Christopher Columbus, as any Grade 6 social-studies pupil will tell you, was not the first European to set foot in the Americas. Nope, a good 500 years before anyone started using the word “Indian” that way, Leif Eriksson was busy trading with the Innu and establishing a Norse colony called “Vinland.” Farley Mowat doesn’t buy a word of it, mind you.

Back in the 1960s, Mowat toured the ruined foundations of some ancient dwellings near Ungava Bay, in northern Quebec. It wasn’t clear who had built them, his archeologist friend told him, but they certainly weren’t the work of Inuit. And, having studied and written extensively about New World Norse settlements, Mowat was pretty sure that Vikings hadn’t built them, either. The Farfarers is his attempt to make sense of the dilemma.

It is not, as Mowat frequently points out, meant to be read as What Really Happened, or even as a proper history. Rather, it’s a hybrid: a work that combines wide-ranging research with loads of unrestrained speculation. It’s the sort of thing that curls lips over at Saturday Night. But it’s also a hell of a yarn.

In comfortable, easy prose, Mowat tells the tale of the Albans: indigenous people who, driven from the Continental mainland by invading Indo-Europeans, settled in Britain. There, they were periodically tormented, raided, and robbed by… well, by just about everyone. Picts, Celts, and Romans, among others, all took bloody swipes at Alba, and, in the twilight of the last millennium, the Vikings chased them out of their homeland for good. The peaceable Albans fled first to Iceland, then to Greenland, and finally settled in what is now Canada.

This is a classic good-and-evil story, complete with unspeakably violent bad guys and saintly, idealized victims. But it still feels credible, and it never bores. Mowat moves smoothly from fictionalized accounts of Alban life to quotations from centuries-old manuscripts, building his case with infectiously clever enthusiasm. Even if you can’t swallow his imagined dialogue – which is stuffed so full of cheesy sailorspeak that it wouldn’t be out of place in a High Liner commercial – you still want it to be true.