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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.
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.
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.
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