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."