Friday, March 16, 2012

Columbus was last



In 1512 Pope Julius II tried to explain why the Christian Bible failed to mention the American Indians and their continent.
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He declared that although the Indians were descendants of Adam and Eve, and therefore human, their ancestors were Babylonians who had been expelled from the Old World on account of their sins.
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God had apparently lost sight of them, and somehow they had managed to survive the flood.
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The theory of the peopling of the Americas that became scientific orthodoxy in the mid-20th century is no less fabulous: the Americas were empty of humans until about 14,000 years ago when migrants from Northeast Asia trekked over the Bering land bridge, and with the exception of a brief visit by the Vikings in the 11th century, the first person to subsequently discover the Americas was Christopher Columbus in 1492.
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More recently, the possibility of migrations up to several tens of thousands of years earlier than 14,000 BP has been accepted by many scientists.
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There is evidence, however, that North, Central, and South America were settled by migrants from different parts of the world over the course of millions of years, and that even in the past 5000 years explorers and traders from various continents visited the Americas before Columbus.
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Columbus was last
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History books tell us that Christopher Columbus – also known a Cristóbal Colón – ‘discovered’ America in 1492.
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His voyage across the Atlantic was financed by Queen Isabella of Spain, as he had failed to win the backing of King John II of Portugal.
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Columbus landed on one of the Bahama islands in the Caribbean, but was convinced he had reached the Indies (or ‘Spice Islands’).
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On his way home, he visited King John II to boast of his success in discovering a shortcut to Japan, China, and King Solomon’s gold mines, but he was told that his voyage had only taken him to ‘Antillia’ (the Antilles), which was already known to the Portuguese, and that there was mainland located directly south of these islands – a continent not shown on any publicly available European map of the time.
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According to the 1st-century geographer Diodorus Siculus, Iberians in the Spanish Peninsula and the Phoenicians of North Africa had learned about a huge paradise in the far western Atlantic about 1000 BC.
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By some accounts, the western isles were part of an Asian continent – known as ‘India Occident’ or ‘India Superior’.
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Some Greek and Roman scholars thought there were only small islands across the Atlantic, known in folklore as the Fortunate Isles, the Gorgades, and the Hesperides. 
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A 5th-century Roman map by Macrobius shows the Gulf of Mexico and the peninsula of Florida, but as part of the Asian/Indian mainland.
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They are shown in the same way on several 15th-century maps published by the Portuguese.
 Portugal’s ruler Prince Henry the Navigator and his successor King John II sent numerous expeditions into the western Atlantic, beginning in 1418.
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These voyages were shrouded in secrecy, and not all the discoveries were shown on published maps, which were often designed to mislead commercial rivals and conceal the existence of unknown lands and lucrative resources.
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According to Ferdinand Colón, Columbus’ son and biographer, the Portuguese had succeeded in reaching Antillia by 1430.
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Moreover, maps produced by the Portuguese Andrea Bianco between 1436 and 1448, but not made public at the time, show the approximate locations of Newfoundland, Florida, and even Brazil.
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Yet later Portuguese maps, published in 1459 and 1489, depict Asia with a southeastern macro-peninsula (Florida) but nothing corresponding to South America.
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Likewise, the globe produced by Portuguese cartographer and navigator Martin Behaim between 1490 and 1492 showed mainland China (Cathay) only 3000 miles west of Europe, and in front of it Cipango (Japan) and the Indies; the Americas are entirely absent. 
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When Columbus visited Portugal around 1482 to try and win King John II’s patronage, Behaim gave him a map showing the same flawed geography. 
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Gunnar Thompson sees this as part of a deliberate strategy to confuse rivals, and also to avoid arousing the anger of the Catholic Church, which recognized only three continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia. 
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Behaim’s 1492 map failed to show a continent below the Antilles, yet an account in theNuremberg Chronicle for 1493 reported that Behaim, accompanied by Jacobus Carnus of Portugal, had crossed the equator to the Antipodes, a Roman term for a southern continent opposite Africa.1
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After examining copies of Behaim’s maps, colonial statesman Benjamin Franklin concluded that Behaim was the true discoverer of America. 
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Behaim, a German expatriate, began working for the Portuguese in 1482. 
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But Andrea Bianco’s 1448 map confirms that the Portuguese had already begun mapping the South American continent. 
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However, it was not until the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci (Americus Vespucius) from 1499 to 1502, working for King Ferdinand of Spain, that the existence of what Vespucci called the ‘New World’ was made public in Europe. 
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Soon afterwards, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named the southern continent ‘America’ in honour of Amerigo,* and Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator later applied the same name to the northern continent.
*H.P. Blavatsky writes: ‘the name of America ... may one day be found more closely related to Meru, the sacred mount in the centre of the seven continents, according to the Hindu tradition, than to Americus Vespucius ...’
Columbus admitted that he carried a map with him on his 1492 voyage showing the route to the ‘Indies’. 
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Many other explorers admitted that they had maps showing the places they ‘discovered’: 
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The Strait of Magellan below South America in the case of Ferdinand Magellan; 
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Brazil in the case of Pedro Álvares Cabral.
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The cape of South Africa in the case of Vasco da Gama; 
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And Australia in the case of Abel Janszoon Tasman. 
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It seems that the whole world had been charted in at least some detail before the Europeans set out on their ‘voyages of discovery’.
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A world map was published in China in 1418, during the Ming dynasty. 
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Its existence suggests that the famous Chinese admiral Zheng He (a Muslim) and his mariners had not only sailed in the Indian Ocean but had also circumnavigated the earth. 
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A comparison of the 1418 map with the slightly later Shanhai Yudi Quantu map (c. 1430) shows that in the meantime the Ming navy had established the peninsular nature of California, improved the west coast outline of South America, and added key east coast features such as Labrador, Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico. 
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The similarities (including errors) that the secret European maps shared with the Ming maps suggest that the maps used by European explorers were partly derived from the Chinese. 
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Portuguese spies such as Niccolo da Conti (c. 1425) and Pero de Covilha (in 1487-1493) had managed to purloin copies of Ming maps.
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The 13th-century explorer and spy Marco Polo was involved in many epic voyages during the 35 years he spent in the service of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler who established the Yuan dynasty and eventually became the first emperor of all China. 
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There are indications that Marco Polo may even have visited the west coast of North and South America. 
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When he finally returned to the Venetian Republic, his maps were confiscated and he was prohibited from writing about most of his travels and from publishing information on the new technologies he had witnessed. 
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In 1428 Prince Pedro of Portugal came to Venice to obtain a copy of Marco Polo’s book and any old maps he could lay his hands on. 
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He is said to have left with numerous documents, which may have played a key role in later Portuguese efforts to reach the Spice Islands and China ahead of their rivals – the Spaniards and Genoese.
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From the 9th to 12th centuries the Norse Vikings were the masters of the Atlantic. 
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The settlement of Greenland was begun by Eric the Red in the late 10th century, when most of the earth, including the Arctic, was warmer than today. 
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Around 1000 AD Eric the Red’s son, Leif, led an expedition to rediscover lands that were known to exist to the west of Greenland. 
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The region in which they settled was named Vinland, which probably corresponds to modern Newfoundland. 
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The Norse discovery of America is the only claim, other than Columbus’, to be fully accepted by modern historians. 
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It was only after excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland provided physical proof that academics stopped dismissing the Viking sagas about such voyages as fairytales. 
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However, they continue to dismiss any evidence that the Vikings travelled further than Newfoundland, or that they initially discovered America hundreds of years before 1000 AD.
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Norse runic inscriptions have been found in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, and even Paraguay. 
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Some lore suggests that a Norse expedition sailed through the maze of islands and passages that form Canada’s Northwest Passage, south through the Bering Strait and all the way down to Mexico. 
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The Seri Indians on the island of Tiburón in the Gulf of California have a tradition about men with blue eyes and blond hair arriving in a longboat. 
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The remains of an Inca Indian, dated to the turn of the 10th century, were found in Norway in 2007. 
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This suggests that Viking explorers reached the Pacific shores of Ecuador or Peru 500 years before the Spanish arrived in the New World, either captured or befriended an Indian, and took him back to Norway.
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There are Norse tales about the Vikings using a ‘sun stone’ to navigate – a notion that mainstream scholars have traditionally dismissed as ‘comic-book archaeology’. 
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However, it seems to be a reference to a natural crystal (cordierite or selenite) whose colour changes from blue to light yellow when pointed in the sun’s direction, allowing the sun’s position to be precisely located on an overcast day. 
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Optical calcite, known as Iceland spar, works just as well. 
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In the 1940s a sky compass was developed based on the same principle of polarization employed by Viking mariners.
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There are stories about a Welsh Prince by the name of Madoc, whose grandfather was half-Norse, sailing west in 1170 and discovering America. 
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Most sources place his landfall in the region of the Gulf of Mexico. 
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Columbus may have known of Madoc’s voyage, as on one of his charts he wrote ‘these are Welsh waters’ in the direction of the West Indies. 
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For centuries European travellers and administrators in America told of meeting Indians who claimed ancestry with the Welsh, could understand Welsh, and spoke in a language very like it. 
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The story of Welsh visitors was confirmed by a Cherokee chief in the 18th century. 
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The Mandan Indians may be descendants of Madoc’s people.
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The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, or The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, a bestseller during the Middle Ages, tells of a great Irish saint named Brendan who sailed to a land across the Atlantic with a party of monks in the middle of the 6th century. 
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The narrative, while highly embellished, seems to contain a hard kernel of fact. 
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He set sail in 564 AD, travelled to the Azores, and eventually reached Barbados, before sailing north as far as Iceland. 
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The Isle of St. Brendan appears on Behaim’s globe of the world, completed in 1492 before Columbus returned to Spain.
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Behaim wrote that St. Brendan had reached the island in 565. 
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Irish and Norse reports indicate that further Irish voyages to America took place in later centuries. 
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Tim Severin demonstrated in 1976-77 that it was possible to sail across the Atlantic in an oxhide boat built with mediaeval materials.
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Evidence of even earlier voyages to the Americas is outlined in the next three sections. 
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It appears that voyages to the Americas have been taking place from all parts of the world for countless thousands of years. 
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The predominant aim seems to have been trade and exploration or the establishment of local colonies, rather than large-scale military conquest and the subjugation and conversion of ‘inferior’ races, as was the case with the European invasions in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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However, orthodox historians and archaeologists are still clinging to their isolationist preconceptions, and refuse to accept the evidence for widespread cultural diffusionism and intercontinental trade. 
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They tend to vigorously defend their own specialist fields against ‘interference’ from outsiders, and generally feel no incentive, or lack the knowledge, to recognize common cultural traits. 
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Where similarities are acknowledged, they are automatically attributed to ‘independent invention’.
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David Pratt

1 comment:

Alexandra said...

very interesting! thank you!!!