The visit was already a week behind schedule. Lord Dufferin had planned to stop in New Iceland before continuing north to Grand Rapids, but delays involving the steamer disrupted the itinerary. On the return journey, rough weather prevented the ship from entering Gimli harbour on September 13. The Colvile continued south to Lower Fort Garry, where Lady Dufferin and the other women in the party went ashore.

By January 1877, New Iceland faced a winter few had expected. The smallpox quarantine imposed the previous autumn still restricted travel along the west shore of Lake Winnipeg. Freight arrived slowly — when it arrived at all — the first harvest had produced little, and many families faced the coldest months of the year with cupboards that were already growing bare.

By the autumn of 1875, the Canadian government had set aside a large tract of land along the western shore of Lake Winnipeg. Unlike most immigrant groups, who were dispersed across existing settlements, the Icelanders were encouraged to establish a colony of their own.

They called it Nýja Ísland—New Iceland.

When we picture the arrival of Scandinavian immigrants in Canada, our minds almost instinctively leap to the sweeping grasslands of the prairies, the establishing of homesteads under the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, or the fishing boats navigating Lake Winnipeg. We envision families arriving by train directly into a vast, open territory waiting to be broken by the plow. Yet long before the West was fully opened or structurally organized for mass European settlement, an earlier, massive wave of Scandinavian travelers encountered Canada through a radically different landscape: the historic Port of Quebec.

For eight centuries, the rugged wilderness of Western Canada remained completely closed to the people of Scandinavia. As explored in our previous look at the 800-year silence, global ice ages, geopolitical pivots, and corporate monopolies combined to keep the Canadian Prairies off the global market.

Then came the late 19th century, and the sky fell.

When the last Norse longships turned eastward away from the shores of Vinland around 1010 CE, they did not just leave behind the turf halls of L’Anse aux Meadows. They initiated a profound, eight-century intermission in the Scandinavian story of North America.

For nearly 800 years, the geographic expanse that would become Canada vanished from the Nordic consciousness.

History has a habit of turning real people into legends.

Few figures demonstrate that better than Erik the Red and his son, Leif Erikson. Together, pushed the boundaries of the known world farther west than any Europeans had ventured before. Their exploits eventually led to the first confirmed European landing in North America—nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

Yet separating fact from fiction is no simple task.