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Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'?
FLY9999 writes: "According to British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies, Chinese explorers discovered America way before Columbus did. He will disclose his information to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at a conference next week."
I hope this doesn't mean that they are going to claim us as a "renegade state" now...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
All your Americas are belong to Chinese?
The greatest Chinese Navigator,Cheng Ho, rocked China's boat so much, they closed the ports...
dgd
Well, it seems that now scientists think that not only Egyptians and Vikings 'discovered' America, but now Chinese. Well, I wonder how many other sea-faring cultures have landed on these lee shores in search of a land of riches? Sort of brings to mind various historical-fantasy novels.
The Vikings touched base 400 years prior to the Chinese. The Arabs had the technology and knowledge to do it. The Romans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians may have done it.
But ultimately, none of those is important as Columbus' "discovery". Why? Because what was the end result of Chinese exploration of the Americas? Or of the Vikings? Or of Saint Brendan? It cannot be denied that Columbus had an effect on the history of the world (for better or for worse). Does this lessen the accomplishment of crossing an ocean? No. But exploration is only one side of the coin. There is also what you do with it. It's the difference between pure science and applied science. You can't have the applied without the pure, but the applied has a hell of a lot more bearing on the world.
That said, I am fascinated by all things to do with geography and history. This is an unquestionably cool discovery. But it's not earth shattering.
There is strong evidence that people as diverse as the Phoenicians, the Vikings, the Irish, the Welsh, the Chinese, the Japanese and English fisherman were actually in the New World, in some cases, millennia before 1492.
Search internet for lots of sources: One with a short description here
This is a great bit of news. We have know for a long time that the history of a war is written by those winning the war. This simply extends this theory a bit.
It is very interesting that the history of the world is written by the dominant group of the time. All the European discoveries are posed as someone discovering something new. The ver fact that there were people in the USA when Columbous landed proves that he did not "discover" it at all - he simply opened the minds of the dominant group of people of the time (The Europeans)
South African history is an example of this. Up till about 15 years ago, the only known history of South Africa was that it was discovered by Europeans, liberated from the savages and made a civilised country. REcent events have shown the barbarism of the European nations in the colonisation of the country, and has started to show the positive side of the indigenous people.
I think it is great that something like this will shake some of the beliefs of the American people. It is nice to see that places outside the European nations actually did some discovery prior to the Europeans.
On a final note - it is interesting that all the histories of the oriental races I have come across, everytime there is a meeting between the europeans (or other leaders of the known world) the Chinese are seen as very shrewd, civilised people - very few of the other cultured have had this benefit. Does it really surprise me (against this background) that the chinese charted Australia and the Americas before the Europeans? No...
didn't i read somwhere that the vikings and norsemen discovered america some few 100 years before columbus too? and i agree with the original subject: the only 'true' americans are the natives. all the rest: black, white or other are immigrants.
According to the article:
When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails, the Chinese also circumnavigated the world a century before explorer Ferdinand Magellan's epic journey, and reached South America.
The reason why Columbus, Cook and Magellan get the credit is because they were Europeans. And, in those days, Europe was the center of the world. Western civilization sprung from Europe so to speak. Think about it: most (both north and south) American citizens have ancestors in Europe, so do the citizens in Australia.
For Europeans, America and Australia didn't exist until Columbus and Cook hit their shores (the Vikings did it before Columbus ofcourse but that was forgotten). After that, lots and lots of Europeans emigrated to America and Australia (most of them for economic reasons ofcourse). Contact between them and the homefront was never lost and therefore Columbus, Cook and Magellan deserve some credit. Maybe not for first discovering the continents but for putting them on the map.
Someday they'll dig up a Chinese skeleton in California, with a Viking-axe stuck in it's skull.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
I'm sure that this is research of the highest caliber. And more importantly, it's the final nail in the coffin for nay-sayers who've refused to believe this. But the headline is misleading. The important point is not that Chinese discovered America, but that we can prove that the Chinese discovered America.
What everyone else has been trying to say, but stumbling across is that, "When Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered."
...do you discover a country when there are already people living there?
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I dislike cries of "too US-centric" as much as the next Yankee, but come on, the story here isn't that they discovered the American continent first. The wow-that's-incredible part of the story is the idea that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe 100 years before Magellan's voyage.
As it has been pointed out, lots of people beat Columbus to the New World, (Vikings and Native Americans to name a couple.) but going all the way around the world is something of an accomplishment. Incidentally, when you sail around the world you're bound to bump into the American continent anyways.
Time Europe article titled The Amazing Vikings. It was part of a feature Time did two years ago.
In addition to going to America 500 years before Columbus, they also did trades all the way down in Irak and formed the worlds oldest parliament.
And it seems they did mushrooms to go beserk. Cool guys.
Hurra for Knark!
The history books are always slow to change. We know, for instance, that Basque fishermen fished the Grand Banks (off Newfoundland) for at least a hundred years before Columbus sailed. It was a well-kept secret, but it was often argued that Columbus' wife (who was Basque) let him in on the secret. The Viking settlement on Newfoundland lasted a long time, so there was never much of a hiatus in contact between Europe and North America. Indications of trade with Asia on the West Coast of North America are long-standing - Chinese goods reached as far as Mexico. If this presentation is true (and it would be interesting to see what he is actually presenting, as opposed to what is reported) it would be welcome just as a response to those historians who speculate, what would have happened if zheng he had not stopped at East Africa and gone on to Europe? Would we all be speaking Chinese? The answer would be nothing, and no (or not yet, anyway). The difference between the two voyages of discovery was that for the Chinese, their motive was altruistic: to discover the world and share their civilization with others. For the Europeans, their motive was greed. The difference being, when discovery was starting to bankrupt the government in China it was first on the cutback list. Greed showed to be a more durable basis for exploration than altruism.
And I thought the Native Americans, aka Indians would have discovered it since they lived there, silly me!
The chinese couldn't have discovered it first, per our definition Discovering means "found and claimed by a white person with european descent".
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What about Marco polo and family?s html
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/marcopolo.
No, i don't want to say that Marco polo "discovered" china but that China/Mongolia and Europe had loose contact with each other for quite some time before Zheng He or Columbus have placed their feet on American soil.
All these films about things that happen in America are just a myth. The country doesn't exist. It's just a children's story, like Atlantis. There is no mythical continent across the atlantic. Think about it. If there really is a country there, then surely if you stood at the west coast of Ireland you would be able to see it. You can't. If you can't see something that you're looking at directly then it isn't there.
I'm sure some people will disagree with me. Well, I ask you this - Have you been there? Have you actually seen this place? Why did nobody ever mention it until really quite recently? And I mean the past 100 years or so. I challenge anyone to find a resource more recent than 1900 that indicates that the place exists.
It was clearly an invention of European governments to use as an excuse to devalue their currencies in the 1920's. They didn't want to blame themselves, so they invented another country to blame.
Face it. America is a ridiculous liberal myth.
Henry Sinclair beat the Chinese by another 30 years. When he got there he found people in Nova Scotia speaking a Celtic dialect, He, in turn, was directed there by a couple of Venetians. The Vikings beat him by a few hundred years, and there is plenty of evidence that European fishermen had been sailing across the Atlantic pretty much all through history.
The only thing that makes Columbus different is that by the time he got there the mechanisms and motivation to publicise the discovery and start the process of conquest and colonisation were in place.
Great! Now we are just waiting for (north) americans to discover the rest of the world!
So, you've been to LA recently :o) *ducks*
It would seem to me that the "Native Americans" were the ones to first "discover" America.
Moreover, they also peacefully inhabited the land and had a continental population that was close to that of Europe around 19th century. But we killed most of them, so they don't count right? At least they can live in slums and on their native casinos now.
Why do white people always think they come first?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Yeah, but they didn't bother to slaughter all the natives so they could form their own self-righteous, godly country and escape the evils of their own ;-) ;-)
When playing Civ 3 starting out in North America, every friggin country discovers me before I discover them ... damn them.
If anyone is interested, here is what the book "Thunder from the East" by two winners of the Pulitzer prize wrote about Zhang He's fleet: "Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He commanded seven major expeditions, involving the largest navel fleet that the world would see for the next five centuries. Not until World War I did the West mount anything comparable. Chinese records show that Zheng He's fleet included 28 000 sailors on 300 ships, the longest of which were 400 feet long. By comparison, Columbus in 1492 had 90 sailors on 3 ships, the biggest of which was 85 feet long. Zheng He's ships also had design elements such as balanced rudders and watertight bulwark compartments that would not be introduced in Europe for another 350 years. The ships sailed as far as East Africa and could have gone around the globe. It is difficult to conceive of their magnificence, for each of the grandest ships-the "treasure ships"-had nine masts,huge red silk sails, 24 bronze cannon, carved wooden animal heads, and painted sides with large "eyes" in front to see the ocean ahead. The treasure ships had luxury cabins with balconies for the top officers and for foreign princes who would be brought home, and these ships were backed by specialized vessels including horse-carriers, troop transports, cargo ships, two kinds of warships, and water tankers carrying drinking water. The crews included 10 translatrors, 5 astronomers, 180 doctors and pharmacologists to treat the sick and gather foreign herbs, and even 2 protocol experts to ensure that the Chinese treated foreigners with just the proper degree of respect. The sophistication of the fleet underscores how far the East used to be ahead of the West. In a broader sense, it indicates the stakes for the entire world as Asia struggles to get back to its feet. The present situation-with Asia making up a minor part of world's economy-is unusual in historical terms. For the great majority of the last few thousand years, Asia has been far wealthier and more advanced and cosmopolitan than any place in Europe. Several ancient Chinese cities had populations of more than one million at their peak, and by some accounts the Tang Dynasty capital of Changan had almost two million taxable residents in the later part of the first millenium. In contrast, as late as 1500 the largest city in Europe was probably Naples, with a total population of 150 000. So ancient Asia was the longtime champion of commerce and technology, and one of the central questions is whether it is now ready to recover a part of what it lost. .....
Chinese records show that Zheng He's fleet reached the Kenyan ports of Malindi and Mombasa. Zheng He knew about Europe from Arab traders, and he could have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But Europe was a backwards region with nothing to offer, as the Chinese saw it. China wanted ivory, medicine, spices, exotic woods, even samples of African wildlife, but it had little interest in European products like wool, beads or wine. So China turned up their noses at Europe."
I don't mind, the Chinese can have USA, as long as they don't 'invade' Canada, else we'll have to unleash an army of Great Beavers upon them.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
So far that's what we've got.
Apparantly the world is still waiting on the extraordinary evidence (and that would be why 85 percent of those Royal Geographic Society people are planning to show up).
This guy is talking about THOUSAND FOOT WOODEN SHIPS. This would have to be a first, and beat the largest known rival almost 3fold. That alone is making me think "this guy is 3 weeks early."
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Actually, the Egyptians discovered New South Wales between 1779 and 2748 BC. Hieroglyphic carvings in Hunter Valley, 100 km north of Sydney, relate how Djes-eb, one of the sons of the Pharaoh Ra Djedef, died from a snake bite.
Australia also appears on the map of Eratosthenes, compiled in 194 BC. This Erasthosthenes was the same person who devised the famous method of calculating prime numbers, still used as a benchmark today.
.....it still amazes me that so-called educated people still dispute who "discovered" lands already populated by humans for THOUSANDS of years -- as if their existence and lives don't "count" for anything.
...all those formerly pristine frontiers just quietly awaiting their future deforestation, mass flora/fauna species extinction, genocide, colonialism, and natural disaster events.
Whew -- on second thought, I guess "America" is lucky all those folks were "racing" to discover it. Those natives sure weren't doing much with it. If not for that race, it would still be an unspoiled, underpopulated, wild, undeveloped, unpolluted, useless area. Only lately has it begun to realize it's full potential!
Basically, Columbus wasn't the first, but he had the biggest impact on history.
On nine sails?
The freakin' Titanic was only 900 feet long and needed 31,000 steam-driven shaft horsepower just to get halfway across.
Thousand foot wooden ships with a single sail every hundred feet or so were either a remarkable engineering accomplishment or a mariner's nightmare.
actually settlers, drifting in small boats on the currents of the ocean, have probably landed all along Americas west coast. The Nowegian guy Thor Heierdal proved this when he built the Contiki and the other boat (I forgot it's name) from material growing in the ilands in the Indonesian archipel and used this to sail across the Pacific from the Indonesian archipel. It took him two tries, but he got as far as Easter Iland. this is of course just one of the many way's in which people reached the worlds remote continents, next to crossing the Bering street (the Inuit way) and crossing the atlantic from Ysland (the Viking way)
Marco Polo brought China into the popular culture through his writings, but he wasn't the first there by a long long long shot. Europe had been trading with the far east since at least the Roman times. The lands between the Med and China aren't exactly barren wastelands, there were Persians and Indians in between. For a while the Mongols had an empire which included China and Moscow, and everything in between.
-- Sigs are for losers
Diffrent dynasties had diffrent outlooks. The Ming dynasty was the one who built the great wall, they also retreated from the sea, ie closed all the seaports and costal cities in an attempt to starve out pirates and such
It was a really quite sad time for chinese history, before the Ming china was a great seafaring nation, hundreds of years before western european expansionism.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actualy, it's pretty unlikely that the indians ever had a population close to that of europe. Almost all of america was vast, untouched wilderness before the europeans came. Europe, in contrast was almost all farmland, and the hands of humans are evident everywhere.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
An excellent book that discusses why some civilizations (particulary european) dominate others ... a good summary
is here
What exactly is "discovering"? There were already people living there when Columbus or Chinese or whatever race "discovered" America. Do historians consider those native residents animals or what?
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The indeginous native americans who were living here the whole time you dolts.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
yeah, but the Chinese weren't smart enough to loot & pillage the natives and settle the damn place.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Err you are kidding right ? Most Native American tribes would be classified as nomadic warriors. Sure they didn't have guns or heavy artillery but these were not zen buddist style people just looking for enlightenment.
History with Rose tinted glasses, the world where no "primitive" culture ever had a problem with war, murder, rape, incest. All of those problems are a result of the modern world.
And anyway... the Chinese are "White", Phonecians' were "white" ? Native Americans' are probably Russians anyway... damn commies
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Here is one quote relevant to your question:
Even 163 metres is only 530 feet, of course, but it shows that 1000 feet isn't that unbelieveable.Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
The "don't count" comment is unlikely to be reflect the editors meaning, and more likely to point out that there is a good reason why "discovered America" was put in quotes: America had already been discovered and settled.
Gautama Buddha, for one, after some other chinese explorers went down the western American coast, and settled (in Guatemala) for a little while, at least 500 years before Christofo Colombari.
Does this mean we will now be celebrating "Admiral Zheng He Day" instead of "Columbus Day"? I can hardly wait to crack out the firecrackers and paper dragon!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
How do you discover a country when there are already people living there?
<bias class="eurocentric">
whatever...You "discover" a country when you are the first to bring alphabetic writing there. The Native Americans didn't discover the New World; most of them had no writing (save the Maya nation). The Chinese didn't discover the New World; they wrote with ideograms. The Vikings can lay a claim because at least they had a runic alphabet. We believe the claims of Columbus, Vespucci, and others for discovering different parts of the New World because they were able to write home using a small number of distinct symbols that somewhat closely correspond to the sound of the language.
</bias>
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why my Kung Pao chicken looks like it's older than my grandmother...
Since China was the only source of a lot of valuable goods (most notably silk), and was considered a rich country after Marco Polos descriptions, it was seen as a worthwhile target.
A common theory is that Columbus knew that he would find "unknown land" (to the powers that be in Europe at the time) to the west, and that he used China just as "bait" to get the ships etc. that he needed.
There are lots of stories about Columbus having maps, and various accounts of what the sources of those maps are. Some say Portuguese or Basque explorers, fishermen or even Portuguese settlers among the Viking on Greenland, others say the Vikings, the Irish (there are accounts of Irish sailing to America as well), the Chinese, Egyptians and more. I've no idea whether there's any actual proof for any of that, though, and won't try to make a guess about it.
Is that why they spam (or allow the spamming) the shit out of us in the US? They want to convince us to change the history books? Baa ha haa hah haaaaa
and who the hell is "WE" in this context? Care to divulge your lineage, immigrant boy?
That was classic intercourse!
I would have sworn it was Native Americans that first discovered America 8^}
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I took a world history course only two years ago in which I learned about the Chinese treasure ships. They were intended to be these massive, floating testements to the wealth and power of the Chinese civilization. The point of the treasure ship expeditions was to impress upon other cultures the strength of the Chinese emperor. As nine-sailed behemoths weighed down with gold, silk, and other riches, the treasure ships didn't disappoint.
One of the more hotly contested historical points is why China turned inward when it was, hands down, *the* strongest nation in the world in the latter half of the fifteenth century. It was on the verge of an industrial revolution predating the British one by hundreds of years, but that never happened: A new emperor came to power who associated the treasure ship expeditions with both the old emperor and the eunuch power regime, and the Chinese policy of expansionism came to a quick end.
It was previously known that the Chinese made it around the tip of Africa, and even as far as South America. Only a small number of people accept early Chinese circumnaviagtion of the globe as truth. I'm one of them, and so was my professor.
Everyone else decided America just really sucked when they got here, and promptly headed back home.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Well said. That's exactly what I've thought for decades but it is obviously entirely non-PC to say (or even think) it.
We also had a land war with Mexico 150 years ago and took close to half of their land. You don't see anyone crying about how we treated the Mexicans.
Oh well, the contradictions of the "politically correct" crowd. :)
Imperial China kept detailed records on a day to day basis of communications and other records. A gold mine of unique historic information can be found in there.
One gold nugged dug up by a French historian (sorry, don't have a link handy) descibes in detail a world journey and visit by a late 18th century British trade delegation that could thus be retraced as the British had kept diaries they published after their travels. The emperor had kept a day to day watch of their activities as they travelled through China and made detailed comments in the sidelines of the reports he was receiving on the foreigners.
The British were out to sell horse drawn carriages, canons, clocks and other "high tech". They had visions of selling huge amounts of their products to China's immense population....
christianity.
(note all others mentioned who "discovered" the americas are not christian, and that our history is heavily christianity based)
he who writes the history books is "correct."
and that would be true if in fact we had actually gone to war or declared war at any point (military exercises are what we would consider the activities today). Dismissing the fact that 'americans' however far in our past lied, cheated, stole, murdered, misrepresented, and raped the 'native' population of the americas allows us the comfort of continuing in the same vein of action without remorse or consideration. If we do not look to our past, we cannot learn from it and grow to be a better people.
Everyone DESERVES respect. Our own constitution is based on 'unalienable' rights afforded to man (all man, mankind). In the government and individual actions in the slaughter of societies, tribes and individuals (something we should very closely equate to the Jewish Holocaust) 'we' denied those people of their 'unalienable' rights.
The sad part is that lets say we "move on", we "move past" what happened and the wrong doings of generations past... what are we doing today to make sure that 1) we preserve what little of that culture is left 2) we ensure that the native american as a bloodline doesn't dissappear entirely. And the answer is 'very little'. I don't believe in 'affirmative action' I believe in 'equality'. 'We' put more effort into building 3rd world countries up than we do in building up the nations that exist within this country. We need to look to the past to see what we can avoid repeating and what we may need to correct so that WE (all of us) have a more prosporous and rich future.
Now I know why Americans LOVE chinese take out :)
From Made in America by Bill Bryson (great book):
No one knows who the first European visitors to the New World were. The credit generally goes to the Vikings, who reached the New World in about AD 1000, but there are grounds to suppose that others may have been there even earlier. An ancient Latin text, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot), recounts with persuasive detail a seven-year trip to the New World made by this Irish saint and a band of acolytes some four centuries before the Viking--and this on the advice of another Irishman who claimed to have been there earlier still.
Even the Vikings didn't think themselves the first. Their sagas record that when they first arrived in the New World they were chased from the beach by a group of wild white people. They subsequently heard stories from natives of a settlement of Caucasians who "wore white garments and...carried poles before them to which rags were attached"--precisely how an Irish religious procession would have looked to the uninitiated. (Intriguingly, five centuries later Columbus's men would hear a similar story in the Caribbean.) Whether by Irish or Vikings--or Italians or Welsh or Bretons or any of the other many groups for whom credit has been sought--crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Ages was not quite as daring a feat as it would at first appear, even allowing for the fact that it was done in small, open boats. The North Atlantic is conveniently scattered with islands that could serve as stepping-stones--the Shetland Islands, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin. It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.
1st, it is well known that multiple cultures "discovered" what has come to be known as America before Columbus did in 1492. First and foremost by far, of course, were the ancestors of the native peoples of America, who appear to have arrived in several waves of migration via the Alaskan land bridge and possibly via maritime travel from Polynesia. There are arguments about exactly how old the earliest sites (including Monte Verdi in South America, and Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania) are, but most scholars accept them as being at least 10,000 years old and perhaps as old as 25,000 years. This beats anyone else by a long shot.
After this migration, however, the ONLY incontrovertible archaeological evidence we have for precolumbian contact comes from Viking Sites of around 1000 AD, including L'Anse Aux Meadows, which I believe is in Newfoundland.
The only other group that has any kind of solid archaeological claim to precolumbian discovery is the Chinese. Their presence seems to be attested by anchor stones found off the coast of California which closely match those from Chinese ship types which existed before the era of Columbus. There is, however, NO secure precolumbian artifactual evidence from the Chinese. This one's really a tossup, so I'd like to see what Menzies has to say.
Now when it comes to all of these other claims - Egyptians, Subsaharan Africans, Phonecians, Welsh, etc. etc., what we're seeing is a lot of bad scholarship. Most of this can be traced to 19th century racist hyperdiffusional accounts which attempted to explain how monumental architecture and such could have been produced by such "primitive" (or in some accounts sub-human) people as the Native Americans. Most of these centered around the Egyptians, mainly due to superficial similarities between Egyptian Pyramids and Mesoamerican "pyramid" platforms, which in actuality are designed and built in entirely different ways. Furthermore, neither the Egyptians, nor even the Phonecians, who are often supposed to have ferried the Egyptians across the Atlantic, possessed the kind of ship technology which would make regular oceanic voyaging possible. These were unreinforced, open-decked, square-rigged boats with no navigational instruments. We're not talking Spanish Naos or Chinese Junks (or even Viking boats) here.
The rest of the so-called evidence rests on overinterpretation of existing evidence (Olmec heads as evidence of African Contact, St. Brendan's Chronicles as an actual account - yeah, they just ran into Judas Iscariot in Massachussetts), proven hoaxes (Cuneiform tablets in Tennessee), or the psychotic ramblings of UFO cultists like Zecharia Sitchin.
Anyway, despite my little tirade, I don't want to rule out that other civilizations couldhave made it to the Americas. There is just no evidence. So here is how it stands on Precolumbian contact:
North Asians : Yes Vikings : Yes Chinese : Chances are pretty good Egyptians, Phonecians, Africans, Welsh : Highly Doubtful Everyone Else : Who the hell knows?
I'll never forget my first day in AP American History class in high school. The teacher started out talking about Columbus borrowing Queen Isabel's jewels to make the sailing, being the first one to discover the Americas, yadda yadda yadda. With most of the class furiously taking notes (I wasn't bothering - couldn't imagine anyone wouldn't remember this tripe by 11th grade anyway).
After about a half hour she informed the entire class that pretty much everything in that was untrue. And laid out the real deal. And proceeded to do so for the rest of the year. She is still one of the best teachers I've ever had. The only regret I have is that since I aced the AP exam, I never took any history classes in college.
I will say, however, that this load of tripe is stuffed down the throats of kids daily in grade school and on TV (a particular offender was the School House Rocks! series of TV commercials on ABC in the late 70s/early 80s). And, at least when I was growing up, World History is a joke. It was totally Western European centric and ignored the sources of a lot of European culture and knowledge (namely what is now known as the middle east and Asia). By no means am I a basher of European or American culture, but I do think the history taught in US schools tends to be too Eurocentric. Sure, you hear about the "Mongol Hordes", but there's not really any mention of the Persian forces that were occupying areas like Austria as late as the mid-1600's. Which starts to help explaining a lot of the unrest in Eastern Europe since the fall of the iron curtain.
in a small strip mall in NJ, as now became evident from leftover fortune cookies found at a nearby dry cleaner.
Propaganda like this is part of any empire's claim on the world. We found it, we own it, right? Oh yeah, the party invented the helocopter. There is a reason communist countries try to claim all ideas and discoveries. It is to legitimize their ownership of all things. Even if true exploratory rants should cause apprehension. I expect the Chinese government to pick this up and produce, "evidence" that they knew it all along.
Who shall stop the Chinese if they do want to conquer? No one bothered as they crushed Tibet. China is one of the largest best armed countries in the world, and it's under horrific central control. Make no mistake few are willing to stand in their way.
Thank you very much Stright Times for presenting this information as you did. I imagine your Royal Navy sources are not pleased. No thank you, for the offer of an active X advert.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
When explorer Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492, he was 72 years behind a Chinese expeditionary force, which had already made its way to the area.
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails, the Chinese also circumnavigated the world a century before explorer Ferdinand Magellan's epic journey, and reached South America.
Although it is widely believed that Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon, it turns out that the Chinese had sailed to the moon 200 years earlier in a primitive capsule propelled by nothing more than junk-style solar sails.
There is also credible evidence that Basque whaling fleets were regularly working the waters off Newfoundland by the late 1300s. Though it didn't have much of a direct impact on North America, it would have to be considered one of the factors that allowed the Spanish to get to the Americas at all a century later, relying as they did on Basque sailors and navigators who, through this lens, would have already crossed the Atlantic.
Whalers were not known for sharing information on where they fished. It was important and closely-guarded proprietary information.
No really.
I'm pretty liberal about what gets posted here. I expect there to be posting about things that don't interest me, thats fine.
I'm just don't see how this applies to "news for nerds".
Just for the record, there are many thing I do enjoy that don't belong(IMO of course) on slashdot, and I would also say they don't belong here.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sailing in 1,000-foot-long ships with nine massive junk-style sails, the Chinese also circumnavigated the world a century before explorer Ferdinand Magellan's epic journey, and reached South America.
Bullshit. Having fished commercially for a number of years and seen first hand what sort of mischief the sea is capable of I can say that with conviction. The first major storm they encountered would have ripped them to pieces. A 1,000 foot long wooden ship would flex tremendously and start leaking like a sieve the minute it encountered ocean swells and a storm would finish the job.
You're using her as bait, Master!
If I have a country that doesn't know china existed, and I build a boat and go looking for lands far away, then find China, I discovered it. It doesn't mean no one elso is there, or that it didn't exist before, it just means I found someplace I never new existed.
Like being in a new neighbor hood and discovering the local 7/11.
Or discovering Oxygen.
Jeez people, get a grip.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
See, if there were people there, then those folks also discovered it. Walked there, if I remember my pre-history correctly...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Do you learn all your history from cartoons? The tribes of America warred on each other with incredible ferocity. The holisitc spiritual utopia of early America is a myth - these people engaged in strip farming, violent incursions, and even ritual torture. This isn't to defame them - many other cultures engaged in these acts as well, including Europeans, but no one is claiming that the Europeans were "children of the Earth" living at peace with the land and each other.
...What else would explain the 700 year old chow mein in my refrigerator?
managers...why god invented purgatory
Given that there were *any* battles over land implies that the land was stolen, since it clearly did not first belong to the Europeans who ended up owning it.
*shrug* Not like it wouldn't have happened the other way round. Here is a timeline of the Winnebagos, for example; check out the long and bloody litany of Indian wars which didn't involve Europeans at all.
Sure, it's not politically correct to point out that that American Indians had huge and bloody land wars amongst themselves, or that Indian tribes held enormous numbers of slaves before the Civil War, etc., but that doesn't make it any less true.
History's just one thing after another. The Europeans' ancestors got kicked around by the Mongols, or the Arsacids, or the Magyars. The present Indians' ancestors got kicked around by the Welsh, or the Spanish, or the Swedes. C'est la vie.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I think you mean the Hebrews not the Jews, and it never happened anyway. There is not a single mention of a large Hebrew slave population at any time in any of the ancient Egyptian documents we have unearthed. The only historical record of it is in the Bible, and we all know how reliable that is *eyes roll*
the Vikings never made it past "new found land."
Perhaps. But there was a Nova segment on Kennewick Man who looks very much like an European. His skull is believed to be around 9000 years old and was found in Oregon.
I don't think a critique of US' aggression against foreign nations implies forgiveness for the aggression those nations may have been engaged in themselves. It certainly doesn't imply approval for slavery (which doesn't even begin to address the issue that there are many forms of slavery, all of them inappropriate, but which vary in degree). The fact that history is filled with stories of invasion, genocide, war, and plunder is not a good reason to pardon one or more groups for their aggressions, nor to endorse similar aggression in the future.
I'm not trying to be politically correct. I'm trying to be accurate in response to an overly euphemistic description of history. If I am not accurate, please correct me. And you have a point that in order to be fully accurate we might put these conflicts into a larger context. That the land was stolen does not necessarily mean that it should be returned-- as you point out, they may well have stolen it from others. That an injustice was committed does not necessarily obligate descendents of the original malefactors to produce some sort of recompense. And when it comes down to it, this is land we're talking about. It's pretty hard, imho, to "own" something that predates you by millions of years and which upon your death, you will become part of.
I do not have a signature
How about Heyerdahl's Ra Expeditions?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Ever wonder why the names of so many New England towns end in the word "field"? Most of what is now New England (and anywhere else on the continent with good dirt and a decent growth season) was cleared fields long before European settlers showed up. Further, most recent estimates (recent, because previous estimates have been uniformly politically self-serving, but based on the same historical observations) show that aboriginal populations in North America rival europe's population at the time of westward expansion.
The density of population from one place to another was much more consistent than in Europe, so there were no streets being used as open sewers , no Bubonic plague, no resistance to the diseases that appear among densely populated cities.
What you learned in High School about native populations is simply wrong. When the plagues started depopulating native villages (mortality rates were about 95%), the settlers thought that all of this wealth sitting and waiting for them to come along was the will of God and in their prayers thanked God for their good fortune.
To get back to the current topic. Just about everyone has been to the Americas before Columbus. The obsession with his successful trips to enslave a few natives and steal a lot of gold shouldn't be interesting to anyone actually interested in history.
Don't get me wrong. The natives made plenty of mistakes. The Mayans were likely wiped out by an ecological disaster of their own making. Other native tribes made their own mistakes. They were human, but several of my ancestors uniformly and repeatedly screwed them over by breaking treaties and contracts time and time again. Pretending it didn't happen or even outright denying it doesn't change the facts.
Here's another one for you. The sale of Manhattan for a few beads? Two problems: First, the deal was made with a tribe that had no claim to Manhattan at the time (though they said they did) . Second, the treaty as signed was for one season's hunting rights (the natives were very savvy with land contracts and land rights). At the end of the contract, we had to vacate, but we pulled out our guns, enslaved the natives, and shipped them back to Europe (the slave trade went both ways across the Atlantic).
Regards, Ross
Anyone who has had the opportunity to examine the actual artifacts first-hand in the travelling Smithsonian exhibit (now in LA):l and/an se_meadows/english/history_e.htm
http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/
will have no doubt that the Vikings came to America and settled on the northern tip of Newfoundland nearly 500 years in advance of any Chinese or Italian seafarers. Of course no one can claim to have "discovered" America as it was already inhabited by what the Vikings referred to as skrallings, who killed some of the Vikings and is the likely reason that they retreated to Greenland after a year or so of living in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. For more see:
http://parkscanada.pch.gc.ca/parks/newfound
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
All the intentional wartime/peacetime atrocities committed by Europeans in the Americas put together don't even add up to 1/100th the amount of Native Americans killed by foreign diseases. Not even close. It doesn't excuse them, but the Europeans were no more guilty of genocide than, say, the English in the Hundred Years' War.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
BigBir3d says,
Not true. Claimants St. Brendan the Navigator and Leif Ericson were Christian.
I think you mean the Hebrews not the Jews, and it never happened anyway. There is not a single mention of a large Hebrew slave population at any time in any of the ancient Egyptian documents we have unearthed. The only historical record of it is in the Bible, and we all know how reliable that is *eyes roll*
Strangely enough, people said the same thing about Assyria. (until Ninevah was discovered in 1920)
I guess you missed the day in history class when you were supposed to learn about how the US Army distributed blankets known to be laced with smallpox to tribes of Indians that were being forceably relocated to reservations in the 1800s. This practice actually appears to have began in the mid 1700s. Small pox was even used as a weapon during the Revolutionary War against opponents who hadn't been innoculated against small pox (ie, the Native Americans). BTW
What? That wasn't in your high school history books? How could that be???
That, my friend, is a textbook example of genocide by European settlers upon the native populations. And a textbook example of how history is written by the victors.
...anactofgod...
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
marjine says,
Depends who you ask. Some people believe that the "Vikings" (actually, a fourteenth-century band of Goths and Norwegians) made it as far inland as west central Minnesota.
Look up the Kensington Runestone. This is controversial, however; some people think it is a hoax.
Chances are that greed lead the Chinese to stop their exploration. They just didn't see any profit in North America and exploration in general.
And maybe there wasn't much profit in it btw.
The difference in Europe was that people were litterally dying to leave. We can presume that things weren't so bad in China or that people weren't offered the choice to leave.
I doubt the USA were founded on greed btw. Freedom would be more like it. Yes, freedom to prosper! But freedom of religion, freedom all around.
Either the Chinese didn't care much for more freedom, or they had so little of it that they couldn't leave.
Let's think of the Internet. Who's on the it? A lot of people who had no room in the tradionnal setting. People trying to escape the so-called real world. Then, other people came, they tried to tame the Internet, unsuccesfully.
Do you get a web-life (setting up a web-page, reading news on the web and so on) because of greed? No, because of the freedom it gives you. Freedom to explore, to learn, and so on. Yes, you may end up making business on the web, and maybe even making a lot of money, but in a lot of cases, it wasn't you first goal.
Europeans, at least some of them, had a thirst for freedom.
You could say that if you want to foster exploration, the best thing you can do is make people's life miserable, while leaving them a means of escape.
Hey! Life is good in the USA and that explains why most Americans can't draw an accurate map of the world or learn another language! You'd be a lot more of an explorer if you were born in some poor African country with a visa and some money to leave.
I tried to look for more information about Gavin Menzies, to find out what his background is and previous work he may have done. I suppose amateur historians are just as credible, but I wanted to know if he was well established and would be well receieved. I came up with relatively nothing about him or his previous work. I did however find a ton of information on Gavin Menzies, guitar tech for the stars. : )
0 20307_91604.shtml F news%2F2002%2F03%2F04%2Fnexp04.xml
I also came across another couple places carrying this same story with slightly different angles.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200203/07/eng20
and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Baseball is a derivative of an older British game - Rounders.
History
Rounders is, almost unquestionably, baseball's immediate ancestor. Primarily a boys' sport in England, it was mentioned, along with baseball, in a 1744 publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and the sport was explained in detail in the second edition of The Boy's Own Book, published in 1828.
It's quite likely that both rounders and cricket evolved from stoolball, though there's no direct evidence that they did.
Henry Chadwick, a native of England who became the first newspaper writer to cover baseball, wrote a historical piece for Spalding's Baseball Guide in 1903, in which he asserted that baseball had derive from rounders. The assertion angered his publisher, A. G. Spalding, who insisted that baseball must be a thoroughly American sport.
Spalding called for a commission to investigate the origins of "the great American pastime," and it was this commission that decided in 1907 that Abner Doubleday had invented the sport. So Chadwick's undoubtedly true statement ironically led to the creation of a total myth.
Incidentally, Spalding should have known better. He was among a group of baseball players who visited England in 1874, when English spectators and sportswriters all recognized the "American" sport as a variation on rounders. And in 1889 Spalding was on an American team that played a game against a champion English rounders team in Liverpool.
The Scottish Rounders Association was founded in 1889 and a National Rounders Association was established in England in 1943. However, rounders remains primarily a sport for schoolboys.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
If you include Mexico and South/Central America, this becomes much more horrid. Roughly 75 million native people were killed. Although diseases were one of the primary causes, they were often deliberately introduced by Europeans, essentially a primitive--but effective--form of biological warfare.
As for historical comparisons (you mention Assyria), this was a successful genocidal holocaust on a scale that appears to be unique.
From: hotsex@bigtent.org
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1420 02:38:12 +0800
To: qappyyfcsybuzzcb@yahoo.com
Subject: re: order
Received: from baoshan.sh.cn ([203.95.4.10]) by yahoo.com
You mean like throwing out European monarchies in favor of democracy?
You mean like throwing out horrific European religious wars in favor of freedom of religion?
You mean like refusing to adopt European fascism that Europeans took to so readily, leaving millions dead and 20th century Europe in flames?
You mean like refusing to adopt European communism, that created such bloodshed, repression, and the infamous "Iron Curtain" across Europe?
We certainly have problems in America, but bastardization of European Culture isn't one of them.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
It's funny how the article would say "one scholar estimated," and your quote inflates that to "some scholars estimate". I'm not blaming you. The way the Atlantic article is written, it sort of naturally leads to the feeling that the scholarly world in general is changing to this new way of thinking. If you look closely at their actual words, though, the feeling the article projects and the actual words listed are not at all the same.
This is how myths are created. Pick some statistical deviant, and present his views as the world of science entering a new understanding and throwing out old myths.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
But I'm a bit suspicious of the claim that a Cherokee chief said Madoc's people were called "welsh". Welsh is an old English word meaning "strangers" or "enemies". Welsh people (as I guess you know) would have called themselves "cymraeg", or even "British" (Prythaeg ?).
This is old hat to anyone who has bothered to read beyond the precusory level(s) of chinese history. Try http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1028.htm for a quick introduction. Sadly the journey(s) only serve to underscore the xenophobia rife throughout China's history. On a lighter note researching the itinerant buddhist monk who supposedly recorded the journey provides good entertainment. Fusang has long been worth a book by a wannabe historian/archeologist. Now that the main stream media has the bit in its mouth hollywood might go along for the ride. Do I see a vessel for the rebirth of the careers of Cheech and Chong sailing over the horizon.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
there's a lot of hollywood between us and any understanding of indian life. But some of the tribes (e.g. Pima) were very peaceful, moving away from the others and settling on plateaus, farming, etc. Then you have the Apaches, which basically lived off of raiding their neighbors.
Nevertheless, the subtext of your post seems to imply that if others kill/steal then ot's ok for me to treat them the same way, which is kinda the evil version of the golden rule -- very sick, that line of thinking.
Also noteworhy is that while there are a few examples of colonists forsaking the western way of life and living as Indians, there are no examples (in the colonial days) of the other thing happening -- Indians voluntarily joining to live in the colonies. Of course, that could be interpreted in a lot of ways (the westerners were more open-minded, or they were self-selected as explorers) other than discrimination against Indians.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I think this guy will use the fact that Columbus had map charts to use for sailing here. I've read a brief synopisi that tries to chain from early Chinese maps through some Chinese dynasyt that mothballed their sailing fleet and destroyed most recorded history, but that some Spanish silor got ahold of a copy that later resultd in the maps Columbus had. I read the story from a link on DailyGrail.com, a great site for causual reading when your're bored and wondering what all the loonies are doing.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
REUTERS: dateline 8 March 2002.
Headline:
Native North Americans discover Europe.
Today the Sioux Nation officially announced the successfull return of their recent expedition across the Atlantic Ocean lead by Soaring Eagle. Declaring the expedition an incredible success the tribal elders announced the discovery of a vast continent previously unrecorded in their tribal folklore. The continent is populated by by large tribes who live in surprisingly advanced cities for such an unexplored area. Tribal elder Chief Running Water declared "this is a great achivement, Soaring Eagle will go down in history for this incredible discovery".
The consulates of several major European countries had not returned our calls at the time this story went to press.
Sure, the Chinese finished researching "monarchy," "compass," and "gunpowder" before the rival European civilizations. However, the Europeans managed to steal the technology and upgraded their barracks to produce the new gun-equipped units. The Chinese countered by building the Great Wall wonder, which boosted their score significantly. The Europeans, always at war with each other, weren't as successful. However, they managed to eek out metallurgy, which nullified the Great Wall wonder. Soon after, they started building galleons and frigates.
All the European players found they couldn't build anymore cities on their part of the map, and decided to load the settlers on some boats and go romping around in the ocean to the west. They had not been explored there before. Sure, they had loaded some caravans onto boats to boost their gold intake, but they only sent them to the south and east.
Previously, the Chinese had sent a small fleet skirting around the world to get a good feel of where all the other civilizations were, but they hadn't put any settlers on their ships [big booboo]. So when the Europeans found this new land mass, it was a free-for-all. That is, with the exception of barbarians wandering into their towns. So they built up some musketeer units and captured the precious barbarian diplomat and got his ransom. That changed the momentum and put the Europeans squarely in the lead, later on leading to riflemen and mechanized infantry. However, the game's still open since nobody's launched a ship to Alpha Centauri yet.
No I'm not trolling.
Anyway, even if you don't accept that argument, it's not worth being seriously upset about. The fact that they don't have to pay taxes doesn't bother me too much, since it makes their miserable lives at least a bit brighter.
I am fairly sure that no famous vikings were ever named "Lief"... ;).
The guys name was "Leif Eriksson" (or "Leffe" to his friends
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Semantic point: the English were less guilty of genocide per-se, insofar as their goal was the political domination of France, not the complete supplanting of French culture with English culture and the removal of all things French from the landscape. It was a murderous campaign, but not per-se genocidal. Not all wanton acts of brutality are genocide - indeed, most are not.
Good-Bye Columbus day!
16 possible explorations of America before Columbus
- 1. HSI and HO (c. 2640 B.C.), Chinese
- 2-5. VOTAN, WIXEPECOCHA, SUME, and BOCHIA (c. 800-400 B.C.), Indian
- 6. HUI SHUN (458 A.D.), Chinese
- 7. ST. BRENDAN (c. 550), Irish
- 8. BJARNI HERJULFSON (986), Norse
- 9. LEIF ERICSON (1003), Norse
- 10. THORVALD ERICSON (1004), Norse
- 11. THORFINN KARLSEFNI (1010), Norse
- 12-13. PRINCE MADOG AB OWAIN GWYNEDD (1170, 1190), Welsh
- 14. KING ABUBAKARI n (1311), Malian
- 15. PAUL KNUTSON (1356), Norwegian
- 16. JOHANNES SCOLP and JOAO V AZ CORTE REAL (1476), Danish and Portuguese
Compiled by Rodger J. FadnessBased on evidence derived from the geographical text Shan Hai Ching T'sang-chu and the chronicle Shan Hai ling, it is argued that the Chinese imperial astronomers Hsi and Ho were the first explorers of America in the 27th century B.C. Ordered by Emperor Huang Ti to make astronomical observations in the land of Fu Sang - the territories to the east of China - the two men sailed north to the Bering Strait and then south along the North American coastline. They settled for a while with the "Yao people," ancestors of the Pueblo Indians living near the Grand Canyon, but eventually journeyed on to Mexico and Guatemala. Retuming to China, they reported their astronomical studies and geographic discoveries to the emperor.
However, a short time later they were both executed for failing to predict a solar eclipse accurately.
According to Hindu legends and to Central American tribal legends, seafaring Hindu missionaries reached the Americas more than 2,000 years before Columbus. Sailing from India to Southeast Asia, they voyaged to the Melanesian and Polynesian islands and then across the Pacific to South and Central America. Votan was a trader from India who lived among the Mayans as a historian and chieftain, while his contemporary, Wixepecocha, was a Hindu priest who settled with the Zapotecs of Mexico. Two more Hindu emigrants were Sume, who reached Brazil and introduced agriculture to the Cabocle Indians, and Bochia, who lived with the Muycas Indians and became the codifier of their laws.
Using official Chinese imperial documents and maps from the Liang dynasty, scholars have reconstructed the travels of the Chinese explorer and Buddhist priest Hui Shun and proposed that he arrived in North America in the 5th century. Sailing from China to Alaska in 458, Hui-accompanied by four Afghan disciples-continued his journey on foot down the North American Pacific coast. Reaching Mexico, he taught and preached Buddhism to the Indians of central Mexico and to the Mayans of the Yucatan. Allegedly he named Guatemala in honor of Gautama Buddha. After more than 40 years in America, he returned to China, where he reported his adventures to Lord Yu Kie and Emperor Wu in 502.
Two medieval manuscripts, The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot and the Book of Lismore, tell of an Irish priest who, with 17 other monks, sailed west from Ireland and reached the "Land Promised to the Saints." Employing a curragh-a leather-hulled boat still in use in Ireland-Brendan and his companions made a sea pilgrimage that lasted seven years during the 6th century A.D. They traveled to Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, and one authority asserts that Brendan reached the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, which he called the Island of Strong Men. Brendan returned safely to his Irish monastery and reported on his travels, but died soon after. In 1977 Timothy Severin, sailing a modern curragh, retraced Brendan's voyage to America.
According to two medieval Icelandic narratives, the Flateyjarbok and Hauk's Book, a young Norse merchant named Bjarni Herjulfson sailed from Iceland towards Greenland to visit his father, who lived there, but was blown off course by a gale. When the storm ended, Bjami sighted a hilly, forested land, which is now thought to have been Cape Cod. Wanting to reach the Norse settlements on Greenland before winter, he did not drop anchor and send men ashore to explore. Instead, he sailed northeast along Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and then headed north to Greenland. He was criticized by the Greenlanders for not investigating the new land, and his discoveries stimulated further exploration of North America.
In 1003, Leu bought Bjarni Berjulfson's ship and, with a 35-man crew, sailed for North America. While most scholars agree that Ericson did land in North America, there is disagreement about where he landed. The only Viking site ever found in the New World is L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which was discovered in 1960 and excavated for the next eight years by BeIge Ingstad, a Norwegian explorer. According to Ingstad, Ericson's first landing was at Baffin Island, which he named Belluland; his second was at Labrador, which he called Markland; and finally he reached Newfoundland, which he christened Vinland. To Leu and his companions, Vinland was an abundant country, rich in game, wild wheat, and timber, and its climate was mild compared to Iceland and Greenland. The explorers spent the winter in Vinland, where they constructed a village of "big houses." In 1004 Leu returned to Greenland, where he was given the honorary name of Leu the Lucky. Leif Ericson, one of the many discoverers of America.
The Icelandic sagas record that, soon after Leu Ericson returned to Greenland, he gave his ship to his brother Thorvald. In the autumn of 1004, Thorvald sailed to Leifs Vinland settlement and wintered there. The next summer, while exploring the 8t. Lawrence region, Thorvald and his crew attacked a band of Indians, killing eight of them. In retaliation, the Indians ambushed the Norsemen, and Thorvald was killed in the ensuing battle. In 1007 the expedition's survivors returned to Greenland and took with them Thorvald's body, which was delivered to Leu for burial.
The Greenlanders' Saga and Karlsefni's Saga are the two medieval sources that give accounts of the Icelander Thorfinn Karlsefni's attempt to establish the first permanent European settlement in America. In 1010, with 60 men and 5 women, Thorfinn - who was LeifEricson's brother-in-law - sailed to Leifs Vinland camp, where he planned to colonize. In Vinland, Thorfinn's wife gave birth to a son-the first European child bom in America - who was named Snorri. Thorfinn explored extensively, traveling as far south as Long Island and the Hudson River and, possibly, Chesapeake Bay. Four years later, Thorfinn and the Norse settlers retumed to Greenland because of Indian attacks and because of violent intemal discord caused by the shortage of women.
The Atlantic voyages of this Welsh prince were recorded by the medieval historian Gymoric ap Grono Guntyn Owen and by the 17th-century chroniclers Thomas Herbert and Richard Hakluyt. Because of political conflicts with his brothers, Prince Madog sailed from Abergwili, Wales, in 1170. He voyaged westward across the Atlantic and landed somewhere in the Americas, where he built and fortified a settlement. After several years Madog retumed to Wales, leaving 120 men behind in the new colony. In 1190 he again crossed the Atlantic to discover that most of his men had been annihilated, presumably by Indians. Madog himself died in the New World a short time later. The actual site of Madog's settlement is disputed. Possible locations are the Florida peninsula, Mobile, Ala., and the West Indies.
According to medieval Arab historical and geographical documents and Malian oral epics, King Abubakari II of Mali, a black Muslim, sailed from West Africa to northeastem South America. After learning from Arab scholars that there was land on the west side of the Atlantic, King Abubakari became obsessed with the idea of extending his kingdom into these as yet unclaimed lands. He mobilized the resources of his empire to hire Arab shipbuilders from Lake Chad to build a fleet. (Their descendants were employed by Thor Heyerdahl to construct his reed boat, Ha I.) In 1311 the king and his crew sailed down the Senegal River and across the Atlantic. It is believed that while he sighted the north coast of South America, he made his first landfall in Panama. Then King Abubakari and his entourage supposedly traveled south from Panama and settled in the Inca Empire.
In a letter dated 1354, King Magnus of Norway and Sweden ordered the Norwegian sea captain Paul Knutson to joumey to Greenland to restore the Christian faith to the N orsemen still living there. Knutson sailed to Greenland in 1355 and, the next year, to Vinland, where he established a camp on the North American coast. Knutson's camp was probably at Newport, R.I., where a tower believed to have been constructed by his party still stands. One group of Knutson's men, who explored Hudson Bay and the territory to the south of it, are thought to be responsible for the Kensington Stone, a rock with possible Norse runes carved on its surface, which was found in central Minnesota. Most of the members of the expedition, including Knutson, died in America. A few survivors returned to Norway in 1364.
In 1475 King Alfonso of Portugal and King Christian I of Denmark arranged a joint expedition to North America to find a sea route to China. Danish sea captain Johannes Scolp and a Portuguese nobleman named Joao Vaz Corte Real were appointed as commanders of the combined fleet. Sailing from Denmark across the N orth Atlantic to the Labrador coast, they explored Hudson Bay, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the St. Lawrence River. Failing to find a sea passage to Asia, they returned to Denmark, where their discoveries were largely ignored.
In "THE BOOK OF LISTS#2"
The people's Almanac(r)
William Morrow and Co. Inc., New-York, 1980
pp. 136-140
They didn't become russians for many thousands of years after crossing the land bridge. Russia's conquest of siberia actually postdates columbus.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
So the Chinese discovered the New World and continued their proud tradition of making innovative discoveries and not doing a damned thing with 'em.
I am an American who has lived in Mexico for over 6 years.
Immigration is a bummer, both ways. Every year I have to renew my permit to stay and live in Mexico. Of course, it's just paperwork--they're not going to tell me "no."
I, too, would like open borders between Canada, U.S., and Mexico. I believe the U.S./Canada border should be open immediately. U.S. citizens should be able to work in Canada and vice versa.
The Mexican border can be opened once the standard of living increases. To do so before that happens would cause a massive and fast fall in the stnadard of living in the United States and Canada. But once Mexican income were to reach, say, 80% of the average income in the U.S./Canada, do it.