• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Before Columbus Sailed The Ocean Blue

Birgitta Wallace, an expert on L'Anse aux Meadows, is not convinced. The iron blooms found at this site might be bog iron which has been converted accidentally by camp fires. It is a shame, but all the direct evidence for Vikings on the ground is really meagre, except at L'Anse.
 
Has the "Self-Sown Wheat" of Vinland Been Identified?

The other day I mentioned that a second potential Norse site had been discovered in Newfoundland, and in the ensuing comments I mentioned that using the Icelandic Sagas’ stories of how the Vikings discovered Vinland to locate the area geographically can be problematic because it is difficult to separate the historical truth from the myths and legends that were folded into the stories. To that end, I received an interesting email informing me that some supporters of the veracity of the Sagas claim to have identified the wheat found in the poems as a New World plant, Spartina patens, marsh hay cordgrass.

To understand this claim, we need to back up and take a look at the Sagas and what they have to say about the products of the New World. In one of the two Sagas about the discovery of Vinland, the Saga of Erik the Red, found in the Hauksbók (c. 1302-1310) and theSkálholtsbók (c. 1450), but likely written in the 1200s, we read that the voyagers to Vinland found both grapes and wild wheat: “There they found fields of wild wheat wherever there were low grounds; and the vine in all places where there was rough rising ground” (ch. 10, trans. Rev. J. Sephton). Other translators call the “wild” wheat “self-sown” wheat. This detail doesn’t appear in the alternate version of the story given in the Flateyjarbók (1387-1394).

As it happens, we know that the “wild wheat” is original to the story because it appears in the oldest reference to Vinland in existence, that of Adam of Bremen, writing in Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis 38 (Gesta Hammaburgensis 4.38) in 1075 CE: ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/has-the-self-sown-wheat-of-vinland-been-identified
 
Review of "Templar Sanctuaries in North America" by William F. Mann (Part 1)

Well, isn’t this exciting! William F. Mann, a conspiracy theorist who claims descent from Templar Holy Bloodline Grail Guardians, is preparing to release his latest Knights Templar conspiracy book, Templar Sanctuaries in North America: Sacred Bloodlines and Secret Treasure, with a foreword by Scott F. Wolter of America Unearthed. The book is due out on May 30 from Destiny Books, but I have early access to the text. It’s not exactly going to change anyone’s mind, but it might tax your patience!

Scott Wolter’s Foreword
Wolter begins by telling readers how excited he is that pre-Columbian European colonization of the Americas is “finally” escaping the suppression of mainstream academics, who have been keeping this information hidden since… 1930? 1940? Diffusionism has a long history among scholars from the 1500s down to the twentieth century, and it’s really only the modern period when we see that archaeological fact undercut traditional speculation. As with so many fringe figures, Wolter is angry at his textbooks from the middle twentieth century, and with midcentury American cultural consensus in general. ...

Wolter says that it is impossible that the Norse colonized part of North America but that no other Europeans followed for five centuries; therefore, it is time to reveal the history of Templar operations in America between 1307 and 1492, “the only logical candidates” for the creators of the Kensington Rune Stone, which he continues to believe is the key to understanding world history, conveniently located near his home in Minnesota. He then comes dangerously close to claiming that the U.S. and Canadian governments committed genocide against Native Americans to wipe out evidence of the Templars. He does assert that the Catholic Church intended to eliminate Native Americans for similar reasons, and that the Templars allegedly warned them, carving the Kensington Rune Stone—get this!—to assert their protection over the Native peoples in the face of Catholic genocide through a “preemptive land claim”! Wolter says they did so because of the memory of the “genocide” Catholics committed against Holy Bloodline goddess worshipers in 1307, i.e. the suppression of the Templar order. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/r...ies-in-north-america-by-william-f-mann-part-1
 
Is Early Medieval Latin the Key to Unlocking the Tucson Lead Artifacts?

Regular readers will remember that I have no particular patience for people who proclaim that the Tucson Lead Artifacts are a genuinely medieval archive of records from Jewish colonists who fought the Toltec in eighth-century Arizona. That has not stopped generations of fringe theorists from proclaiming them proof of European diffusion into America during the European Dark Ages. The latest to make the claim is Donald N. Yates, whom regular readers will recall as the founder of DNA Consultants, a company that sells DNA testing kits of dubious value and which proclaims that DNA evidence proves that Yates’s Native American ancestors were actually Jews and thus America is, by implication, the new and true Promised Land of God.

Yates’s claims are hardly different than those that preceded him, but he uses his academic credentials to suggest that his interpretation of the Lead Artifacts is more academically grounded than those of his critics. Yates, who has previously presented himself as a fringe historian and a DNA expert, now falls back on his doctoral degree in Classics from the University of North Carolina, in which he says he specialized in Dark Age Latin. Yates earned a Ph.D. in 1979, and his dissertation was on the “Isengrimus” attributed to Simon of Ghent, who flourished in the 1300s. Such qualifications, Yates says, qualify him to determine the authenticity of the artifacts.

“To make that decision, you have to have credentials in certain areas—in medieval Latin and paleography (the study of ancient manuscripts) and epigraphy, which is the study of inscriptions,” Yates told the Epoch Times on Saturday. “I’m a classicist, I have a Ph.D. in classical studies specializing in medieval Latin and paleography. I have a whole row of publications in that very, very tiny specialized area.” ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/i...he-key-to-unlocking-the-tucson-lead-artifacts
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jim
The world's largest Viking ship in modern times has reached Canada after a challenging journey across the Atlantic, departing Scandinavian shores in late April.

Björn Ahlander, the ship's Swedish captain, ordered the great dragon vessel – named after Harald Hårfagre, the king who unified Norway in the 10th century – to drop anchor at St Anthony in Newfoundland, Canada, on Wednesday, after more than a month at sea.

"I am proud of the men and what we have achieved en route. It has not been easy. We have encountered many problems on the trip, but the crew has remained in good spirits and has worked hard all the way," he told reporters.

Following in the historical tailwind of Leif Eriksson, the Viking thought to have discovered America centuries before Christopher Columbus, the ship left Norway's Avaldsnes on April 26th, taking a route via the Faroe Islands, Shetland Islands, Iceland and Greenland.

The journey offered stark contrasts, with the crew battling winds, ice and rain – but also calm waters, sunshine and even the wedding of two of its crew members on Greenland.

Harald Hårfagre is equipped with modern navigational tools, but also historical aids such as log lines and magnetic and solar compasses. It was accompanied by another boat during the Atlantic crossing, on standby to rescue the 33-strong crew on board if things had gone awry.

An impressive 35 metres long, eight metres wide and with a mast height of 24 metres, Harald Hårfagre is the world's biggest longship built in modern times. Sponsored by Norwegian businessman Sigurd Aase, it was completed in 2012.

The ship is set to remain at St Anthony for a couple of days and will then sail onwards to Quebec, Toronto and several places in the United States.


http://www.thelocal.se/20160602/ahoy-the-vikings-are-back-in-north-america

http://www.torontosun.com/2016/06/0...6-week-atlantic-voyage-recreating-early-sagas
 
"The Templars of Ancient Mexico": A Study in Racism and Sexism in the Creation of Fringe History
8/12/2016

I have now finished translating Eugène Beauvois’s 1902 article on “The Templars of Ancient Mexico and Their European Origins,” and I have to say that it surprised even me, both in the scope of its ridiculous claims and the extremely close resemblance it bears to modern Templar conspiracy theories. It’s not the most elegant translation I’ve ever done, but it gets the point across. I omitted the excessively long footnotes, both because I kind of got bored by the end of the translation and also because, aside from the primary source references, they were often directing readers to Beauvois’s own earlier work, or to other outdated fringe claims. Perhaps someday when I have more time I’ll add them in, but I doubt it.

It turns out that Beauvois, an archaeologist specializing in Nordic and pre-Columbian cultures, was a prolific fringe historian, producing dozens of articles alleging all manner of European incursions into America. He wrote of the Welsh in North America, of the Celts in Mexico, and of the Vikings in America. He endorsed the Zeno manuscript hoax, too. He began innocently enough in 1859, at age 24, with the (correct) conclusion that the Icelandic sagas recorded a memory of the Vikings discovering what is now North America. But from this he drew an incorrect conclusion. Unable to conceive of Native Americans as real humans with their own cultures, he assumed that the overwhelming moral force of Christianity and the intellectual superiority of European Man led the Natives to immediately adopt European culture. He went on to suggest that the path followed by the Vikings was the route that the Irish and eventually the Knights Templar eventually took from Europe to America, landing in the north and walking south in Mexico, guided by the tribes they evangelized.

This argument came to its fruition in an 1897 article whose title we can translate as “Traces of the Influence of Europeans on the Pre-Columbian Languages, Science, and Industries of Mexico and Central America,” an article that the Journal of American Folk-Loredismissed as being “of doubtful value.” His argument was that passages in Plutarch referring to the island of Ogygia where the Celts say Kronos lies sleeping (De Defectu Oraculorum 18 and De Faciae 27) actually refer to Mexico, thus proving that the Celts had been in contact with Mexico since Antiquity. Of course for the sequel the proud Frenchman would need to prove that the French had outdone these old Irishmen.

In the 1902 article, acceptance of his earlier argument is taken for a given, and he refers to it many times. As I have previously described, in the article he assumes that the title of the nation of Native Mexicans who served in the temple of Tezcatlipoca, the Tecpantlacs, refer to the Knights Templar because the word means “people of the palace-temple,” which he compares to the name of the Templars, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, with the addition of claiming that the Temple of Solomon doesn’t refer to the actual Temple but rather to the basilica beside the old temple grounds where the Knights made their Levantine headquarters. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/t...-and-sexism-in-the-creation-of-fringe-history
 
The reason you’re reading this is because Scott Wolter said something weird again. In comments on his blog this week, Wolter explained his newfound belief, apparently acquired from his recent efforts to align his work with that of Graham Hancock, that ancient peoples held regular world council meetings where representatives of various cultures gathered together to shape history. Here is what he said:

Personally, I think there was a world wide exchange of knowledge and information prior to the Younger-Dryas period that experienced a massive reduction in the high culture of humans that existed beforehand. I know Graham Hancock personally, and recently discussed his latest book with he and Robert Schoch. Robert has a different theory about what caused the massive population reduction around the planet, but the two are friends and it was refreshing to see two intelligent individuals with competing ideas present their ideas without attacking the other. this is how it's supposed to be.

I've also heard that indigenous people meeting regularly for thousands of years on a different continent each time there was a world council meeting. I asked one of these elder (they still hold meetings to this day) how they got to the meetings in ancient times and he said, "By boat."

I can hear the debunkers now...


If we take his words literally, it sounds like he was talking to a 12,500-year-old immortal, but it sounds rather like he got the idea from a Native American informant, passing along what was claimed to be oral history. It is prima facieimprobable, if for no other reason than this world council somehow failed to distribute the fruits of the Old and New Worlds around the world, except for the odd cigarette or line of cocaine, yet was 100% effective in preventing the spread of diseases from the Old World to the New and vice versa over thousands of years of regular contact by (presumably) at least the low number of Europeans who sparked the epidemics that felled two continents’ worth of people after 1492.

The trouble with oral history is that it is gets revised and edited with each new teller, and it is easy enough to find examples of modern material worked into and presented as “ancient” history. Add to that the regrettable influence of fringe history on pop culture, and you have a recipe for unreliable narration of past events, particularly those alleged to have taken place 12,500 years ago! ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/w...ld-intercontinental-world-conference-meetings
 
I'd like to see Mr. Wolter's list of peoples who didnt visit the americas.
 
He's a Greek and he's OK!

Greek Scientists Claim Plutarch Recorded Ancient Greek Voyages to Canadian Colony
2/6/2018

I read an interesting article about some bad research published recently in the Journal of Coastal Studies claiming that the ancient Greeks visited North America in the early decades CE, and perhaps as far back as the Bronze Age. It’s a rather textbook example of how cherry picking ancient texts outside of their established context can lead to poor results. I first learned of the claim on Friday in Hakai magazine, but it took me a few days to digest the complex chain of faulty reasoning involved. While the original journal article is locked behind a paywall, the lead researcher posted a copy to Research Gate, so we are fortunate to be able to analyze the actual arguments rather than a media summary of them.

The article in question is titled, somewhat ungrammatically, “Does Astronomical and Geographical Information of Plutarch’s De Facie Describe a Trip Beyond the North Atlantic Ocean?” It was written by Greek archaeometry professor Ioannis Liritzis and a group of colleagues with even less background in the Classics, most of whom are physicists. The article was published on the Journal of Coastal Research’s website in November, ahead of a future print appearance at an unspecified date. To the best of my knowledge, the article only came to public attention this weekend when Hakai, a magazine devoted to coastal waterways, wrote about it. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/g...rded-ancient-greek-voyages-to-canadian-colony
 
Could AmerIndians have washed up in Galway? And did that give Coumbus the idea to sail west?

One of the most dramatic pieces of evidence for a pre-Columbian crossing of the Atlantic is to be found in a single Latin marginalia, that is some words scribbled into the margin of a book. The sentence in question appears in a copy of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini which was published in Venice in 1477. In that work Piccolomini discusses the arrival of Indians in Europe blown from across the Atlantic at a date when America was unknown to Europeans (another post another day). Next to this passage a reader has written in Latin the following extraordinary words:

Homines de catayo versus oriens venierunt. Nos vidimus multa notabilia et specialiter in galuei ibernie virum et uxorem in duabus lignis areptis ex mirabili persona.

the author of the marginalia is remembered by history as Christopher Columbus. He was most likely in Ireland in 1476-1477 on a sailing trip to the north. This accidental encounter with a Amerindians (or Chinese as he believed) was to prove an important moment in his life. And years later his son recalled the episode in his father’s autobiography. It very likely demonstrated to Christopher that under the right circumstances it was possible for a vessel to cross the Great Ocean between the Indies and Europe.

http://www.strangehistory.net/2012/11/17/american-indians-in-galway-ireland/
 
Could AmerIndians have washed up in Galway? And did that give Coumbus the idea to sail west?



http://www.strangehistory.net/2012/11/17/american-indians-in-galway-ireland/

“This passage presents several challenges. The first two sections are easily translated. The difficulty is in the third part.

1) Homines de catayo versus oriens venierunt = ‘Men from Cathay [China] came towards the west’

2) Nos vidimus multa notabilia et specialiter in galuei ibernie virum et uxorem = ‘We saw many remarkable things and particularly in Galway in Ireland a man and a woman…’

3) in duabus lignis areptis ex mirabili persona = ‘[a man and a woman] on two pieces of wood (tied together?? Drift wood??), of the most extraordinary appearance [the boat is of the most extraordinary appearance?].’

Readers will agree that the most important information is in the first two clauses. However, let us risk a translation of the whole with the understanding that there are some uncertainties in the final part:

Men from Cathay [China] come towards the west. We saw many remarkable things and particularly in Galway in Ireland a man and a woman on two pieces of drift wood of the most extraordinary appearance.

http://www.strangehistory.net/2012/11/17/american-indians-in-galway-ireland/

maximus otter
 
Gaelic-speaking native Americans

I seem to recall something about native Americans found speaking Gaelic, but I'm having real trouble locating anything about it. The nearest I can get is that Gaelic is still spoken in pockets of Nova Scotia -- not the same thing! Could anyone give me any pointers on this one?

I get to reply to the first post on this Thread. Did Irish Monks reach America before Columbus?

On Monday, the Council for West Virginia Archaeology posted an open letter that they wrote to the editor of Appalachian Magazine,
taking issue with that publication’s December article attributing some Native American petroglyphs in the state to Irish monks. The article, posted on December 21, asked whether Celts preceded Columbus to the Americas. Frankly, as a bit of recycled garbage culled from 1980s press clippings, I would never have taken notice of it were it not for the Council’s letter. Sadly, there are simply too many similar pieces recycling twentieth century pseudohistory to keep track of.

While the Appalachian piece was filed under a “Legends and Tall Tales” subject heading, and the anonymous article author admits that the story’s evidence is “shaky” and basically a “conspiracy theory,” the content of the piece clearly implied readers were meant to take it seriously:
There is a modern theory which states that ancient Irish missionaries appeared in the New World roughly a millennium after the earthly life Christ and can trace its unusual roots to a discovery made in the coalfields of Southern West Virginia during the early-1980s.
Clearly, Appalachian has not done its homework. The claim that Irish monks visited the Americas in the Middle Ages is centuries old. Colonial Americans debated whether Native American mounds were the work of Irish missionaries, and the French historian Eugène Beauvois wrote a large number of papers in the late 1800s advocating the position that the Irish bequeathed civilization to Native Americans, following, he believed, Norse Vikings and preceding French Knights Templar.

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/w...g-claims-about-irish-monks-in-ancient-america
 
Vikings again!

... However, that does not mean that I will avoid writing about the real historical background of this episode. That background however, is not really about the story of a Viking ship supposedly in the California desert—which Newsweek correctly reported a few years ago originated, according to a U.S. government publication, in an exaggeration of a story about a Civil War-era ship built in 1862 for a Colorado River mining company and left in the desert to rot when they discovered it would cost too much to transport to the river. It’s also not about petroglyphs near San Fernando de Velicatá in Baja California—some of which date back five hundred to a thousand years and one of which is sometimes said to resemble a Spanish galleon, and here will be mistaken for a Viking ship. In the past, Spanish chroniclers identified the petroglyphs as the work of Chaldeans, and in 1910 Arthur Walbridge North expressed amazement at their alleged similarity to Phoenician writing. Native lore, which North recorded on a 1906 trip, claimed them to be the work of a lost race of Giants who lived in Mexico before the native peoples.

Instead, the background I’d rather discuss revolves around the issue of why people have come to believe that Vikings visited in Mexico. This claim was popularized by white supremacist writers of the middle twentieth century, particularly ex-Nazis and former Nazi supporters like Jacques de Mahieu—cited approvingly by Wolter in one of his books—who built upon the work of Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi archaeologists to propose that the Vikings had colonized the ancient Americas and held Aryan dominion over all the native peoples, which they passed on to the Knights Templar. (Wolter, writing in 2013, dismissed De Mahieu’s Nazi connections as “irrelevant and unimportant.” De Mahieu hired Joseph Goebbels’s former translator to translate his work from French to German.) ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-america-unearthed-s04e01-vikings-in-the-southwest#
 
Ancient Mariners: Transoceanic Voyages Before the Europeans

Source: ancient-origins.net
Date: 8 March, 2020

The idea that humans have been completing transoceanic voyages - traveling the earth via our oceans - before Europeans set sail is, in many people's eyes, an accepted conclusion. Yet it is still debated , resisted, and rejected in many academic circles.

We have seen the work of Hapgood, who theorized a pre-ice age tradition of world mapping which involved an advanced, unknown sea-faring civilization who possessed astonishing abilities. Hapgood based these claims on decades of research into ancient map fragments; the most famous of which, the “Piri Reis” map dating to the 15th century, is believed by him and his team to show the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land Antarctica and the Palmer Peninsula.

Astonishing in itself, the fact that the fragment also appears to show the coastline free of ice is downright spectacular considering, according to research presented by Hapgood, the last time it was ice free was over 6,000 years ago (Hapgood, 1966, P. 93-98). Thus, when we consider an oceanic link say, between South America and the Pacific Islands, it should not be too hard to fathom.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-important-events/transoceanic-voyage-0013390
 
Wolter again, this time it's crypto-jews.

To that end, Scott Wolter showed up Tuesday night on Jimmy Church’s radio show to promote his newest obsession, a set of stones from Texas he thinks represent a European occupation from around 1500. ...

Wolter is totally into the Texas “mystery stones” right now—to the point that he traveled by car from Minnesota to Texas twice during a pandemic to see the stones. They’re some crudely carved stones with cartoonish inscriptions and (nonsensical) Hebrew text allegedly found in a cave in 1968 (but not actively examined until 2000) resembling a Hollywood-style treasure map. Wolter thinks they’re ancient and “cool.” Their current owner is dying of cancer and is “living for this”—meeting Scott Wolter and getting Wolter to investigate the stones.
According to Wolter, the cave has a date carved in it from 1501 and the stones bear dates from the early 1500s and the 1700s. The dates are too late for me to care that much—they are after Columbus, so despite their anomalous placement in Texas, they don’t change history in any major way. I’m certain they are fakes since they look as fake as fake can be. Some contain images of a stereotypical Egyptian headdress, even though medieval and Renaissance artists depicted Egyptian kings in the style of Ottoman sultans or European kings. Even Wolter said that the stones look as though they were recently carved, but he has convinced himself that they have centuries of weathering. I’m also a bit concerned that Wolter is excited that a runic inscription found on a preexisting fake rune stone in Oklahoma is duplicated on one of the new Texas stones. Wouldn’t the more logical conclusion be that the new one is a fake rather than the product of a “crypto-Jewish community” of Templar/Viking rune initiates, as Wolter claims. A second Texas stone also duplicates another (fake) rune inscription from Oklahoma.

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/s...-stones-document-colonization-by-crypto-jews#
 
From the Bridge of Sighs to Siberia and on to Alaska.

Venetian Glass Beads Found in Arctic Alaska Predate Arrival of Columbus

Dr. Mike Kunz from the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Dr. Robin Mills found at least ten glass trade beads at Punyik Point and two other archaeological sites in Alaska.

“Punyik Point, a mile from the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, is unoccupied today. It was a seasonal camp for generations of inland Eskimos,” Dr. Kunz said.

“Punyik Point was on ancient trade routes from the Bering Sea to the Arctic Ocean, and was probably a dependable place to hunt caribou as the animals moved in fall and spring.”

“And, if for some reason the caribou didn’t migrate through where you were, Punyik Point had excellent lake trout and large shrub-willow patches.”

Along with the radiocarbon dating of the Alaska twine and charcoal found near the beads, the researchers figured the glass beads arrived at Punyik Point sometime between 1440 and 1480.

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/venetian-glass-beads-arctic-alaska-09357.html
 
Just noticed this thread, and want to point out two bits of information:

First, it is generally accepted by professional historians and anthropologists who make a living in respectable institutions that any number of people from Europe or elsewhere might have occasionally reached the East coat of the Americas in advance of Columbus. They were looking for a better place to live, or following fish, or wanted to trade. Or they were blown off course. They left bits and pieces. The important part is that none of them survived or thought it worth staying. Even the Vikings gave it up after a while. The destructive portion of this information is when inadequate academics extrapolate this to show that Europeans "created" better cultures for the aboriginal inhabitants or develop grand and unsubstantiated theories of imaginary civilizations.

Second, we underestimate by a lot how extensively people and items traveled before the European 15th century. Trade over huge distances is well documented as far back as archeology reaches. China to Scandinavia, African items in China, the extreme south of S America to Alaska and New England, people or a chain of people walking slowly made money and enjoyed the experience by trading everything everywhere. Venetian glass beads in Alaska doesn't surprise me. Something as precious as that would have reached New Brunswick and made its way slowly across the continent. I am ignorant about particulars of trade along the East Asia/Japan/Siberia routes, but those ships could have been blown off course as well. And I bet Venetian glass reached the Korean upper class just as silks reached Venice.

All this evidence is a magnificent tribute to the commercial and adventurous spirit of homo sapiens - no need to invoke the templars. The reality is excellent on its own.
 
Last edited:
Genoan writings about The New World, which pre date Columbus by over 100 years, have been discovered.

"Sailors in Christopher Columbus’s home town knew about North America more than a century before the explorer discovered the continent, Italian researchers have claimed."


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...0-years-before-christopher-columbus-lfwxv3g2h
It's akin to Galileo being persecuted for saying the sun was at the centre of our solar system when the Greeks had said the same thing 2,000 years before. Bloomin clever those ancient Greeks.
 
Genoan writings about The New World, which pre date Columbus by over 100 years, have been discovered.

"Sailors in Christopher Columbus’s home town knew about North America more than a century before the explorer discovered the continent, Italian researchers have claimed."


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...0-years-before-christopher-columbus-lfwxv3g2h
So not only did Chris believe he'd found a route to Asia when actually he'd found a new continent, he hadn't even discovered the new continent.

Still, I'm not entirely convinced that talk of a fertile land inhabited by giants in the west beyond Greenland is much evidence of knowledge of the Americas. It sounds like a typical mythical, gap filling land. In spite of Columbus' assertion that the world was smaller than had been supposed, the actual size of the earth was well known in his day. Without knowledge of the Americas, that leaves a huge expanse of ocean which someone's imagination might fill with bucolic paradises, giants, cynocephali and dragons.
 
Actually everyone except CC knew that there was in fact something out there. The Irish discovered it, the Vikings discovered it, the folks in Iceland who fished knew it was there. My guess is most experienced commercial captains, like the Genoese, knew. They just didn't know what or where. CC was betting that it was really the far east, although those fisherman knew better.
 
I agree that there seems little reason to take this description more seriously than all the other claims of faraway lands. Do we even know that beyond means west of Greenland and not north?
Columbus arrived in the Bahamas. Even if there was a land west of Greenland, there might not have been any reason why it should have extended as far south as the Bahamas.
 
This EurekAlert news release provides more details about the discovery of the Genoan documentation.

NEWS RELEASE 8-OCT-2021
Italian sailors knew of America 150 years before Christopher Columbus, new analysis of ancient documents suggests

New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned ‘discovery’.

Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature expert Professor Paolo Chiesa has made an “astonishing” discovery of an “exceptional” passage referring to an area we know today as North America.

According to Chiesa, the ancient essay – first discovered in 2013 – suggests that sailors from Genoa were already aware of this land, recognizable as ‘Markland’/ ‘Marckalada’ – mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as part of the Atlantic coast of North America (usually assumed to be Labrador or Newfoundland). ...

“We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent, albeit in an embryonic form, in the Mediterranean area,” states Professor Chiesa ...

Galvaneus was a Dominican friar who lived in Milan and was connected to a family which held at the lordship of the city.

He wrote several literary works in Latin, mainly on historical subjects. ...

Cronica universalis, which is analyzed here by Chiesa, is thought to be one of his later works – perhaps the last one – and was left unfinished and unperfected. It aims to detail the history of the whole world, from ‘Creation’ to when it was published. ...

Chiesa states Cronica universalis “brings unprecedented evidence to the speculation that news about the American continent, derived from Nordic sources, circulated in Italy one and half centuries before Columbus.” ...
FULL STORY: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/931035
 
I don't know anything about Columbus in history, but an alternate story is that it was generally known that there was land out there, and Columbus, an adventurer and hot-dogger, persuaded a neighboring king (not his own government) to put up cash that at the very least would get him famous making up a narrative about a sea passage to Asia. Is there does anyone know a real history book of this?
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research paper. The full paper is accessible at the link below.

Paolo Chiesa (2021)
Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (c. 1340)
Terrae Incognitae, 53:2, 88-106.
DOI: 10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792

Abstract
The Cronica universalis written by the Milanese friar Galvaneus Flamma (it. Galvano Fiamma, d. c. 1345) contains an astonishing reference to a terra que dicitur Marckalada, situated west from Greenland. This land is recognizable as the Markland mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as some part of the Atlantic coast of North America. Galvaneus’s reference, probably derived by oral sources heard in Genoa, is the first mention of the American continent in the Mediterranean region, and gives evidence of the circulation (out of the Nordic area and 150 years before Columbus) of narratives about lands beyond Greenland. This article provides a transcription of the passage, explains its context in the Cronica universalis, compares it to the other (Nordic) references of Markland, and discusses the possible origin of Galvaneus’s mention of Markland in light of Galvaneus’s biography and working method.

SOURCE & FULL PAPER:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792
 
According to this 2018 article, Columbus was under the impression he would find human and semi-human monsters of the sort alleged in ancient and medieval accounts.
Columbus believed he would find ‘blemmyes’ and ‘sciapods’ – not people – in the New World

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of a fast route to East Asia and the southwest Pacific, he landed in a place that was unknown to him. There he found treasures – extraordinary trees, birds and gold.

But there was one thing that Columbus expected to find that he didn’t.

Upon his return, in his official report, Columbus noted that he had “discovered a great many islands inhabited by people without number.” He praised the natural wonders of the islands.

But, he added, “I have not found any monstrous men in these islands, as many had thought.” ...


Why, one might ask, had he expected to find monsters?

... Columbus’ views were far from abnormal. For centuries, European intellectuals had imagined a world beyond their borders populated by “monstrous races."

One of the earliest accounts of these non-human beings was written by the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder in 77 A.D. In a massive treatise, he told his readers about dog-headed people, known as cynocephalus, and astoni, creatures with no mouth and no need to eat.

Across medieval Europe, tales of marvelous and inhuman creatures – of cyclops, blemmyes, creatures with heads in their chests, and sciapods, who had a single leg with a giant foot – circulated in manuscripts hand-copied by scribes who often embellished their treatises with illustrations of these fantastic creatures. ...
FULL STORY: https://theconversation.com/columbu...d-sciapods-not-people-in-the-new-world-104306
 
Not sure where to post this, but here will do for now:

15th century English gold coin found in Newfoundland, predating previous finds:
Amateur historian discovers 600-year-old English coin in Newfoundland (CNN)

The discovery of a rare gold coin on the south coast of Newfoundland, Canada, may challenge traditional historical narratives about the timing of European contact in the region, as it predates explorer John Cabot's arrival on the island by at least 70 years.
In a press release last week, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador said that the English coin was found during the summer of 2022 by Edward Hynes, a local amateur historian, who reported it to officials as required under the province's Historic Resources Act. The 600-year-old coin predates the first documented European contact with North America since the Vikings, in a region with a 9,000-year-old history of human settlement and rich Indigenous traditions.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top