Did you doubt me?
Here's Pliny describing either Lapp's or Inuit. Presumably, Inuit as the King of the Suevi (Germanic peoples of Europe) may have had some knowledge of Lapp's and not considered them worthy of being sent all the way to Rome.The same Cornelius Nepos, when speaking of the northern circumnavigation, tells us that Q. Metellus Celer, the colleague of L. Afranius in the consulship, but then a proconsul in Gaul12, had a present made to him by the king of the Suevi, of certain Indians, who sailing from India for the purpose of commerce, had been driven by tempests into Germany13. Thus it appears, that the seas which flow com- pletely round the globe,
According to Bartolomé de las Casas, two dead bodies that looked like those of Indians were found on the Portuguese Flores Island in the Azores. He said he found that fact in Columbus' notes, and it was one reason why Columbus presumed that India was on the other side of the ocean.[66]In Ferdinand Columbus' biography of his father Christopher, he says that in 1477 his father saw in Galway, Ireland two dead bodies which had washed ashore in their boat. The bodies and boat were of exotic appearance, and have been suggested to have been Inuit who had drifted off course.[67]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact#15th_century_Europe
There are plenty of other suggestions of pre-Columbian and even pre-Norse transAtlantic contact.
Nicely done.
Thanks! I’d read that (or about it) back when I was young, and hadn’t been able to lay hands on it.
Having stood on that Galway shore one New Year's eve, I find it so fascinating to imagine Columbus having been there. The only bodies we saw laying about were drunks.