Chapter 1: It Begins
At the start of the Second Millennium, North America was emerging from the Late Woodland Period, an era of population dispersal. Around the year 1000, populations in the Mississippi River Valley were beginning to form sedentary communities. The rise of the Moundbuilders was occurring, as well as the beginning of the great empires in Mesoamerica. The seeds of the Inca empire were sown in the Andes, and a revolution in the North American farming communities was occurring. The birthplace of a dozen nations was preparing for an explosion in civilization. But by 1050, this great civilization would be strangled in its cradle.
In 950 AD, a viking conducting a raid in Iberia contracts Smallpox. He would carry the deadly virus back to Scandinavia. Though his name has been lost to history, he would indirectly cause one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Smallpox would reach Iceland in 972, and Greenland in 995.
In 999 AD, Leif Eriksson travels from Greenland to Norway, where he converts to Christianity. He sets out to travel back to Greenland to convert the Norse colonies there. On his way to Greenland, he is blown off course to a land he would call Vinland. He rescues two men who were shipwrecked there, before returning to Greenland. In 1001 AD, he set off to explore Vinland with his father, Erik the Red. Little did they know that an unsuspecting member of their crew had smallpox.
On the way back to Vinland, Leif Eriksson is once again blown off course, now landing in Nova Scotia. However, disease has taken its toll on the crew, with almost a third sucumbing to smallpox by the time winter hits. Erik the Red is killed in January of 1002, his body buried in on the new continent. Leif Eriksson returns to Greenland in spring of 1002. Only a quarter of his crew survives the entire trip. Eriksson vows to never return to Vinland, declaring that God has forbidden Man from exploring it. Vague whispers of a cursed land to the West would circulate Europe, but none would successfully return for centuries. But for America and its millions of residents, the nightmare was only beginning.