8 thoughts on “The Naming Of America”

  3. I found a well used book in a thrift shop for $1.00. 1421 The Year China Discovered America. Makes a plausible case that the Chinese were here decades before Columbus and he had a copy of a copy of one of their maps that placed America much closer to Europe. Navigation error on the map due to ocean currents. It is suggested that to get funding he faked the map to suggest it was Asia knowing in advance that the land was there and wasn’t Asia.

    Interesting read that I wouldn’t have bought new. Not necessarily convinced, but won’t dismiss the possibility out of hand.

    1. Yeah, that’s been thoroughly debunked years ago. Cheng Ho never got any further east than New Guinea. He mostly went south and west, reaching Africa. Chinese records don’t contain any copy of any such map, nor any reference to it, or to any such voyage.

  4. I’ve said this before, but America is actually named “India”, which is why it was full of Indians. My theory is that when early humans set out from Africa, their leader told them they were heading to a place they called India, a pair of continents that wasn’t already full of Neanderthals, Denisovians, or Homo Erectus, and that they’d soon be living in Palm Springs or Palo Alto. So they started walking along the coast.

    But near Mumbai the leader got tired of walking and said “We’re here! This is India!” Most of the fools believed him and stuck with the incorrect name for Hindustanistan, but a few others continued the journey, eventually arriving in Bakersfield and then continuing on down to Terra del Fuego.

    Much later, Columbus sailed over and rightly realized that he’d reached India, seeing as how the place was full of Indians, but later map makers thought that couldn’t be right because there was already a place in south Asia that was called India. So they just made up a new name.

    I think I’ll swing over to campus and convince some woke college kids that the term “Native American” is a colonialist, imperialist, white cis-gendered male imposition of an incorrect and self-serving European term on the Indians who knew this place was India the whole time.

  5. Columbus wasn’t looking for “India” but the “Indies” — as all the manifold islands south and east of the Asian continent were then known (viz.: “Indonesia” today) — all the way up to and including the Japanese islands.

    1. Or perhaps he was really looking for Indies, movies starring Winona Ryder, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, etc.

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