American history: 1000 - 1565

The continent of North America appears to have been first sighted by Europeans in about A.D. 1,000, when Leif Ericson's boat went off course on a voyage from Norway to Greenland. Ericson referred to what he had found as Vinland, and an area thus named to the west of Greenland is marked on a map produced well before the days of Christopher Columbus. But despite this and other voyages which brought Norsemen to American shores, it was the end of the fifteenth century before Columbus explored the Caribbean and the English navigator John Cabot traversed the north-east coast, to awaken European interest in this New World. In 1507 the erroneous impression that Columbus had reached the East (rather than West) Indies was corrected by naming the new land America after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Further penetration of this unknown and unexpected continent soon followed, taking Spaniards into the southern and south-western interior as well as along the coast of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

Dennis Welland (ed.): The United States. A Companion to American Studies; Methuen, London, 1974/1987, page 4