The Vikings sailed and came to Vinland,
Stayed for a while, went back to Finland.
And that’s why you can’t pry me from this message board with a electrified crowbar. 
From the Viking Rap:
They say Columbus found America back when the world was flat
Well Chris we got some news for you
Been there, done that
America as a whole should celebrate an Indigenous Peoples Day regardless of a Columbus Day.
I note that the following statements are simply wrong. They have no factual basis.
Newfoundland is on the North American continental shelf and any statement claiming that that is not North America is without any basis in fact.
The L’Anse aux Meadows site is firmly established as a Viking settlement and there is no debate on that topic among serious scholars.
(The Viking “discovery” of North America is only an interesting factoid of interest to historians and anthropologists seeking explanations for its ultimate failure, but questioning the event is silly.)
Do you have an earlier example? He was instrumental in establishing the Spanish American empire and he did it with amazing brutality. In what way is that an oversimplification of anything?
Over fifty years ago, my high school history texts were noting that the Cabots, the Corte-Reals, Lavrador, Hudson, and a host of fishermen from Britanny, Normandie, Portugal, and elsewhere were stumbling across the North American coast in the same time period as Columbus. Similarly, given various aspects of sailing in the Southern Atlantic, there is no reason to believe that Cabral or some similar Portuguese mariner would not have come across Brazil while following da Gama’s routes to India. There is no reason to assume that no permanent settlements would have occurred without Columbus.
Piffle. They tended to be pre-literate and the few literate cultures were still based on stone inscriptions rather than paper or its analogue, but there is no basis for claiming that Maya, Aztec, Inca, Creek, or Iroquois societies were primitive. They had a level of agriculture and trade that was greater than subsistence farming; they had organized governments and laws that governed their populations; most anthropologists note that the overall health of people in those societies (prior to the introduction of external diseases), tended to be better than the general health of Europeans. “Primitive” is simply a word used to dismiss the accomplishments of people when one wishes to rationalize one’s conquest of them.
There is no basis for this claim. There is no reason to believe that the Europeans exploring the American coast in the late 15th century would not have also “discovered” the Americas.
If you are asserting that you have moved to the Right, based on (the ignorance behind) these beliefs, it would seem that you are reinforcing the adage that facts have a liberal bias.
You’re got one of those ready made; 4th Monday in September - just missed it again!
Right. The personal significance of Columbus as the “discoverer” of the Americas is tremendously over-exaggerated. If Columbus had never existed, the Americas would have been discovered by Europeans anyway within a few decades at most. In fact they were discovered independently of Columbus when Pedro Cabral was blown off course to the coast of Brazil in 1500 while trying to round Africa. Between the fishermen exploring the North Atlantic in search of codfish, and the Portuguese ships traversing the South Atlantic, it was only a matter of time before one of them was blown far enough west to reach the Americas.
^^ did you miss that part about the Vikings?
Unfortunately, the onset of the “Little Ice Age” and the failure of the Norse Greenland settlements doomed that line of exploration.
No. What’s your point?
If it gets me a day off work, I’d celebrate the Johnstown Flood. 
Just kidding. I don’t have a job.
Colibri:
I disagree. Columbus is highly significant, even though it was because of a mistake. Europeans had some idea that there were lands to be found across the Atlantic, but never got the sense that there was any valid commercial reason for making that dangerous voyage to Terra Incognita. Columbus, in mistakenly thinking and reporting that he had reached the Indies by going west, changed all that. Now, there was a known reason to try crossing the Atlantic in force - the riches of the Indies and China and India were just (they thought) a voyage away, without dealing with the Cape of Good Hope, or the Arabs, Turks and Mongols who controlled the Silk Road. By the time Columbus’s was determined to be mistaken, the New World was found to be a source of abundant gold, which was even better, of course. But the idea, however mistaken, that there was a sea route west to the lands at the eastern end of the Silk Road was fully Columbus’s and very much responsible for the fact that serious European conquest/settlement efforts were made from Columbus’s time and afterward, as opposed to barely at all before.
Is “amazing brutality,” a clear factual assessment?
This, however, does not contradict Colibri. One may extoll Columbus for the date at which he initiated European expansion, but there were too many European mariners hanging around off the shores of the Americas in the decades after Columbus (and several in the years before 1492) for the European/American contact to have been pushed back more than a few decades. It would have probably happened differently in many respects, but it would have happened in the same general time frame.
An analogy would be the advent of heavier-than-air powered flight. The Wright brothers are legitimately recognized for having accomplished the deed first, (despite the occasional efforts to give the nod to Langley, Pearse, Whitehead, or others), but with Whitehead, Santos-Dumont, Farnam, Vuia, Voisin, Curtiss, Bleriot and others all making similar efforts, (often unaware of the Wright’s designs), heavier-than-air flight was going to be achieved before 1910, even if the Wrights had never existed.
I suppose that one can challenge “amazing” on the grounds that humans are so routinely brutal that no one should ever be amazed at any act of brutality.
Efforts to deny brutality are unpersuasive.
Sorry, but that’s only unpersuasive to you. To the vast majority of humans who have lived, we’re talking relatively unremarkable.
The comparatively delicate sensibilities you have about man’s brutality to man are the product of your age, not some law of the universe.
You are claiming that his actions were not brutal?
You’re historically mistaken in your time line. The gold coming from the West Indies was very disappointing, which is a major reason Columbus turned to slavery to try to make more money. By the early 1500s, it was becoming apparent to everyone but Columbus that the Americas were not the Far East, but a new continent. (Amerigo Vespucci was the first to explicitly to propose this based on his explorations of the northern coast of South America, which was why the continents ended up named for him instead of Columbus.)
The first high civilization and major source of gold that was encountered was the Aztec Empire. Hernan Cortes began its conquest in 1519, almost two decades after it was known that the Americas were not the Far East. Coincidentally, this was the very same year that Magellan embarked on the voyage that would actually reach the Far East by sailing west, as Columbus had proposed.
The exploration and exploitation of the Americas might have taken a bit longer if it had taken place through Brazil by following up Cabral, or via North America following up a discovery near the Grand Banks, rather than by following up Columbus. But the Aztecs and the Incas and their wealth would probably have been discovered in the first half of the sixteenth century providing a motive for conquest.
tomndebb:
Well, the question is, would they have thought it was worth the resources to invest in? I don’t know that they would have if they didn’t think it led to the riches they knew existed in the Far East. The Age of Exploration wasn’t about exploration for the sake of pure knowledge-expansion, it was all about finding ways to get to the Far East, from Da Gama to Magellan to Hudson.
Yes it is, actually, as much as we can factually evaluate anything about that time period. As has been said, Columbus was viewed as being excessively brutal even by his contemporaries.
If you want to quibble and say that we can’t be certain about anything in the historical record from that long ago, I guess you can. But based on available evidence, Columbus was an outlier even among an extremely brutal crowd.