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600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse WordsBy Larry Stroud, Guard Associate EditorPublished on Thursday March 15, 2007 Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists? BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language. The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine,...

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public...

A Russian cruise ship with only rats aboard is floating aimlessly in the North Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the coast of Newfoundland after breaking loose from a tugboat. The MV Lyubov Orlova — named after an iconic Russian film actress — was being towed to a scrapyard in the Dominican Republic when a cable snapped, leaving the 295-foot vessel adrift. A brief effort to re-secure the boat was abandoned days later due to rough seas. As of Tuesday, the ship was roughly 760 miles off the coast of Newfoundland and 1,125 miles from Ireland, a U.S. intelligence agency told...

The world’s largest viking ship has arrived in North America after crossing the North Atlantic Ocean on a journey from its homeport in Haugesund, Norway. The Viking ship, named Draken Harald Hårfagre, set sail from Norway with its approximately 32 crew members in late April and made stops in Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland, Canada, before making its way through the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Toronto for the Tall Ships Challenge Great Lakes 2016 festival this weekend. Future stops for the Viking ship include Chicago, Green Bay and Duluth, before heading to U.S. east coast with stops in New York City...

A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.

A tabernacle stolen Thursday night from Our Lady of Lourdes Church was found on Friday morning, damaged beyond repair.Henry Gaudon, project manager for the parish, was at a loss to understand why someone would steal something considered sacred in the Catholic church.A tabernacle is a fixed, locked box in which, in some Christian churches, the Eucharist is "reserved" (stored).The Bay St. George RCMP received a report at 8:10 p.m. Thursday of a break, enter and theft into Port au Port Peninsula church. A television and wall mount were also reported stolen.Gaudon said Fr. Gerard Patry went into the dimly...

An American Airlines flight from Miami to Milan has been diverted to Canada, with reports of injuries on board. Flight AA206 has been cleared to land at St John's International Airport in Newfoundland. There are paramedics on the ground waiting for the plane's arrival. Canadian newspaper The Telegram reports there are five ambulances at the airport, and "there are people with serious injuries on board". This is a developing story. More information will be added as it comes to hand.

The Thanksgiving tale of the Pilgrims and the Indian has an astonishing, less well-known back story. The story of how the Pilgrims arrived at our shores on the Mayflower—and how a friendly Patuxet native named Squanto showed them how to plant corn, using fish as fertilizer—is well-known. But Squanto’s full story is not, as National Geographic’s new Thanksgiving miniseries, “Saints & Strangers,” shows. That might be because some details of Squanto’s life are in dispute. The important ones are not, however. His story is astonishing, even raising profound questions about God’s role in American history. Every Thanksgiving we remember that,...

I am of Viking ancestry. In my part of the World, things like fighting spirit, balls and an appetite for destuction matter much. We also dispose of some decent brain power. Bohr and Nobel both were Scandinavians. My tiny Sweden is furthermore the only nation that successfully has took Moscow (- in 1610 Swedish field marshal De la Gardie entered Moscow and was cheered by large crowds. Everyone knows Swedish rule equals law and order. We might be a boring bunch, but we wholeheartedly hate chaos, injustice, disorder and crime. Leave it to us, we'll fix it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1w7e46pHuc

America’s First Mass St. Brendan (Naomh Breandán) and the whale by Honorius Philoponus from "Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis" (1621)America’s First Mass | John Buescher | Catholic World ReportWhen was it, where was it, and who said it? When and where was the first Mass offered in America? No one living today knows the answer to this intriguing question. But we can summarize what we do know about the first Masses in various parts of the New World.Some legendary accounts of the life of St. Brendan, who was a priest, say he set off in a small boat on a...

There are two key characters in this story, John Cabot, a sailor, and Richard Amerike, a Bristol business man. Unfortunately, neither left much of themselves for us to see or read: no portrait, nothing in their own writing, no detailed contemporary record of themselves or their work. There is, however, enough recorded to know that they both achieved things of lasting importance; one very directly, the other less obviously but in its way even more portentous: Cabot awakened the world to the existence of the North American continent, and Amerike gave his name and badge to what, in time, was...

There isn't a Man in the Moon, pigeons won't stand still if you put a pinch of salt on their tails and Christopher Columbus didn't discover America. How many childhood certainties have proved false over the years?. Now Peter Macdonald, writing for the BBC, has claimed that America was named not after a Florentine navigator called Amerigo Vespucci but after an Anglicised Welshman called Richard Amerike. Although North America was visited by Leif Ericsson, or "Leif the Lucky", nearly 1 000 years before the birth of Christ, Europeans were generally unaware of its existence until the Genoese Giovanni Caboto, who...

America was named after a British Customs officer and not, as historians have long believed, the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who participated in Christopher Columbus's voyages to the New World. Martin Waldseemuller, whose 1507 map of the world was the first to show the so-called Unknown Territory as a separate continent, has long been credited with naming the new land after the Florentine nobleman. But according to a new book by Rodney Broome - Amerike, The Briton Who Gave America its Name - the country was named in 1496, years before Vespucci's voyage, by John Cabot - the Bristol-based explorer...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- A few years ago I chanced to be in Buenos Aires on Columbus Day. It is a major holiday there, during which no business is transacted. I spent the day wandering about town enjoying the celebrations. One plaza held a Columbus Day festival in which passersby could enjoy demonstrations and samples of music, dance, crafts and foods of all the various Latin American nations, and of many of the source-nations of Argentina's immigration. The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and...

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...

The discovery of America: the revolutionary claims of a dead historian Press release issued 4 April 2007Replica Of John Cabot's Ship Dr Alwyn Ruddock, a former reader in history at the University of London, was the world expert on John Cabot’s discovery voyages from Bristol to North America (1496-98). What she was said to have found out about these voyages looked set to re-write the history of the European discovery of America. Yet, when Dr Ruddock died in December 2005, having spent four decades researching this topic, she ordered the destruction of all her research. In an article published today...

An Italian historian has unveiled a previously unknown document that sheds fresh light on explorer John Cabot’s discovery of Canada — a brief entry in a 516-year-old accounting ledger that shows Cabot had financial backing from a Florence-based bank in England and, most intriguingly, may have had prior knowledge of the distant land his famous 1497 voyage would put on the world map. The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

The Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad's famous identification, in 1961, of a Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, from just after A.D. 1000 is, of course, a notable exception, no longer in dispute. But that discovery has so far gone nowhere. The Norse settlers, who may have numbered as many as 160 and stayed for three years or longer, seem to have made no lasting impression on the aboriginal skraellings that, according to Norse sagas, they encountered, and to have avoided being influenced in turn. The traditions of the Micmac people, modern-day inhabitants of the area, have...

The vintage international lounge at the Gander airport in central Newfoundland is a time capsule where Italian marble and designer furniture still exude the faded glamour of world travel. It’s a vast room, its iconic yellow sofas whimsically arranged on a mezzanine overlooking terrazzo floors and sleek blue chairs where VIPs ranging from global leaders to the Beatles once stopped on transatlantic flights. It was opened by the Queen as a showcase of Canadian modernity in 1959. But the growing costs of preserving this cultural touchstone have raised the prospect that a more practical, smaller terminal will replace it. “We...