Simon Winchester’s great book Atlantic has a whole section on L’Anse aux Meadows. Apparently it was a small scale exploration/colonization thing run by the Norse from Greenland. The Norse ventured to Iceland and Greenland. Internal squabbles in each settlement sent them looking farther west for more land. But Newfoundland sucked. The Norse left after a few generations. Went back to Greenland, then quit that too for Iceland. Wrote all about in their sagas, but most people thought the sagas were mostly myth, for nearly a 1,000 years.