20 thoughts on “Columbus Day”

    1. As to the subject matter in the linked essay, the question of whether the Portuguese and English would eventually have found North America is one I find academic. Columbus is the one European explorer who got to the New World before the others.

        1. Rand,

          Yes, and October 9 is the day Congress designated to honor their discovery.

          http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/leif-erikson-day

          And of course you have the mystery of where the Bristol fishermen were drying the Cod they brought into port. Like good entrepreneurs the Bristol merchants believed in keeping their secrets, however its very likely that John Cabot knew where he was going 🙂

          http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kurlansky-cod.html

          Its also likely that America might be named after one of the early “venture capitalists” that financed the Bristol cod merchants and actually owned John Cabot’s ship, a gentleman named Richard Amerike, but that it is probably just a coincidence, his name and the name for America being so similar 🙂

          Still, it would be nice to think America is named in honor of an 15th Century entrepreneur and merchant, the majority owner of the private ship that John Cabot sailed in, even if its not politically correct. After all, we all know that only governments are in the business of exploration and discovery 🙂

          http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/americaname_01.shtml#three

          2. Peterh,

            That is the accepted theory and has been for a long while. The problem is no one is even sure he wrote those letters or of how many voyages he made. And that is the problem, the lack of records from that era. The more you look the more gaps you find. Even the original log of Columbus’s first voyage is missing, perhaps still buried somewhere in the General Archive of the Indies…

            In the case of John Cabot there are many questions, like how many voyages he actually made. There is also the 1565 record of a chronicle from 1497 reporting John Cabot’s discovery of the “land of America” which would predate the use of the name on the map of 1507 by a decade. So really the case is still out as folks keep digging further into archived documents from that era.

            http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Maritime/Sources/1565fust.htm

            It will be interesting to watch what develops from the research.

          3. “Amerigo Vespucci.”

            “Peterh,

            That is the accepted theory and has been for a long while. The problem is no one is even sure he wrote those letters or of how many voyages he made. And that is the problem, the lack of records from that era.”

            All true enough. However, one record did survive, and that was John Cabot’s American Espress bill — which shows that his trip to this continent was put on that. That’s where the name came from (little known fact).

        2. Discovering a new, rich continent doesn’t count if, for whatever reason, you don’t tell anybody. Columbus was the one, the first one, who discovered a new land, realized what he’d found and then came back and told all of Europe there’s a new land over there.

          2. Kevin,

            Counts where? History books? The Bristol merchants weren’t interested in praise from the King for giving him new subjects to tax, or modern day historians, they were in it for the profits. And to find a way around the Hanseatic League regulations 🙂

          3. Rand,

            And the Queen’s wise men were right, the Earth was too large (25,000 mile Circumference) for Christopher Columbus to reach Asia without running out of food and water. But Columbus insisted they were wrong and the world only had a 18,000 mile Circumference. The idea educated folks believed the world was flat was an 19th Century myth started by Washington Irving.

    1. Jacques Cartier who officially discovered Canada, except of course for the fleets of Basque fishermen he found in the Gulf of St. Lawrence when he reached it. But then they weren’t interested in medals and honor, just money.

  3. Columbus no more discovered America than I discovered Beijing. When he arrived, there were already a lot of people living here.

  4. The Vikings have always interested me. Their Greenland colony existed for longer than the US has been a nation – by about twice.

    They even had an outpost in Newfoundland for a while, and the first American of European descent was born there, nearly 500 years before Columbus’s voyage.

    Did the Vikings tell anyone? Yes. And interestingly, Columbus’ son, in his biography of his father, recounts a voyage his father took seven years before first proposing a voyage to China by heading west; a visit to Ultima Thule, today known as Iceland. And in Iceland, he would have heard of the sagas of the Norse, much of which talked about the lands to the west.

    Also, it was in Greenland, when the Norse first met what they called Skraelings (Native Americans) that the long expansion of humanity, heading east and west, finally met.

    What happened to the Greenland Norse? They settled Greenland in the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than today. They prospered for centuries, only to decline as the little ice age set in. That decline, coupled by pressure from the Skraelings, probably finished them. I say probably because no one actually knows; contact was lost, and to this day no one knows their final fate. For me, it is the most interesting “lost colony” story I’ve ever encountered.

    1. Arizona C J.

      [[[And in Iceland, he would have heard of the sagas of the Norse, much of which talked about the lands to the west. ]]]

      And if I recall Admiral Morison’s biography he also stopped off in Bristol, the jumping off port for Iceland where he likely heard stories in the taverns of “Hy-Brazail” which Bristol merchants searched for in the 1480’s and was rumored to be the source of their “non-Icelandic” Cod. i.e Newfoundland.

      But in his view of a “small” Earth (18,000 miles circumference) he didn’t see them as a New World but simply lands on the east coast of Asia north of his destinations – China and Japan. And that was exactly the arguments he used when seeking funds from Spain for what he actually saw as a trading voyage, not one of discovery.

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