numbers of people to do so. Basically survival was more important than exploration.

The eruption of a volcano on the island of Lombok seems to have changed the climate on Greenland to a much colder one and the Vikings were woefully unprepared to deal with it. Coupled with the lack of trees to build ships, it seems that the population of the land closest to the the Americas died out themselves from starvation, overhunting, disease, and low birthrates.

As noted in other answers, the Vikings never reached what is now known as the United States. If they had, they likely would have faced far more significant opposition as the Native populations farther south were much larger. It’s likely that they would been repelled, if not killed outright, when they tried to settle in the areas.

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