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!
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?
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.
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!
the natives still wouldn’t have a wheel 6k yrs after the rest of the world had one.
the natives still wouldn’t have a wheel 6k yrs after the rest of the world had one. sarc/
Then neither ganja nor coke would have been discovered, and forget about Angelina Jolie.
If not Columbus then Al Gore would have discovered America.
A lot of place names would be different as many of them were named for the Saint of the day of the discovery or landing.
they were fishing off of Canada at the time, so the history of North America would probably not be much different.
South America’s history would have been a bit different.
And the real question is if a slower settlement from England would have spread smallpox and other diseases as fast in the North American tribes of the NE continent to South America.
Maybe, maybe not. When the Pilgrims arrived, the area was already depopulated by smallpox...but did the smallpox come from fishermen or from the Spanish, up the trading routes of the eastern coast?
Wenn Columbus nicht Amerika entdeckt hatte, dann wir wahrscheinlich Freeping auf Deutsch wären.
Thought the Vikings discovered America.
At all events, someone else would have done it, with comparable results.
Don’t get fooled by that “except Brazil.” Although the famous division of the world among the Spanish and Portuguese, and a count of nations both made it seem like Portugal got the short end of the stick, in reality more than half of South America went to the Portguese.
The difference is that Spain treated its Latin American lands as mere possessions, where Portugal incorporated them more into Portugal. So while American and British-aligned free masons were able to piece-by-piece dissemble Spain’s oversees holding, Brazil actually became the Empire of Portugal. (Look it up! The emperor left Europe for the New World!)
Today, there are 192 million Portuguese-speaking South Americans, covering 3.3 million square miles. There are 190 million Spanish-speaking South Americans, covering 3.4 million square miles. (French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname are French, British and Suriname, respectively.)
How would the world be different if San Salvador was settled by the Portuguese? The respective colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese may have ended up very similar, since San Salvador is barely West of the Spanish-Portuguese dividing line.
One important difference which may the opposite of what you learn in your public screwl text books: The British simply did their best to kill off the natives; the Portuguese supplanted them; the Spanish converted them, treating them far better than the Portuguese and British. The black legends of Spain’s genocide of the natives is just that: black propaganda by the British.
Columbus’ treatment of the natives was bad enough to horrify the court of Spain, although even he just adopted the un-Christian governing methods of the “Indians” he encountered. The genocide of Mexico simply never took place. Mexico City was already in collapse (possibly through the spread of European disease from San Salvador); and it erupted in an orgy of human sacrifice to appease Quetzlcoatl. By the time the Spanish arrived, there was little left to conquer. Muskets were hardly so superior to bows and arrows that a tiny little invasion force of a few boatloads of men could have killed millions of Mexicans.
The biggest potential difference: The dominant nation of the Western World might have spoken French. The “United States” might be comprised of Eastern (”Lower”) Canada and the Eastern, Central and Northwestern United States, which probably would have taken advantage of the French Revolution to establish independence. And if anyone thinks we’d be a worse country for it, I’d suggest visiting a French Canadian historical reconstruction, and comparing it to Mount Vernon. As you do, keep in mind, Washington was revolutionary in his reasonableness with his slaves and white employees.
American Democracy is not a British invention. Although British common law was once central to American Freedoms, our states are modelled after the French’s Indian allies. One thing which seemed for 200 years like it was particular brilliance was the sparseness of the Constitution, defaulting to common law. I now wonder whether that was a good idea, since common law has been pretty much completely vanquished in its most significant ideas. I wonder whether a French-speakers’ attempt to establish freedoms would have been clutzier, yet more resilient. (I presume it would be clutzier, since enunciating freedom might have been more difficult than inheriting it. Then again, DeToqueville, having seen American freedom, did one bang-up job of understanding what made it so wonderful.)
Why would America be French? The Spanish Armada was never the glistening conquerers that Americans have learned it was. It was a “rag-tag fleet” that preserved Europe from Islamic invasion through absolute divine intervention at the battle of Lepanto. After the defeat of the Armada, the British, jealous of Spain’s new-world holdings led an absolutely evil war of black-ops terrorism to undermine Spain. Neither France nor Portugal represented the existential threat to England that Spain had, however, nor had the interest in fighting England that Spain had (being the Netherlands). In fact, France had sided with the Protestants in the 30-year war, which ABSOLUTELY was the papacy v. its political rivals. It’s quite likely, therefore, that without the Spanish aggression towards England, England might never have been inspired to fight such a dirty war to claim the New World, or if it did, it would have inspired a united front of Spain, Portugal, France, and possibly even a Holy Roman alliance against itself, instead of fighting separate wars against Spain and France.