Posted on 10/10/2011 3:36:57 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Okay, today is Columbus Day observed (real Columbus Day comes in 2 days) and normally I just look at it as a low level holiday in which banks and post offices are closed. However, today I got to thinking: What if Columbus had not discovered America? I don't mean if he tried and failed. What if he never bothered in the first place? He could quite easily have given up on attempting to put together such an expedition. It would have been quite easy to have given up the attempt. One interesting thing is that 1492 was the very first year that Columbus could have even made the attempt. Had he gone to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand a year earlier he would have been told that it would be impossible as long as the Muslims were still in Granada. 1492 was the year that the Muslims, after centuries, were driven out of Spain.
However, let us start from the assumption that Columbus didn't make the attempt. Then WHO would have been the first to reach the New World and how would that have impacted history? My guess is that it would have been Pedro Alvarez Cabral of Portugal who in 1500 discovered Brazil while performing a "volta do mar" (a turn to the West to catch the westerly winds) in order to cross the southern tip of Africa. Had that happened then instead of South and Central America currently being mostly Spanish speaking countries with the exception of Brazil, that whole area would have been primarily Portuguese speaking today. Yes, even Mexicans would be speaking Portuguese today.
How else do you think history would have been affected if Columbus was like those lazy OWP protestors and decided to just sit on his keister instead of organizing and expedition to sail West?
Some folks claim that Amerigo Vespucci discovered America, around 1460.
There are some remains in Mexico that suggest that the Great China Fleet might have made it to North Smerican shores.
Columbus ushered in the modern age of exploration and the colonization of India, Africa,China, Micronesia and GULP the Moon!
Amerigo would have been considered a Boy Wonder since he was only 6 years old in 1460.
They didn't stick around nor even told other Europeans about a New World so their impact on the settlement of America was ZERO.
Then why bother and even ask the question dumbass if you have your canned response ready?
And why would it be different. Remember follow the money. CC wanted to make a fortune in far Eastern spices and he thought he could get a monopoly by going west instead of east. If he hadn’t done it, somebody else would have in a very short time after 1492 and history would be basically the same, only the names of the first here would have changed.
What if the Americas had NEVER been discovered by people from other continents?
Naturally, the Aztecs would have been forced to continue to expand their empire in the search for more and more sacrifices to appease their sun god. Perhaps they would even have reached territory that is now part of the US, and we would find their decedents living in what are now our southwestern states in great numbers, and the blood of those they murdered would be staining what are now our streets ... oh, er, wait a minute ... :))
The Aztecs would have perfected multicultural, diverse, open heart surgery?
A city in Ohio would have a really stupid sounding name.. . .
About the Vikings? Sorry, but they did come and their impact was ZERO. I am looking to find out how things would have been changed if Columbus had NOT discovered America. The best assumption is that Portugal, by far the leading nation in exploration at the time, would have been the ones to have discovered the New World.
Columbus brought the word of Jesus Christ with him. To the pagan human sacrifice Indians of the new world, that was absolutely the single most important result of his exploration.
The Vikings discovered America in about the year 1000 AD but they subsequently returned to Scandinavia. This left the door open for Columbus to re-discover America in 1492.
History would have been quite different if the Portuguese were the first. Not just language but their culture is/was different from Spain.
No discovery in 1492, no horses. No horses, Plains Indians don’t keep the buffalo population in check. Exploding bison population leads to exploding methane increase. Global warming floods coast, putting the Americas further away from Europe. Algore’s ancestors never make trip, Algore never gets to warn us about global warming.
Columbus discovered America?
What happened to the Vikings?
What happened to the people who crossed the Siberian bridge thousands of years ago?
Holy mammoth Batman!
Oh, and the "little" fact that over 90% of the Indians got wiped out by Yellow Fever.
Yep, you couldn’t keep an entire TWO continents “secret” for very long as history has shown. The Spaniards came in the 1500s not that long after Columbus. Not to mention indigenous people who had been here for at least 10,000 years. It wouldn’t have taken much time before another European expedition would have attempted to take over everything they found. The only difference I could possibly fathom would be if Spain had dominated North America (above Mexico of course) instead of the English and French. And that seems unlikely.
the natives still wouldn’t have a wheel 6k yrs after the rest of the world had one.
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