There are many legends surrounding the discovery of the Americas: tales of Phoenician seafarers, Chinese explorers, Roman dissidents, West African traders with gold-tipped spears, and Irish monks, all long before Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, or Jacques Cartier. Fleets of nameless Basque fishermen figure somewhere in the lineup too.
The fashionable objection now is that Columbus could not have discovered America, because it was already there. By that standard, Galileo did not discover the biggest four moons orbiting Jupiter, and Banting and Best did not discover insulin. Indeed, by that logic no one discovered anything previously unknown to them.
Millennia later, Norse explorers reached Greenland in 985 or 986 A.D. during a climatic blip in 10-degree summer weather, about 1.5℃ warmer than the era before or after. At that time the global ocean was probably three to six feet higher than today. Scientists writing in the journal Geology found that “a brief warm period interrupted a consistent cooling climate trend driven by changes in Earth’s orbit.”
Where today there is only ice, prehistoric DNA from forest insects, chironomids preserved in a lakebed under advancing ice sheets, suggests a temperature range that enabled trees to flourish. That would explain why the seafarers from Iceland—meaning “Island” not an icy land—found a green land. They settled, attracted more settlers and, according to the Smithsonian Institution, “built manor houses and hundreds of farms; they imported stained glass; they raised sheep, goats and cattle; they traded furs, walrus-tusk ivory, live polar bears and other exotic arctic goods with Europe.”
Some fault the Norse for “failing” to “adapt to Inuit hunting techniques,” as the indigenous had done from time immemorial. But perhaps they didn’t want to revert to a stone age lifestyle. Dr. Slack insists the Greenlanders abandoned their colonies for internal cultural reasons such as the “need to reaffirm their frontier identity,” returning to the seas.
The Viking presence in Greenland lasted 400 years. By contrast, l’Anse aux Meadows, the Norse outpost at “Vinland” on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, was used merely as a seasonal camp, and then for less than two decades around the year 1000.
What about others who may have come by sea from Ireland, Egypt, West Africa, China, the Middle East, or Ancient Rome? Farley Mowat’s book “The Far Farers,” published in 1998, asserted that voyagers he calls “Albans” reached North America from the Orkney Islands between the 5th and 7th centuries, settling in southwestern Newfoundland—a notion that Canadian Geographic magazine summed up as “highly speculative.”
For most of these stories the evidence is vanishingly thin, usually championed by only a few eccentrics.
A tourist attraction near Salem in New Hampshire, known as “Mystery Hill” or “America’s Stonehenge,” purports to be a Phoenician or Carthaginian settlement, complete with a stone for human sacrifice and a drainage rim for blood. Did a fleet of Phoenicians, among the world’s first great seafarers, flee the Mediterranean in 146 B.C., when the Romans destroyed Carthage and outlawed human sacrifice, in quest of religious freedom? That was posited in the 1960s by an eccentric amateur anthropologist, Charles Boland.
The fantasy was picked up in 1977 by the “In Search Of” program hosted by Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in the original “Star Trek.” In 1982, Nimoy’s program covered the notion that Chinese Buddhist monk Hu-Shen “discovered America 1,000 years before Columbus.” If it all sounds rather flaky, that’s because it is.
A few stones that show signs of having been moved around, drilled, or quarried; a few pictograms of indeterminate origin; a few artifacts that probably belonged to 17th- or 18th-century collectors—no wonder scholars dismiss such discoveries as pseudo-archeology.
Nor did a flotilla of Romans fleeing Nero’s persecutions in 64 A.D. cross the Atlantic and live in Jeffress and Clarksville, Virginia—leaving only a bronze cup that resembles similar Pompeiian vessels in the Naples Museum. The cup, which can be seen at the Smithsonian Museum with the label “origin uncertain,” most likely belonged to a 17th- or 18th-century collector. As for Roman coins or supposed Roman symbols cut into rock now submerged by flooding when the John H. Kerr Dam on the Roanoke River was completed in 1952 (another theory championed by Charles Boland), it’s impossible to say how or when they got there.
Granted, the Romans had a massive commercial fleet. They reached the Canary Islands. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus recorded a voyage from Alexandria to Rome, also in the year 64, with 600 passengers. Quite a ship. But the idea of transatlantic Roman seafaring fails the basic smell test since they notoriously had limited sailing skills.
The Bollandist monk-scholars who own the Brendan manuscript dismiss the tale as pious fantasy. Indeed, it is likely an allegory of the monastic life, inspired by “The Odyssey” by Homer—a return through life’s hardships to the divine light of Paradise.
My suggestion for the holidays: Rather than speculate about pre-Norse exploration legends, just enjoy reading Norse myths that were also preserved by the monks. Or better yet, read Homer.
