Posted on 08/29/2009 12:03:39 AM PDT by OldSpice
The first Briton sailed to the New World only seven years after Columbus, a long-lost royal letter reveals.
Written by Henry VII 510 years ago, it suggests Bristol merchant William Weston headed for America in 1499.
In his letter the king, right, instructs his Chancellor to suspend an injunction against Weston because "he will shortly with God's grace, pass and sail for to search and find if he can the new found land".
Bristol University's Dr Evan Jones believes it was probably the earliest attempt to find the North-West Passage - the searoute around North America to the Pacific. He said: "Henry's letter is exciting because so little is known about early English voyages of discovery.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirror.co.uk ...
GGG Ping
Well the letter says he set off...it doesnt say he made it. Note also that the king lifted and injunction against him - he might have agreed to set off on the basis that the injunction was lifted, and then scarpered off!
It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that Vikings or some other Norsemen from Europe got here first, but didn’t make it back, or made it back and the whole story lost due to a lack of infrastructure capable of surviving the centuries to come. Like, where are the Viking Dead Sea Scroll equivalents, if such a thing ever existed at all?
Exactly, I wondered if due to the hour I was missing something. The article fails to tell us:
1. if he left,
2. if he made it to North America,
3. if he returned to England.
Yours in Christ,
Monsignor McBedford
LOL! You are in the transformation no?
Uhh... the vikings did make it here first. ~1000 AD if I remember correctly. It’s not too controversial.
Little did the Indians know that their open immigration policy would lead to their demise.
hahahahahaha!
Really?? The ones out here seem to be quite lively, happily scalping the white man every day in their casinos.
Yes, and I think John Cabot mapped the coast of North America two years after Columbus stumbled upon an island in the Caribbean that he thought was the East Indies.
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Sure miss Bill’s threads.
It's all about perspective. How does one group of people "discover" a land that already has 20 million people living there? Whether the ancestors of those who were already living here in "the new world" in Viking times came by way of a land bridge from Asia or sailed here from across the Pacific, the fact is there were millions of people living here at least ten centuries, and probably a lot longer, before the Vikings ever thought about sailing west.
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