Discovering the 'New World'

[carnivorousplant]

@Colibri

Not quite as stupid as Captain Cook, who was killed in Hawaii in a squabble over a stolen ship’s boat.

I had him in mind. Bligh commanded the guard boat, BTW.

[Bridget_Burke]

@appleciders

The Vinland Sagas weren’t exactly well known in Southern Europe at the time. It’s not impossible, of course, for Columbus to have heard of them, but it seems quite unlikely to me. We know that Columbus had read Marco Polo’s Travels, and that he read and was strongly influenced by The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (and had copies of both books in his library) but I’ve never heard it suggested before that he might have heard of the Vinland Sagas.

In any case, even if he had heard of the Vinland Sagas and believed them, he probably wouldn’t have gone north to Iceland and sailed west from there because he wouldn’t have wanted to go to Vinland, which really has very little to recommend it in the Sagas. I suppose it might have encouraged his notion that land really wasn’t that far away to the west, but if so, it’s a little strange that we know so much about his reading material with no mention of the Vinland Sagas.

He’d probably read the Voyage of St Brendan, though. The City of Genoa donated a memorialto Galway City, commemorating Columbus’s (probably legendary) visit to Ireland. Oscar Wilde said that America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Long ago, I read They All Discovered America, which retold all the various tales of pre-Columbian discoverers. (Well, not these guys.) The author presented the data uncritically but with a tone of “hey, some of this could be true.” Ragtag groups might have survived the crossing, only to die out or be incorporated into the groups already here.

With Columbus, the times & the tech were ready to find a New World.

[md2000]

Columbus was “first to publish” so he gets the credit.

Plus, he claimed he wa “this close” to bypassing the midddlemen in the spice trade, which meant everyone else wanted to follow him. Although I’m surprised the Vikings didn’t get all excited when someone told them they found a new source of wine. Maybe having to do the work of actually* making* the wine put them off.

[Acsenray]

@Dahu

Do you have a cite for this? A cursory google search doesn’t bring up anything. Is there hard evidence now?

Mark Kurlansky – who wrote the well-received *Cod *and *Salt *-- says in his Basque History of the World that the Basques had secretly been fishing for Cod off North America long before Columbus.

[carnivorousplant]

@Acsenray

that the Basques had secretly been fishing for Cod off North America long before Columbus.

Sneaky basqtards.