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Maps Suggest Marco Polo May Have "Discovered" America
An anonymous reader writes in with news about maps attributed to Marco Polo that seem to show the coast of Alaska. "For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an "as told to" penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo's journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine, the maps would show that Polo recorded the shape of the Alaskan coast—and the strait separating it from Asia—four centuries before Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer long considered the first European to do so. Perhaps more important, they suggest Polo was aware of the New World two centuries before Columbus."
I am not sure how any European can claim to be the first to discover America when the continent was populated by humans for thousands of years.
While the Vikings were in North America first and had a few tangles with the Skrælings, Columbus was the first to enslave the indigenous inhabitants, forcibly convert them and use them to extract precious metals. Because Columbus was serving the centralized Spanish state with its missionary zeal and interest in mining, not a small group of Norse freeholders who just wanted to be left alone and farm, his visit marks the start of catastrophic social upheaval in the Americas, and so it's understandable that he remains so prominent a figure.
If the journey were reversed, Columbus would have discovered the Azores. The first exploration by Europeans [who recorded their discovery] of continental North America in 1497 was led by John Cabot. He was always thought of as the discoverer of America until the early C19th (why would a bunch of British immigrants credit a Spaniard?).
Then came the War of 1814, burning of the White House, etc. and a wave of anti-British sentiment. Suddenly, the US's founding father became good ol' Christopher.
Columbus' travel was about the circumfence of the Earth. While most scholars in the 15th century estimated the circumfence to be about 26,000 miles, quite close to reality, Columbus was convinced it was only 15,000, making a travel westward to India to seem actually feasible and shorter than the Portuguese way around the Cape of Good Hope.
It takes a special kind of racism to imply that honesty and resilience are purely English traits.
Yeah, I still don't get the Columbus story. The "everyone thought the world was flat" BS annoys me. Everyone knew the world was round, Columbus' argument was he thought the world was SMALLER than it was (and smaller than everyone thought)... and he was wrong. So, basically, we celebrate a man who was both wrong and just plain lucky as a great explorer...
This is a little stronger than "ha ha I forgot to mention, you don't have to leave tips!" He (essentially) wrote a book about China, and didn't mention chopsticks, foot-binding, or tea? But does mention a race of men who had dog-heads instead of human-heads? He also claimed to be governor of Yangzhou and other obvious bullshit.
Centuries before Marco Polo, Arab Traders were well-established in China, Italians had extensive contacts with the Persian and Arab world, and it seems very likely that Marco Polo just compiled stories he had heard. We know his stories were full of BS, exactly how much is BS is impossible to say.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I'd say being able to spread the knowledge of your discovery is an important part of that discovery. After the Vikings reached America, one tribe knew about the discovery and it was subsequently forgotten. After Columbus discovered America, this knowledge spread throughout Europe.
And those minutiae of fashion or dining are exactly the sort of details that today expatriates may well leave out if they were asked to recount life abroad.
Marco Polo's account was set down not by Marco Polo himself, but by Rustichello da Pisa, who is known to have also added other European stories of the East. At this particular point in history, belief in races of people somewhere out there with e.g. dog's heads, with faces in their chests, or with a single leg was common in Europe, and this may well be da Pisa's own interpolation.
In the new book by Vogel that I cited, Elvin (who wrote the preface), notes a longstanding controversy about whether Polo held some kind of office in Yangzhou, or whether he simply stayed there, the Italian words for these two activities being similar enough that an error in transmission is understandable.
You can always find a few flat world, even today, however the widespread myth of the Christians believing the earth was flat is a creation of two atheists (White and Draper) who pushed this.
Easy way to see that Christians did not believe this is look at the art they created, from the 300s, you will find various art works of the Christ where he is holding a representation of the earth with a cross over it and that representation is a round sphere.
Yep, life in the Americas was a Bunny Life. The next tribe over the hill enslaved your women and killed your warriors in a spirit of love an harmony. The Aztecs were a hippie culture which cherished medicinal "herbs" and sang Kum-by-Ya by the firelight in the evenings before going off to make free love.
You might think yourself clever, but your retort only confirms my point above. Violence and political domination before Columbus was only "the next tribe over the hill" (or at least another tribe a limited geographic area). Lacking ships, horse, and steel, no one indigenous tribe could have had such a wide impact and held so much territory as the Spaniards starting from 1492.
Yea that is why we celebrate him. Pray what the fuck have you ever done that ranks in significance to what he has done. We should always celebrate explorers. Whether he was 100% correct in everything he tried to do. Are you going to make fun of astronauts in the Shuttle Columbia because they couldn't even land their space plane, and besides they really didn't build it in the first place.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. "
-Uncle Teddy