Today we are going to find out who REALLY discovered America ! :D
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America! Who REALLY discovered the New World? The most straightforward answer would be Christopher Columbus & the year would be famously stated as 1492. Was Columbus the first European to glimpse the untamed, verdant paradise that America must have been centuries ago? Those who have dug a little deeper would venture a guess that the vikings were the ones to set foot on it’s shores first.
& What is the first Viking name that would pop up in their head when it comes to the most famous Viking explorer? The most likely answer would be "Leif Eriksson" the first to discover North America nearly 500 years before Columbus. Yet again they will be wrong. This is the little known, forgotten history, of The Man Who Didn’t Discover America!
Between 1480 & 1780, European explorers discovered & mapped almost all of the world’s seas & the outlines of almost all continents. Impelled by a variety of motives - trade, personal enrichment, glory & by the 18th Century, scientific knowledge - their legacy is today’s World Map, a common resource of all mankind.
The European voyages of discovery began early in the 15th Century when Portuguese navigators advanced southward, round the west coast of Africa., in search of gold, slaves & spices, until in 1487 Dias and de Covilha brought them into the Indian Ocean. Thenceforth voyages of exploration multiplied, particularly after the resurgence of Islam made an old route to the east via Alexandria and the Red Sea precarious.
While the Spanish sailed west, the Portuguese explored the eastern route to Asia. The Spanish search for a western route to the Spice Islands was less successful, but its unintended & momentous result was Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492 followed by the Spanish conquest of the Americas. But it was not until after 1524, when Verazzano traced the coastline of North America as far north as Nova Scotia, that the existence of the new continent was generally accepted.
Hundreds of years before these events, however, lived a man who had the potential to become a legend, yet made a seemingly small choice that changed the course of his life & human history as we know it. His name was Bjarni Herjulfson.
& He could have become one of the most famous explorers in history., if only he’d gotten out of his boat!
This strange story of Bjarni Herjolfsson, a Viking who was “short on curiosity,” is told in The Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga), a Norse saga that was probably composed in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, some two to three hundred years after Bjarni Herjolfsson may have caught glimpses of the North American coastline from his ship.
The saga is not the first account of European contact with the North American continent to be written. In about 1072, Adam of Bremen, a German monk, recorded information he had received from King Svein Estrithsson, the king of the Danes. According to King Svein, “another island” existed to the far west of Greenland and Iceland. There, “unknown crops also grow.” Scholars today assume that Adam of Bremen was discussing the discovery of Vínland or Wineland by Norse explorers.
The story of the Vikings in North America is a complex one. Over the past fifty years, linguists, archeologists, historians, cartographers, and even navigational experts have pieced together various clues which provide us with a better understanding of this story, but pieces of this story are, and probably always will be, incomplete.
Further compounding the difficulties in understanding this story are the many contradictions that exist between the various texts discussing the Vikings’ experiences in America. Bjarni Herjolfsson’s story, for example, is told in only one of the two Viking sagas about North America. In the Saga of Eirik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða), no mention is made of Bjarni, which has led some historians to ask if his journey to the west of Greenland even occurred.
Whether Bjarni Herjolfsson was the first European to see America or whether this honor should be awarded to Lief Eirikson will probably never be definitively answered. Bjarni’s failure to land in North America was not simply a failure of the imagination, it has also meant that Bjarni and his crew failed to leave evidence of their journey for archeologists to discover.
manwho didn'tdiscover
