The year is 982 AD. A fiery Norse explorer named Eric the Red has been exiled from Iceland for murder. He sails west and discovers a massive, forbidding island, its coast fringed with patches of green but its interior a frozen wasteland.
He calls it Greenland.
Not because it was green - it wasn't, not really. But because names sell. Eric knew that if he called it what it was - "Iceland 2.0" or "The Frozen Rock" - no one would follow him back. So he spun it. He returned home and painted a picture of lush, verdant coasts ripe for settlement.
It worked. In 985, 25 ships carrying 700 hopeful settlers set sail for this promised land.
Only 14 ships made it. The North Atlantic swallowed the rest - crews, dreams, and all, swallowed by the same icy waters Eric had conveniently omitted from his sales pitch.
Think about that. Four hundred people, gone, because one man wanted to populate his discovery. And those who survived? They couldn't leave. The journey back was too terrifying. They were trapped in the land Eric had sold them, a place far less green than advertised.
For centuries, the colony clung to life. They farmed, traded, and eventually vanished - wiped out by climate change, conflict, or simply being forgotten by a Europe that moved on. The Greenland they found wasn't the Greenland they were promised.
So the next time you hear a real estate pitch that sounds too good to be true, remember Eric the Red. He proved that marketing is older than civilization itself, and that a good name can send 700 people to their deaths.
Iceland is green. Greenland is ice. And the man who swapped them was history's first and deadliest travel agent.