After nearly three months at sea, the Viking-replica boat Snorri hit the beach at L’Anse aux Meadows Tuesday. Colorfully dressed Newfoundlanders stuffed the weary nine-man crew into a smoke-choked sod hut and fed them seal soup and squid.

The nine-man crew pretty much had it coming.

Not that there’s anything wrong with building an exact copy of a 1,000-year-old Norse cargo ship, loading it up with global-positioning electronics to navigate, laptop computers with digital photo and fax capabilities to keep in touch and a shiny new shotgun to terrorize polar bears, and setting out to re-create Leif Ericson’s voyage from Greenland to Newfoundland. The resulting endeavor (sponsored by the mail-order outfitter Land’s End) surely was uncomfortable and exhausting, but once that modern-day safety net and the breathless corporate media hype are added, it just didn’t feel like adventure. To the public, the Snorri was a snoozer.

Hard to believe it’s been 51 years since Thor Hyerdahl and his small crew lashed some logs together and sailed from South America to Polynesia. There was a purpose — to prove that Polynesians may have originated in South America. There was an adventure — the fate of the Kon-Tiki was a mystery from the time it disappeared over one horizon until it appeared over the other.

The high drama of Lindbergh’s 1927 cross-Atlantic solo flight wasn’t just because people wondered whether Lindy would make it. From take-off to landing, people were frantic with worry about whether Lindy was making it, and the spotty, uncomfirmed sightings by a few scattered fishermen only added to the suspense.

Contrast that with the outbreak of round-the-world balloon expeditions last spring. Public interest in this competition waned as soon as it became apparent this wasn’t the old wicker basket and a bag of hot air vanishing into the clouds routine, but a contest among multi-millionaires to see who could build the most elaborate floating Winnebago. The live video feeds from the corporate balloonists, like the daily real-time digital updates from the Snorri on the Land’s End Website, didn’t add excitement, they subtracted. Like the song says — how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

Throughout this entire yawn, Land’s End sort of implied that the Snorri was achieving some kind of first. As a voyage to re-trace Eriksson, it wasn’t — the Norwegian explorer Ragnar Thorseth made essentially the same trip in 1991 with the Viking-copy Gaia. Thorseth did it to raise awareness of environmental and cultural issues. Land’s End did it to illustrate its catalog.

Two good things, though. Luckily, the warning blasts from the shotgun worked and no polar bears made the ultimate sacrifice for at-home shopping. And the Snorri at least has earned a footnote in the annals of exploration: It is, without question, the first Viking ship replica to sail from Greenland to Newfoundland with an entire public-relations department in tow.