"Exploration and Discovery before 1492" by Wilcomb Washburn from The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, 1992., Silvio Benini, Editor, pp. 257-260. Although the name Columbus is indelibly linked with European discovery of America, the Norsemen without question arrived in the New World five hundred years earlier, and other Europeans may have arrived a thousand years earlier. It does not minimize Columbus achievement to put it in the context of Europe's knowledge of lands beyond the Atlantic from the time of the greeks and romans and perhaps earlier. Some scholars postulate voyages to the Atlantic Islands and even to the American continent by Stone Age or Bronze Age sailors from Europe. A thousand years later Phoenicians and Carthaginians ventured from the Mediterranean Sea to repeat the feats of these shadowy early navigators. Greeks and Romans followed. The Atlantic islands discovered were sometimes exuberantly reported as the site of the Hesperides (producer of Golden Apples), the Fortunate islands, the Terrestrial Paradise, or other attractive locales. Although these early navigators are sometimes thought to have made transatlantic discoveries, most scholars limit their findings to Islands in the Atlantic. During the time of Alexander the Great, the Greek Pytheas of Massilia claimed to have visit a island called Thule, probably Iceland, which became known as the "ultimate", or farthest land from Europe; the sea around this land was often thought to be congealed. In medieval times irish monks such as Saint brendan (c. 520-578) set sail in seagoing, leatherskinned, willow framed coracles, seeking variously the earthly paradise was assumed to lie in the extreme East, the effort to sail west to reach it indicates a recognition of the sphericity od the earth and a belief that the width of the Atlantic separating Europe from Asia was not great. Reports of the voyages of irish monks were to litter the maps of the period with mythical islands. Norse Explorations and Settlements Beginning in the eighth century A.D., Norsemen moved west from Scandinavia, often finding Irish already established on Islands such as Iceland, which the Norse reached in the ninth century. The distance between Iceland and Greenland is much less than the distance between Iceland and the lands from which the settlers from Europe had come. Hence it is nor surprisingly that before the end of the tenth century, the Norsemen had reached Greenland and, shortly after, Vinland the Good. Some scholars assume the Irish was ahead of the Norse, even in America, but hard archaeological evidence is lacking to support the irish claim, whereas it exists for the Norse. That the Norse planted settlements, however briefly, on the mainland of North America has long been accepted, despite the fact that the Icelandic saga evidence upon which that assumption was based on many years was treated cautiously by scholars like Fridtjof Nansen because of it's oral, folkloristic, and mythical elements. Indeed the Massachusetts Historical Society, when asked to report on a nineteenth century proposal to erect a statue in Boston to Leif Ericsson, responded, "There is the same sort of reason for believing in the existence of Leif Ericsson that there is for believing in the existence of Agamemnon; they are both traditions accepted by later writers, but there is no more reason for regarding as true the details related about his discoveries then there is for accepting as truth the narratives contained in the Homeric poems." But the discovery in 1961 by Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad of some house ruins at L'Anse-aux- Meadows in northern NewFoundland containing European artifacts such as Norse spindle whorl dating from around A.D. 1000, the few remaining doubts about Norse pre-Columbian settlement in the New World were largely erased. The Norse settlements on Mainland America were an outgrowth of the activities of Eric the Red of Iceland who established a colony in Greenland in the late tenth century. Eric's son Leif may have been the first European to set foot on American soil, but the story of the accidental discovery and late occupation of a portion of "America" involves not only Leif but Bjarni Herjulfsson, Leif's brother Thorvald, and Thorfinn Karlsefni Thordarson. The land west of Greenland that was discovered and temporarily settled consisted of three distinct but apparently connected regions: Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. The first two areas are usually identified as Baffin Islands and Labrador, but for the last name is subject to great debate because of the assumption that vines grew there. Questionable claims to pre-Columbian Norse site have been made for new England, Minnesota, and other parts of Canada. Fourteenth century voyages into the interior of Canada and the United states have periodically been reported for example, as recorded in the Kensington Rune Stone found in 1898 near Kensington Minnesota. This artifact occasioned a bitter debate among scholars and amateurs and was eventually judged to be a modern fraud, although theories of its authenticity periodically reemerge. The elastic character of ancient inscriptions on Rocks can be judged from the fact that the puzzle inscriptions on the Dighton Rocks near Taunton, Massachusetts, have been read to support both Norse and Portuguese pre-Columbian discoveries. Another potential Norse site is on Kodlunarn Island in Froshbisher Bay, where the English explorer Martin Froshbisher led three expeditions in 1577 and 1578. The arctic explorer Francis Hall in mid-nineteenth century rediscovered the site and discovered an iron bloom from it, and a Smithsonian Institute expedition in 1981 excavated the site and discovered several additional iron blooms dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There are many explanations for unusual dating of these objects that would preclude Norse presence in the area during those centuries, but possibility of a Norse presence cannot be ruled out in even conceivable that advocates of a pre- columbian discovery by the legendary Welsh prince Madoc, around A.D. 1170, may, with the discovery of these artifacts reemerge. The fact the Vinland is clearly recognized by modern geographers as part of the North American mainland while Greenland and Iceland are identified as islands adjacent the mainland but not necessarily within the Western Hemisphere, emphasizes the artificial nature of contemporary descriptions of what constitutes "discovery" of the "New World". Our present day knowledge of the presence of a continent separated from both Europe and vast oceans impels us to consider any discovery what we now know to be the mainland of that continent be a discovery of the whole, while discovery of offshore islands is not given the same importance, Such things indeed is often used to rob Columbus of discovering America because he discovered outlying island on his first two voyages and did not read the mainland of South America until the third voyage 1498. But the explorations and settlements of the Norse the mainland of North America, though known in Europe had little impact on those who sought to reach the described by Marco Polo, a land of immense, wealthy, and powerful nations populations. Rather, that filtered back to europe inspired at best curiosity a cold and uninviting northern frontier similar to northern reaches of the Scandinavian peninsula which the new discoveries were often confused in telling and conjoined on some maps. Classical Exploration The Atlantic Ocean was the source of idyllic paradisiacal imaged for some classical writers but described in forbidding terms by other classical medieval writers as an impassable, shallow , muddy barrier navigation. Such reports were derived principally from thr story of Atlantis reported by Plato in the middle of the fourth century B.C. Atlantis, a powerful kingdom occupying a gigantic continent larger than Europe but was destroyed in a cataclysmic series of earthquakes and floods, which cause it to disappear beneath the sea, leaving the Atlantic impenetrable because of the shoals of mud and dangerous reefs. In contrast to the tales of fortunate islands or isles of the blessed, other tales of giant sea monsters, huge eels, spouting whales, and the like were sometimes reported by fearful commentators, whose visions were later to adorn the maps of medieval Europe. The Roman poet Horace spoke of godless ships bound madly in contempt o'er channels not allowed and warned that the gods were appalled by this violation of strange seas and sacred waters. It should be recalled that the Atlantic were thought by most classical and medieval scholars to be merely and arm of a great ocean surrounding the central landmass of Europe, Asia, and Africa, Prior to the efforts of those who sought to reach the East by sailing west, traders, diplomats, and explorers tried to reach the East by sailing east, starting from the eastern mediterranean or the Red Sea which was intermittently connected by a canal and sailing across the Indian Ocean. Classical reports of attempts, some successful and some not, to sail around Africa, either from the east to the west or the west to the east, can also be found in the literature. The earliest known attempt to circumnavigate Africa from east to west was undertaken by Phoenician seamen at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. on the order of the Egyptian king Necho, reported by Herodotus, the voyage, in the opinion of some modern scholars, did take place and did succeed in its mission. In the second century B.C., Agatharchides of Cnidus in the Erthraean Sea discusses the history of the area following Alexander the Great's conquests which opened up the area to Greek enterprise. Alexander's successors in Egypt, the for Ptolemies, promoted explorations down the African coast and into the surrounding ocean. By the first quarter of the second century B.C. the secret of the monsoon route to India from Africa had been discovered. The Greek navigator Eudoxus of Cyzicus, in the last two decades of the second century B.C., twice sailed to India from Egypt's Red Sea ports, probably utilizing the hitherto closely held Arab Knowledge of the monsoons seasons that facilitated such voyages. Subsequently, he tried to sail directly from the Mediterranean to India by circumnavigating Africa from west to east. He failed in his first attempt and made a second effort, during which he may have been cut off by Carthaginians, who jealously guarded the Atlantic jumping-off places of the route around Africa, which they, as well as Phoenicians and Persians, had earlier-probably unsuccessfully-attempted to accomplish in a west-east direction. Medieval Exploration Voyages into the Atlantic, some with the goal of circumnavigating Africa, continued in the Christian Era. In 1291 the Vivaldi brothers, Ugolino and Vadino, of Genoa sailed into the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar with the intention of reaching India and were never heard from again. The Venetians Niccolo and Antonio Zeno may have discovered land in the western ocean in the fourteenth century. Genoese navigators, in the service of Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, sailed to the Canaries and down the African Coast. In the course of such voyages in the Great ocean surrounding the land masses of Europe, Asia, and Africa, it is not conceivable that sailors were blown off course, shipwrecked, or otherwise carried to 'American" lands, in the same way that the Portuguese voyager Pedro Alvares Cabral "discovered" Brazil while sailing around Africa to India in 1500. Periodic reports of Roman coins or other tantalizing evidence of a pre-Columbian presence in the New World, or in the islands lying between the New and the Old Worlds, must always be treated with skepticism given he difficulty of establishing historical facts. The same must be said for the evidence native American myths such as that of the white, bearded god Quetzalcoatl, expected to return from the East, who assumed arrival in the form of the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes caused the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II effectively to disarm himself and lose his kingdom. Pre-Columbian discovered can also be attributed to explorers, navigators, fisherman, merchants, and others from Asia, who may variously have sailed, been blown off course, or been carried by the Japan Current northeast along the Aleutian Islands and down the west Coast of America. It is more difficult to conceive of a trans-Pacific route eastward across the Southern Pacific to South America, though Polynesians have been given credit for the achievement by some; a more plausible route runs in the opposite direction, as have been demonstrated theoretically by Thor Heyerdahl. In any event, pre-Columbian contact between Asia and the western coast of North and South America has been hypothesized because of the similarity of pottery types in Japan during the early to middle Jomon period and the Valdivia pottery of ecuador in the period 3500 to 200 B.C. The similarity of pottery types on two sides of a vast ocean suggested trans-Pacific contact to Smithsonian anthropologists Betty Meggers, Clifford Evans, and their collaborator Emilio Estrada, though their thesis has been accepted by only a few scholars. But while images of Asian Animals, similarities of items of clothing, pottery, and so forth can be used to demonstrate the possibility of transpacific exploration and discovery, the evidence is too insubstantial, and the effects too transient to threaten the importance of the first transatlantic discoveries that did not have immediate and substantial consequences. The Historian Debate Two scholarly vices, hypercriticism, on the one hand, and imaginative inferences, on the other, coexist in the historical profession, creating an ever=present tension between those who want to believe what cannot be proved false what is in fact believable. The historian must steer a strict course between both extremes when dealing with the evidence for pre-Columbian contact between the Old World and the New. Columbus's achievement has been denigrated by historians unwilling to concede that he had the ability or the luck to achieve his great enterprise. Skeptics have suggested that someone possibly an anonymous pilot showed him the way. The presence of the large islands such as Antillia reputedly the refuge of seven bishops and their people who left Portugal in the eighth century to escape the Moors on the 1424 map of Zuane Pizzigano was judged in 1954 by the Portuguese scholar Armando Cortesao to represent the forefront of America and to reflect a pre-Columbian Portuguese voyage across the Atlantic. Similar claims for pre_columbian discoveries, particularly in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, have been made in behalf of the English, Danes, Flemings, Basque fisherman from the Bay of Biscay, and Portuguese from the Azores. The documentation of each such claim is complex and clouded, as in the letter written in the winter of 1497-1498 by John Day, an english merchant in Andalusia, to the Lord Grand Admiral of Spain speaking of transatlantic discoveries by men from bristol in other times which mat or may not refer to pre-Columbian times. Those who accept the various hypotheses of pre-Columbian discovered of America frequently imply that Columbus does not deserve to be called the discoverer of America. Important scholars, particularly in the earlier era. frequently subscribed to such views, but they are increasingly rare among scholars of the late twentieth century. Cortesao, for example, has received little support for his theory about the 1424 map from present-day Portuguese scholars. More relevant, though not necessarily contradictory of the idea that columbus discovered America, is the frequently voiced complaint that Columbus did not discovered America because it had been discovered before, by own inhabitants. Of course, it is true that ancestors of present day Native Americans, who found, perhaps a thousand year ago, a land bridge to the New World perhaps while hunting game, were the first men and women to discover the land geographers now categorize as the Western hemisphere, or North and South America. But the term discovery as used by Europeans always meant discovery of Europeans. It was not meant to suggest that the native inhabitants either did not know where they were or had not earlier discovered themselves the lands not discovered by the Europeans each case the term is specific to the discoverers. Bibliography Adam of Bremen. History of the Archbishops of Bremen. Translated with an introduction and notes by Francis Tschan. New York. 1959 Agarharchides of Cnidus. On the Erythraen Sea. Translated and edited by Stanley M. Burstein. Hakluyt Society, 2d ser. 172 London, 1989. Cassidy, Vincent H. The Sea around Them: The Atlantic Ocean A.D. 1250 Baton Rouge, La. 1968. Fitzhugh, William W., and Jaqueline S. Olin. "Archeology of Froshbisher Voyages: Contributions to the Archeology of Froshbisher Bay, N.W.T. Canada. Results of Smithsonian Institute Expedition." Report submitted to the Governor of the Northwest Territories, Prince of Wales Northern Center, Yellowknife, N.W.T., Canada. Typescript 1990. Ingstad, Helge. Westward to Vinland: The discovery of Pre- Columbian Norse House sites in North America. Translated by Erik J. Fris. New York, 1969. Jones, Gwyn. The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyage of Discovery and settlement to Iceland, Greenland. America London, 1964. Keen, Benjamin. The Aztec Image in Western Thought. New Brunswick, NJ., 1971. Magnusson, Magnus, and Hermann Palsson. The Vinland, The Norse Discovery of America: Graenlendinga Saga and Eirik's Saga. New York, 1966. Oleson, Tryggvi J. Early Voyages and Northern Approaches 1000- 1632. Canadian Centenary Series. London, 1964. Sauer, Carl O. Northern Mists. Berkeley, Calif., 1968 Thiel, J. H. Eudoxus of Cyzicus: A Chapter in the History of the Sea Route to India and the Route round the Cape in Ancestor Times. Groningen, 1966. Wahlgren, Erik. The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved. Wisconsin., 1958