Following Christopher Columbus' first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, Spain and other European countries engaged in large-scale colonization that resulted in European settlers and their descendants colonizing most of the Western Hemisphere.
However, they weren't the first Europeans to make the voyage to North America. After establishing settlements in Iceland and Greenland in the ninth and 10th centuries A.D., the Vikings reached what is now Newfoundland, Canada in around A.D. 1000. They built an outpost at L'anse aux Meadows and used it to explore other areas of northeastern North America, with historical records indicating that they created another outpost called "Hop" somewhere in what's now the province of New Brunswick.
