Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (5 page)

Most of what is guessed about the Norse colony in North America is derived from two Icelandic epics called
The Vinland Sagas
. There are three locations—Stoneland, probably the barren coast of Labrador, Woodland, possibly Maine; and Vinland—which the Norse visited. While Leif the Lucky gets the credit in history and the roads and festivals named after him, it was another Norseman, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who was the first European to sight North America, in 985 or 986. But it was Leif who supposedly built some huts and spent one winter in this land where wild grapes—more likely berries, since there are no grapes in any of these places—grew before returning to Greenland. A few years later, another Greenlander named Thorfinn Karlsefni set up housekeeping in Eriksson’s spot, passing two years there. Among the problems they faced were unfriendly local tribes, whom the Norsemen called
skrelings
(a contemptuous term translated as “wretch” or “dwarf”). During one attack, a pregnant Norse woman frightened the
skrelings
off by slapping a sword against her bare breast. Terrified at this sight, the
skrelings
fled back to their boats.

In his fascinating book
Cod
, Mark Kurlansky asks, “What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 986 and 1011 that have been recorded in the Icelandic sagas? They were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank. They could break off pieces and chew them . . .”

There are those who hold out for earlier discoverers. For many years, there were tales of earlier Irish voyagers, led by a mythical St. Brendan, who supposedly reached America in the ninth or tenth century, sailing in small boats called
curraghs
. However, no archaeological or other evidence supports this. Another popular myth, completely unfounded, regards a Welshman named Modoc who established a colony and taught the local Indians to speak Welsh. A more recent theory provides an interesting twist on the “Europeans sailing to Asia” notion. A British navigation expert has studied ancient Chinese maps and believes that a Chinese admiral may have circumnavigated the globe and reached America 100 years before Columbus. Convincing proof of such a voyage would be a stunning revision of history, but to date it is the equivalent of the philosopher’s tree falling in the forest: If the Chinese got there first but nobody “heard” it, did they really get there first?

A significant discovery belongs to another of Columbus’s countrymen, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), who was sailing for the British. In 1496, Cabot (and his son, Sebastian) received a commission from England’s King Henry VII to find a new trade route to Asia. Sailing out of Bristol aboard the
Matthew
, Cabot reached a vast rocky coastline near a sea teeming with cod. Cabot reported the vast wealth of this place he called New Found Land, which he claimed for Henry VII, staking a claim that would eventually provide the English with their foothold in the New World. Sailing with five ships on a second voyage in 1498, Cabot ran into bad weather. One of the vessels returned to an Irish port, but Cabot disappeared with the four other ships.

But Cabot and others were not sailing into completely unknown waters. Fishermen in search of cod had been frequenting the waters off North America for many years. Basque fishing boats fished in these waters. Clearly, though, they had decided it was a nice fishing spot but not a place to stay for good. And they were slow to catch on that the coastal land they were fishing near was not Asia. Even in the sixteenth century, according to Mark Kurlansky in
Cod,
Newfoundland was charted as an island off China.

So even though cod fishermen were the Europeans who discovered “America,” they—like generations of anglers who keep their best spots to themselves—wanted to keep their fishing grounds secret, and the distinction of being the first European to set foot on what would become United States soil usually goes to Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish adventurer who conquered Puerto Rico. Investigating rumors of a large island north of Cuba that contained a “fountain of youth” whose waters could restore youth and vigor, Ponce de León found and named Florida in 1513 and “discovered” Mexico on that same trip.

Finally, there is the 1524 voyage of still another Italian, Giovanni da Verrazano, who sailed in the employ of the French Crown with the financial backing of silk merchants eager for Asian trade. Verrazano was searching for a strait through the New World that would take him westward to the Orient. He reached land at Cape Fear in present-day North Carolina, sailed up the Atlantic coast until he reached Newfoundland, and then returned to France. Along the way, he failed to stop in either Chesapeake or Delaware Bay. But Verrazano reached New York Bay (where he went only as far as the narrows and the site of the bridge that both bear his name) and Narragansett Bay, as well as an arm-shaped hook of land he named Pallavisino in honor of an Italian general. Still frustrated in the search for a passage to the east, Verrazano returned to France but insisted that the “7000 leagues of coastline” he had found constituted a New World. Seventy years later, Englishman Bartholomew Gosnold was still looking for a route to Asia, which he did not find, of course. However, he did find a great many cod, in shallow waters, and renamed Verrazano’s Pallavisino Cape Cod in 1602. But the English sailors who attempted to settle the area—near what is Bristol, Maine—found this new world “over-cold.”

But all these European cod fishermen and lost sailors seeking Asia were no more than Johnny-come-latelies in the Americas. In fact, America had been “discovered” long before any of these voyages. The true “discoverers” of America were the people whose culture and societies were well established here while Europe was still in the Dark Ages, the so-called Indians, who, rather ironically, had walked to the New World from Asia.

Must Read:
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
by Mark Kurlansky.

Okay, the Indians really discovered America. Who were they, and how did they get here?

Until fairly recently, it was generally believed that humans first lived in the Americas approximately 12,000 years ago, arriving on foot from Asia. However, new evidence suggests that the people who would eventually come to be called Indians may have arrived in America some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal found in southern Chile and the 1997 discovery of a skeleton in present-day Washington State have not only bolstered the argument that humans lived in America much earlier than had been widely accepted, but also shaken the foundations of who they were and how they got here.

The version of events generally accepted and long supported by archaeological finds and highly accurate carbon testing is that the prehistoric people who populated the Americas were hunters following the great herds of woolly mammoths. During an ice age, when sea levels were substantially lower because so much water was locked up in ice, these early arrivals into the Americas walked from Siberia across a land bridge into modern-day Alaska. While “land bridge” suggests a narrow strip between the seas, the “bridge” was probably a thousand miles across. Once here, they began heading south toward warmer climates, slaughtering the mammoth as they went. Eventually, as the glaciers melted, the oceans rose and covered this land bridge, creating the present-day Bering Strait, separating Alaska from Russia. The earliest known artifacts left by these people were discovered at Clovis, New Mexico, and have been dated to 11,500 years ago.

But a growing body of evidence suggests several more complex and surprising possibilities:

• The Pacific coastal route: According to this theory, people from northern Asia migrated along the western coast of America on foot and by skin-covered boat before the Bering land bridge existed. This theory is based partly on artifacts found in coastal Peru and Chile, dated as far back as 12,500 years ago, that provide early evidence of maritime-based people in the Americas. In Monte Verde, Chile, the artifacts include wooden tools, animal bones, and a human footprint.

• The discovery of the so-called Kennewick man in Washington State further clouded the issue. Dated between 8,000 and 9,300 years old, these remains raised the question of whether this early American was from Asia at all.

• North Atlantic route: The discovery of several sites on the North American east coast have suggested a very different sea route. Artifacts at these sites in present-day Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina are dated between 10,000 and 16,000 years old, well before the Clovis artifacts. In theory, early Europeans in boats followed the ice surrounding modern Iceland and Greenland down to North America.

• Australian route: Another, more controversial, generally less accepted theory is a modification of the theory propounded by the late Thor Heyerdahl in his book
Kon Tiki.
Heyerdahl contended that the Americas could have been settled by people from southeast Asia who crossed the Pacific to South America. While many scientists consider this farfetched, a skeleton found in Brazil gives some support to the idea, but some scientists think it more likely that the skeleton belonged to some branch of southeast Asian people who moved north along the coast of Asia and then across the Bering Strait.

Of course, it is also possible that any or all of these theories might be correct and more than one group of people migrated into the New World. Some of them might have become extinct, replaced by later groups, or they may have undergone significant physical changes over the many thousands of years since their arrival.

What is far more certain is that, by the time Columbus arrived, there were tens of millions of what might be called First Americans or Amerindians occupying the two continents of the Americas. These were divided into hundreds of tribal societies, the most advanced of which were the Mayas, and later the Aztecs in Mexico and the Incas of Peru, all of whom became fodder for the Spanish under the reign of terror wrought by the conquistadores. Many history books once presented these American Indians as a collection of nearly savage civilizations. A newer romanticized version presents groups of people living in harmony with themselves and nature. Neither view is realistic.

There were, first of all, many cultures spread over the two Americas, from the Eskimo and Inuit of the North down to the advanced Mexican and South American societies. While none of these developed along the lines of the European world, substantial achievements were made in agriculture, architecture, mathematics, and other fields. On the other hand, some important developments were lacking. Few of these societies had devised a written language. Nor were some of these Indians free from savagery, as best witnessed by the Aztec human sacrifice that claimed as many as 1,000 victims a day in Tenochtitlán (near the site of present-day Mexico City) or the practices of the Iroquois, who had raised torture of captured opponents to a sophisticated but ghastly art.

During the past few decades, estimates of the Indian population at the time of Columbus’s arrival have undergone a radical revision, especially in the wave of new scholarship that attended the 1992 marking of five hundred years since Columbus’s first voyage. Once it was believed that the Indian population ranged from 8 million to 16 million people, spread over two continents. That number has been significantly revised upward to as many as 100 million or higher, spread across the two continents.

Although Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe was a calculated, methodical genocidal plan, the European destruction of the Indians was no less ruthlessly efficient, killing off perhaps 90 percent of the native population it found, all in the name of progress, civilization, and Christianity.

While Europeans were technically more advanced in many respects than the natives they encountered, what really led to the conquest of the Americas was not military might or a superior culture. The largest single factor in the destruction of the native populations in the Americas was the introduction of epidemic diseases to which the natives had no natural immunity.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

A
MERIGO
V
ESPUCCI,
in a letter to Lorenzo Medici, 1504:

In days past, I gave your excellency a full account of my return, and if I remember aright, wrote you a description of all those parts of the New World which I had visited in the vessels of his serene highness the king of Portugal. Carefully considered, they appear truly to form another world, and therefore we have, not without reason, called it the New World. Not one of all the ancients had any knowledge of it, and the things which have been lately ascertained by us transcend all their ideas.

If Columbus was so important, how come we don’t live in the United States of Columbus?

The naming of America was one of the cruel tricks of history and about as accurate as calling Indians “Indians.” Amerigo Vespucci was another Italian who found his way to Spain and, as a ship chandler, actually helped outfit Columbus’s voyages. In 1499, he sailed to South America with Alonso de Hojeda, one of Columbus’s captains, reaching the mouth of the Amazon. He made three more voyages along the coast of Brazil. In 1504, letters supposedly written by Vespucci appeared in Italy in which he claimed to be captain of the four voyages and in which the words
Mundus Novus
, or New World, were first used to describe the lands that had been found. Vespucci’s travels became more famous in his day than those of Columbus. Some years later, in a new edition of Ptolemy, this new land, still believed to be attached to Asia, was labeled America in Vespucci’s honor.