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Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests. The journey would have taken the Vikings, also called the Norse, from L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the same island to a densely populated part of Newfoundland and may have led to the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the New World.

North America's oldest church may lie beneath a small town in Newfoundland, according to information cobbled together from the research of a historian who recently died before publishing her seminal work. "To describe Alwyn Ruddock's claims as revolutionary would not be an exaggeration," Jones said. "If Ruddock is right, it means that the remains of the only medieval church in North America may still lie buried under the modern town of Carbonear."Ruddock, a historian with the University of London, was one of the world's foremost experts on Cabot's voyages until her death in late 2005. In keeping with her will,...

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...

Alwyn Ruddock, an 89-year-old historian, had all her notes & research materials detailing perhaps tremendous discoveries relating to John Cabot's voyages to the New World in the late 1490s posthumously destroyed. This article, Rewriting History: Alwyn Ruddock and John Cabot, gives a lengthy retelling of that tale. From what I can tell, it looks as though our good friend "Peer Review" or its relatives, well-known to us from the phony Global Warming money scam, is mostly responsible for the destruction of her astonishing research on Cabot and his predecessors. Dr Evan Jones and his research partner, Margaret Condon, have set...

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...