too many notes
Posted on 09/25/2009 12:32:08 PM PDT by Nikas777
ping
too many notes
I believe anyone sailing west, towards the setting sun, would have had to discover America eventually.
The Phoenicians talked of a “great island” far beyond the Pillars of Hercules. There’s a big fight still going on between those who say there were no foreign contacts in North America until Columbus.
One has only to look at figurines/artifacts out of the Yucatan and South America to wonder about that.
More notes. Later.
bump for later.
Cabral in 1500, trying to sail around Africa to get to India, accidentally discovered Brazil--so if Columbus had never sailed, Europeans would have learned about the New World pretty soon anyway.
A couple of Genoese sailed west in 1291, I think it was, and were never heard from again--they could have been lost at sea, or perhaps reached America. Maybe they were eaten by Caribs.
Amerigo Vespuci was a pickle salesman at one point in his life.
ML/NJ
The distance between Greenland and North America is about 200 miles. Not even a weekend fun sail for the Norse.
Most likely there were other earlier contacts with Europe.
“Sailors sail, that is who they are and what they do.”
Yes, I agree. I have read about evidence of runes being found in some unexpected places in NA.
Or the structures in New Hampshire and Rhode Island
A Norse settlement has been unearthed at L'Anse aux Meadows near the northern tip of Newfoundland, of the right period to fit with the evidence from the sagas. The actual settlement seems to have been abandoned pretty quickly because of hostility from the local indigenous population, but a Norwegian coin from a later period was found at an Indian site in Maine, suggesting continuing visits to the New World by the Norse.
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Didn’t the Greeks first land in Tarpon Springs ?
“Posidonius suspects that the length of the inhabited world, about 70000 stadia, is half the entire circle on which it had been taken, so that if you sail from the west in a straight course, you will reach India within 70000 stadia. “
From the west? In other words, if you sail toward the east? Well...you can’t do that in a straight course, and they knew that at the time.
The real issue back then was whether or not it was worth the bother to sail west. It would be like driving from Manhattan to Death Valley without being able to stop at a motel anywhere in between. A lot of trouble to get from a difficult place to one arguably worse.
They’d have advised in their Michelins, “It’s like Africa, only a lot farther away.”
The final item, which nobody ever really addresses while working very, very hard to turn Columbus into an also-ran, not-important, the Indians-were-here-first-and-besides-everybody-else-discovered America-first white-European male-hate-filled bigot ... was that Columbus was the first who actually DID something with the information.
He went, he discovered something, he CAME BACK, and he TALKED ABOUT IT to other people who then went, did things, and came back.
Doesn’t matter how many times anybody else floated ashore - if they didn’t come back and pass the word on; if they didn’t survive as a colony or family or tribe all the way to modern times, they didn’t do anything important.
(They might have “did it” (sailed over and “discovered America” earlier than Columbus) - which is nice, and should not be ignored in the record. But it wasn’t important, since they died wihtout affecting later generations.)
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