Explore With Us!

Sailing across the waters of the North Atlantic the Norse first voyaged to North America over 1000 years ago. Known as the “Vikings” these early explorers are well documented in the Sagas to have settled Greenland and then explored to the West. Tales of their voyages to mainland North America are also recorded in the Sagas but the detail and extent of their explorations have been mostly lost in time. In the mid-1800s descendants of those original Vikings began emigrating to North America. They followed a sea route to their new homeland that was once well known to their forefathers. These modern day Vikings voyaged to Canada and the U.S. and have since created significant settlements deep in the heart of North America.

For a millennium the flow of historical and genealogical information has been mostly from east to west…with less going the other way. Now, over the last several decades, a hint of ancient voyages to the North Arctic and even to the heart of the continent have been discovered. These whispers from the past and the personal connections to those original voyagers are the motivations for a team of explorers to search for Norse presence in North America while taking a personal voyage into their own history.

Their journey will be to “Fara Heim”. In Old Norse, “að fara heim” means “going home”. The Fara Heim team will voyage from Manitoba, Canada by sail through across Hudson Bay, through the Arctic and then end with a return to the lands of the original explorers.

Using modern search technologies the team will visit likely sites to search for and record the findings of signs of Norse presence. These sites are being selected using historical data, verbal history, community knowledge and analysis of modern data. The search objective is data collection with a defined search protocol being used to protect all visited sites and artifacts from damage and permanent loss. The data package will be analyzed for evidence of Norse presence with positive results leading to formal archaeological digs.