Um… no? They transitioned to facts because someone did the research and found them to be true. Someone may have done the research because the stories weren’t dismissed out of hand, but the lack of dismissal isn’t what made them facts.
Heck, the way the admiral did things, the Pinzones were lucky to get anything other than thrown into irons… dude skipped kindergarten on the day they explained “sharing”.
The pre-Norse presence of Irish monks in Iceland is documented in sagas and supported by archaeological evidence. It’s more than just stories.
Iceland is simply not part of the “New World” in any normal definition of the term.
Because they had been there, of course. The little they found in Vinland did not provide much incentive to mount an expedition to explore further.
At the time, there was little concept of exploring just for the sake of exploring. Greenland and Vinland were both discovered by Norse ships that had been blown off course, not by deliberate exploration.
By the time of Columbus, mercantilism had taken hold in western Europe, prompting countries to look outward for new possibilities for trade. The exploration and colonization of the Americas took place quickly after Columbus’s voyage because the time was ripe for it, when it hadn’t been 500 years earlier.
We’re talking about a time when people believed in curses and thought that people with hallucinations were wizards. If someone suffered an allergic reaction to strawberries, they’d kill the old spinstress on the edge of town for being a witch.
Taking their writings seriously is, of course, silly. But taking it all to be fiction isn’t necessarily correct. We know of plenty of cases, like the above, where their fantasies were layered into otherwise factual events.
Taking their writings seriously is the only intellectually reasonable approach. Taking their writings LITERALLY is what’s silly. As for the rest of your paragraph, cite for killing suspected witches in early medieval Ireland, for specious reasons or otherwise?
The medieval supernatural wasn’t just a bunch of idiots believing whatever crossed their plate. These were sophisticated, intelligent people who spent a lot of time observing the natural world. Many of their foundational assumptions were wrong (e.g. God exists and is active, magic exists), but that’s all. It’s modern people who seem incapable of understanding nuance in pre-modern texts.
We know the Irish explored out to sea, in part because they discovered Iceland and in part because of the way they interacted with the west coast of Great Britain. We also have a lot of literature describing sea voyages. The thing is, it is very clear that the voyage tales are allegorical, not mere elaborations or misrememberings of voyages of discovery. They are carefully crafted and constructed literary products of medieval monks, not documented oral tradition.
We also know that in their metaphorical landscape, west (sunset, desert ocean) was the direction of the land of the dead. It’s a pretty good place to locate fantasy lands exploring human-supernatural encounters.
Go read the Voyage of St. Brendan and the Voyage of Mael Duin and then get back to me with the bits you think might be historical. (Mind you, lots of people have done this with Brendan, but none of them convincingly.)
One of the important points is advancing technology. Why didn’t anyone mount an expedition to Vineland? Because the route was owned by the Vikings. The only known path was via Iceland, then Greenland. They didn’t know any better, and there’s no indication the Vikings in those locations wanted foreigners poking around their domain.
Then the ice came. Apparently the last “Bishop of Greenland” never visited his bishopric, visitors stopped going there, the pack ice closed in, and the colony withered and died in quiet isolation. Not the best time to be sailing those northern waters where the “known” lands were.
Columbus was a beneficiary of modern sailing and shipbuilding technology that was developed by those sailing long distances across the Mediterranean, instead of hugging shorelines. They then translated this into various techniques to travel down the coast and then well out into the Atlantic, how to use prevailing winds and currents, etc. to sail down and then around Africa to India and it’s valuable spices. By the time Columbus was claiming China was 3,000 miles west, that was a do-able trip for a ship. The Vikings had primitive open ships with oar power as often as sail power. European ships of 1500 had fancier rigging and better sailing technique, and capacity to carry sufficient trade goods to pay for the voyage.
Of course, at the same time fishermen were finding and keeping secret a fantastic new spot, with unlimited supplies of cod.
From a previous thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...t=newfoundland
As for earliest “discoveries” - I have read recent studies that suggest the interior route is highly unlikely. Pollen analysis suggests the internal corridor was far to barren, lacking the food - plants and animals - to support a wandering tribe and entice them thousands of miles chasing game. The competing theory is that the first discoverers came down the coast in small watercraft. By the time the interior path was traversable, the hunting grounds at the North America end would already be occupied by coastal people migrating inland.
I guess the interesting thought is - as they meandered along the Aleutians and down the coast, at what point did it occur to someone “hey, we haven’t seen anyone else for a LONG time. This land must be completely unoccupied.”
For an interesting read about “discovering” America, check out A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz.
Some Asians discovered America. The Norse discovered America. Columbus discovered America. Simon and Garfunkle discovered America. It’s either just the Asians as far as we know or it’s a lot of other people too.
This doesn’t surprise me. When a land has been under a 2-3 km thick glacier for a few thousand years and the glacier melts, it takes a considerable amount of time for the land to regain fertility. Glaciers leave behind only rock and melt-water bodies of water. It takes a couple thousand years or so for enough soil to build up on top of the rock to sustain enough plants to support larger animals. Similarly, the bodies of water will be barren of fish for quite a long time.
The migration probably would have taken some years, since some of the coast was not suitable for living on. Gaciers from mountains would have gone all the way to the ocean in places, so they’d have to go around those places by boat. If those were sufficiently wide areas, it might take a while before someone was adventurous enough to do that. It’s not like they knew there was a fertile land down south that was unoccupied and waiting for them. So it may be that no one ever came to that conclusion until perhaps they ventured inland.
If you look at the terrain somewhat inland from the Pacific coast, you’ll find mountains almost all the way down. Since this was an ice age, those mountains would have been covered in glaciers. Puget Sound was filled with ice as well, and I’m pretty sure that the Fraser River was too. As best I can tell, the first place they could move inland would have been the Columbia River.
The Columbia would have given access to the Wilamette Valley and the Columbia Basin, but travel from there further east or north would have been blocked by ice in the Rockies. I think there may have been an open area in New Mexico that they could have gone through to get to the eastern half of the continent, but possibly not. They may have had to go even further south and come north from there.
This is perhaps supported in the fossil record. The N. American sites earlier than the Clovis people aren’t all that much earlier. South America seems to have more and even earlier sites. So it could be that S. and C. America were settled earlier than eastern N. America.
Bad link. Given that you love quoting that part, you may want to get a bookmark.
The part quoted is from the book “Cod, the Fish that Changed the World”, which is found here.
(Oh, and if you’re reading the book: if the author’s knowledge of Basque fishing history is as good as his knowledge of our political history, he doesn’t know cod from ass.)
This covers the Celts in general:
Certainly they seem to have believed in curses. And I’m reasonably confident that if I went through all the surviving Welsh mythology that I could find a number of people being cursed, and other people getting angry about it and killing those people.
And certainly we know that, even in modern times, people believe in curses, believe that they experience the effects of those curses, and take out arbitrary targets within the region whom they hold accountable for no particular reason. Between the breadth of geography that this afflicts, the large quantity of tales of magic, demons, spirits, and curses that we see coming out of every culture through history, and the large edifices built to various and sundry deities and other forces, I’m not seeing any reason to think that this isn’t mankind’s natural inclination. So if I am looking at a time and place without written word, I’m going to assume that a majority believed in magic (or bowed to peer pressure sufficiently to play the part) and behaved accordingly.
I once read through the Chinese Seven Military Classics. Sun Tzu and one of the others advocated for training your troops, using the landscape to your advantage, and utilizing spies. The other five went into a bunch of nonsense about looking for patterns in the stars and consulting horoscopes (as my 20 year old memory has it - possibly not a fully accurate depiction). And yet these were all, purportedly, serious and equally respected works within China, for centuries.
Based on what we know about koro - a thing we can research in the modern world - and what we can read throughout history, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that it takes conscious effort and education to subdue our imaginations, backed by peer pressure, in order to get people to take their fantasies and other experiences as something to be classified in the “not real” zone. It’s just not obvious to us, because we don’t live in an environment where the opposite is true.
Thanks.
I guess I like this detail - the interesting point is that if the details are true, then there is documented history that some English fishermen, and by inference Brittany too, knew of the rich cod-fishing grounds of the Grand Banks; certainly the Basques did. There are archeological sites of Basque whalers in Labrador, about the same time as Columbus’ trips.
I also heartily recommend Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” for its description of how incredibly rich the Gulf of St. Lawrence was until the Europeans began systematically harvesting it in industrial volume.
As a result, even if Columbus had failed, fairly soon the land across the sea would be an open secret for most of the European sailing community. Mowat recounts stories of codfish commonly up to 10 feet long, schools so thick you could almost walk on the water. You think any drunk fisherman in a local bar would pass up the opportunity to tell that story to anyone who would listen, back home?
As for the original discoverers… The general consensus is that people arrived about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. Yes, the studies I heard about generally concurred that the interior passage was too barren for a migration path. As Jared Diamond noted in one of his books - there’s a small number of disputed sites that are older, but basically there’s an explosion of archeological evidence all starting about the 12,000 year old point. Even covering 10,000 miles from one end of the Americas to the other, in 1,000 years - that’s a migration of 10 mile a year. A group might cover that distance in a single hunting trip. I only wonder what sort of reproduction rate is needed to fill a continent or two? How big was the starter population?
Maybe I’m missing a big intermediate step but my understanding was that the Midwest/Great Lakes region had especially fertile soil explicitly because of glacial action and the glaciers depositing soil as they retreated.
From genetic evidence, I seem to remember it was about 70 individuals. Although it is possible that lines have gone extinct, that would have to happen very soon after the founding population arrived.
Vinland was generally known about in Europe, at least by the clergy and probably sailors. From talking shop. It was visited by Greenlanders for timber. It was just uninteresting.
Eric Gnupsson was appointed Bishop of Greenland in the 1110s He is known to have gone on an expedition to Vinland.
Other possible expeditions that fragmentary evidence or indications exist for include Powell Knutsson in 1354, eight men reported by Jacob Cnoyen in 1364 and Ivar Bardarson also sometime around 1350 - 1370. Interestingly Cnoyen notes that the eight men were descendants of settlers who settled from presumably Greenland generations earlier, and may thus be the first case of Americans discovering mainland Europe. One of them was apparently a priest.
It’d be quite a sensation if archaeological evidence of Irish monks predating the Norse in America were found. Its hard to see how those headlines could be missed.
Yes, the Celts believed in curses (including the medieval Irish). They also believed in witches. That doesn’t mean they were killing innocent women over perceived slights. They were, in fact, more likely to resort to self-help (countercharms, etc.)
Medieval Ireland had an extensive and well-documented legal system. You seem to think that if a people succumbs to any magical thinking, that they are entirely irrational, and the same as other irrational people. What the hell does Chinese literature have to do with medieval Ireland? Youare hand-waving away a lot of evidence, and bringing in a lot of other irrelevant evidence instead.
Just because people believe in the supernatural, it does not mean that they are incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy. In fact, the supernatural usually only exists within culturally prescribed terms, because otherwise society would not be able to function. The same reason our culture perceives ghosts in lonely houses at night, but less often at the mall on Black Friday.
One place the supernatural was located in medieval Ireland was out in the western ocean. Stories of the western ocean are stories of encounters with the supernatural; in the case of St. Brendan, that supernatural is the Catholic divinity.
The Irish may have been factually wrong about the existence of the supernatural, but they were not stupid and above all they were not haphazard in their beliefs. There was an intricate organic system which can be studied, and to believe that Irish accounts of overseas voyages were historical voyages of discovery is to ignore mountains of evidence.
According to the documentary “Hare We Go”, Bugs Bunny discovered America.
And that archeological evidence is…?
Kverkarhellir Cave and other sites
While the evidence may not be incontrovertible, it’s at least pretty suggestive.