SCHOOLS – ESPECIALLY THOSE in the United States – still teach that the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under commission to the Spanish throne, discovered America in 1492 and that the continent was named after his contemporary, Amerigo Vespucci. In the States, where ‘Columbus’ is used to name everything from towns to space missions, they still make much of the man, which is surprising as he never even made it to their shores.
Paradoxically, it was in fact the Russians who were the first to ‘discover’ America when Siberian tribes simply wandered across the land that connected Russia to Alaska some 20,000 years ago. Next to pip Columbus to the post were probably the Ainu, the original and indigenous Japanese of Hokkaido, who may have in turn been driven out by the smaller yet far more aggressive Polynesians. (The Ainu lived in Siberia, too, so they may also have simply migrated from there.) Also beating Columbus to the post were the Vikings under Leif Erikson.
Unlike Columbus – who actually made four voyages of limited discovery, reaching as far as the Caribbean and the coast of Central America – Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine explorer under commission to Portugal, claimed to have made four voyages to the New World but only made two: his first and fourth voyages only happened in his head. In his ‘second’ and ‘third’ voyages – in reality his first and second – of 1499 and 1501 respectively, Vespucci did indeed venture further than the Caribbean to encounter the north coast of South America and to have then followed the east coast as far south as the Bay of Rio de Janeiro; he claimed to have travelled as far south as what is now Patagonia but, as he was a notorious liar, no one believed him. Based on Vespucci’s notes and charts, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map of South America in 1507, this being the earliest use of the name ‘America’, which Waldseemüller’s notes say he assumes to have been inspired by the forename of Vespucci. This would suggest that he had seen the name on other maps of the New World and thus decided to follow suit but, significantly, in his later issues of that map he replaced ‘America’ with ‘Terra Incognita’.
The far more likely toponymous hero is the otherwise little-known Robert Amerike, a wealthy Bristolian merchant who sponsored the voyages of John Cabot, providing the ship Matthew in which John Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497. Pre-dating any visit to the New World made by Vespucci by over two years, Cabot explored the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and, in the time-honoured tradition, no doubt applied a form of his sponsor’s surname to the land.
The weight of tradition also lends support to this notion in that toponymous honours are rarely based on the forename of any explorer or sponsor. When Henry Hudson discovered a new river in what is now New York in the early seventeenth century he did not, for example, call it Henry’s River but the Hudson; had the toponymous honour been heaped upon the unworthy shoulders of Amerigo Vespucci then the New World would have been called Vespuccia and not America. But that is enough of those who did not make it to North America; what of those who did?
Following those Siberians some 10,000 years later, the first to travel to the New World instead of stumble into it were the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan and Siberia. Japan is not that far from Alaska, which, with its chain of Aleutian Islands stretching well beyond the 180-degree meridian separating the western and eastern hemispheres, qualifies as the most northern, western and eastern of the American states. The furthest flung island of that chain, Attu, lies about 1,000 miles from Alaska proper and about the same distance from Japan to form the first rung of an island ladder to the North American mainland. Debate as to whether the indigenous Japanese had paddled across to Attu or whether Siberian Ainu had crossed over the northern land bridge was brought to a head on 28 July 1996 with the discovery of an almost complete skeleton in the Lake Wallula section of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington State. With carbon dating establishing an age of about 9,000 years, it was discovered that the ancestry of Kennewick Man most closely resembled that of the Ainu.
The North American Graves Protection and Repatriation lobby demanded Kennewick Man be released into their custody for tribal burial. The anthropological and paleontological groups, aware that such a move would forever mark Kennewick Man as a Native American and place him beyond their attempts to get to the bottom of a mystery, pressured the government to resist any such move. Caught in the middle, the government took refuge in the fact that the land on which the remains had been found belonged to the US Army so they should retain custody, a move which pleased nobody. A victory of sorts for all was provided in 2015 by the University of Copenhagen, which, through DNA testing, asserted that the remains presented conclusive similarities to the Native American tribes of Washington State so there was indeed a link. But with the Ainu having been in America for over 9,000 years this was a double-edged statement; with the inevitable intermingling of all early peoples on the continent one would expect to find genetic similarities in trace DNA in tribes local to where Kennewick Man was found. After all, he is unlikely to have pitched up there on his own. So, the University of Copenhagen only answered half of the question with no indication as to which group was there first.
Next to settle and colonize North America were tenth-century Vikings, the very first Europeans in America. Striking out from their powerbase on Greenland, a small fleet of long ships, under the command of Leif Erikson, landed on the northern tip of Newfoundland in AD 1000 to establish a settlement at what is now L’Anse aux Meadows. From here, it is thought that the Vikings moved to the North American mainland where, across the next couple of decades, they established more settlements, with the most recent find of 2017 uncovering what may be a Viking village at Minisceongo Creek, near the Hudson River in New York State, thus proving the Vikings extended their influence as far south as New England. This was nearly half a millennium before Columbus didn’t make it to America so the real mystery is how he managed to grab all the kudos – and the answer to that lies in transatlantic hostilities between the UK and the emerging USA.
A SHORTCUT TO INDIA
Columbus was not much of a navigator; he thought the world to be about half the size it really was and, with this misconception foremost in his mind, when he sailed west in 1492 it was with the intention of finding a shortcut to India and the east. When he arrived in the Caribbean he was convinced he was in India, hence nonsensical names such as the West Indies and the Native Americans also being called Indians.
As for the notion that his voyage proved the earth round and not flat, this was the invention of American humorist Washington Irving in his A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), in which the author asserted that the Spanish Council of Salamanca opposed the funding of Columbus’s voyage on the grounds that he would sail off the edge and perish.
In fact, none then thought the world flat and the Council of Salamanca only questioned Columbus’s estimates of the size of the world. As things turned out, they were right and he was wrong.
After the 1775–83 conflict called the American War of Independence or the American Revolution, depending on which side of the Atlantic you sit, the United States wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything English. Words such as ‘master’ were ousted in favour of the Dutch-derived ‘boss’ and any man foolish enough to appear in public sporting a powdered wig risked hostility ranging from the verbal to the physical. Oblivious to the past discoveries of the Siberians, ethnic Japanese and Vikings in post-revolutionary America, it was a straight toss-up between the non-English Columbus and the English-funded John Cabot and, despite the former not even making it to their shores, Columbus was the clear winner. To further disassociate themselves from the hated British during the War of Independence, the American revolutionaries referred to their country as the Territory of Columbus or Columbia, thus the name ‘District of Columbia’ given to the land set aside for their new post-war capital of Washington where Congress held its first meeting at the turn of the nineteenth century. This new Congress, desperate to distance itself from the British Crown with a new national identity, promoted Columbus as a man who sailed west in an effort to shrug off the old world order and, like their own fledgling nation, sought an independent future. Anything and everything was ‘Columbified’; King’s College in New York, founded by Royal Charter by George II in 1754, was renamed Columbia University and, after the war, ‘Hail Columbia’ by Joseph Hopkinson became the country’s de facto national anthem to be sung on the tricentenary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage – the new country’s first national celebrations.
With Cabot and all the other contenders thus airbrushed from the American perspective of their own foundation, the Columbus bandwagon kept rolling, picking up momentum from the likes of the Catholic order of the Knights of Columbus, a ‘muscular Christian’ group founded in the United States in the 1800s who succeeded in establishing 12 October as Columbus Day. But, as more became aware of the atrocities inflicted by Columbus, eventually sent home in chains for his crimes of slaughter and enslavement against the peoples of the islands he actually did discover, the gilt started to peel from that particular bit of gingerbread. To take Haiti as one example, when Columbus arrived in 1492 there was a healthy population of around 500,000 Arawaks; two years later over half were either dead or elsewhere in chains. This, combined with an increasing awareness of the mass rapes and mutilation imposed by Columbus on communities that failed to render his required levy of gold, prompted a recent yet steady abandonment of any celebrations of his memorial day across America. At present, twenty-one of the states ignore the festival completely and, of the remaining twenty-nine states, the overwhelming majority now choose to observe 12 October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In 1964, Congress made formal submission to President Lyndon B. Johnson, requiring him to declare 9 October as Leif Erikson Day and, at the time of writing, there was a sizeable demonstration mounted by New Yorkers calling on their mayor, Bill de Blasio, to remove Columbus’s statue from Central Park.