Y’know, there’s an argument I’ve heard often enough…“Columbus didn’t ‘discover’ America—the Native Americans already knew it was here!”
That kinda got me thinking…what if we flipped the situation around?
Say it’s September, 1492. A large ship, commanded by a maverick Aztec sailor who believes he can reach the west coast of Mexico by sailing east, makes landfall on the coast of Portugal. The Aztecs walk around, plant some flags, grab some plants, make their presence known but somehow manage not to get killed or infected, then sail home and successfully report back to the Imperial court. Much rejoicing.
My question is: would you say that the Aztecs had “discovered Europe”? Personally, I’d give them the honor (they didn’t know it was there, after all) but I was interested in hearing what anyone else would say.
Hey, and I think this makes 5,000 posts for me. Yay.
Columbus wasn’t the first guy to discover America. But he was the first guy to do it and have it stayed discovered.
Where were the Native Americans living if not in America, then? Or, if you insist on ignoring them, the Scandinavians never forgot about Greenland and had a settlement there as long, if not longer, than the 513 years Western Europe as a whole has been aware of the New World.
As for the OP: yes. If that had happened, I would say they discovered Europe.
Columbus discovered America because it was unknown. It’s similar to saying Lavoisier dicovered oxygen: oxygen existed whether he discovered it or not, exactly like the New World existed without the discovery.
Like Lavoisier, the discovery had consquences and caused changes. But it’s cheap and facile (not to mention a cliche) to mention that the American Natives knew about the world before Columbus. The discovery made everything different.
Whether I would say “the Aztecs discovered Europe” in the example cited depends on what they did when they discovered it. The Vikings found out about the New World, too, but ultimately did nothing but set up a few failed settlements. But calling it a discovery is stretching the point: yes, they knew about it, but discovery generally leads to doing something with what was discovered.