In the history of Vinland, or more properly Wineland, we find the first
record of American grapes.[39] Biarni Heriulfsson, a Norseman, while
making a voyage from Iceland to Greenland, 986 A. D., was driven by a
storm to the coast of New England but did not touch land. Leif the
Lucky, son of Eric the Red, about 1000 A. D., visited the country
discovered by Biarni. One of Leif's men, Tyrker, a German who "was born
where there is no lack of either grapes or vines," discovered grapes,
whereupon Leif named the country "Wineland." Other Norsemen in at least
two expeditions visited Wineland, supposed to be a part of Rhode Island
or Massachusetts, and for centuries after, the land discovered by Leif
the Lucky was known in Icelandic literature as "Wineland the Good." The
first European to touch the New World christened it after its grapes.
The next record we have of American grapes comes from an Englishman, one
Captain John Hawkins, who visited the Spanish settlements in Florida in
1565.[40] In his account of the colony he speaks of the wild grapes,
comparing them, as did all the early explorers, with those of Europe. He
indicates further that the Spaniards had discovered the value of the
wild grape for domestic purposes and says that they had made twenty
hogsheads of wine in a single season. It is almost certain that this
grape was _Vitis rotundifolia_, best represented by the Scuppernong,
which is commonly found on the Atlantic sea-coast from Maryland to
Florida.
The first English colonists, like the Norsemen, declared the new-found
world to be a natural vineyard. Amadas and Barlowe, sent out by Raleigh
in 1584, described the land[41] "so full of grapes as the very beating
and surge of the sea overflowed them, of which we found such plenty, as
well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the green
soil, on the hills as on the plains, as well as on every little shrub
as also climbing towards the top of high cedars, that I think in all the
world the like abundance is not to be found."
Ralph Lane, in a subsequent expedition of Raleigh's, in a letter to
Hakluyt, pronounced the grapes of Virginia to be larger than those of
France, Spain or Italy.[42]
The region described by Amadas and Barlowe is that of the two great
sounds, Albemarle and Pamlico, on the coast of North Carolina and more
specifically Roanoke Island. It was to this place that Raleigh sent his
expeditions, with one of which Amadas and Barlowe were connected, and
established the earliest colony of Englishmen in the New World. The
first home of Europeans in America was in Vinland, named for its grapes.
The first home of Englishmen was on Roanoke Island, "so full of grapes
that the very sea overflowed them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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