Not that I think Columbus would have been able to draw a connection between Vinland/Greenland and the Caribbean basically being connected (sorta)

But I would have thought that reports of dark skinned peoples in "the northern isles" of Scandinavia would have piqued the interests of any European scholars that read the Norse sagas or historical accounts. Or had the Skraeling really been dismissed as a mythical and fictitious people?

I've read a lot of entries on here discussing European knowledge and opinion of Norse accounts of the lands of North America, and how they had thought it was a collection of islands and not an entire continent, but not much about the people they encountered.