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Originally posted by thelibra
Was Columbus the first European to discover America?
Certainly not.
Basque cod fishermen were regularly sailing America's coasts long before Columbus, but didn't tell anyone about it because it was a prime fishing spot. America's coasts were a Basque's best-kept trade secret, and the massive hauls they could procure off of an unoccupied coast were a major contributing factor to their fame as fisherman.
In the Northwest Atlantic study, which has components from the Gulf of Maine, Greenland and Newfoundland fisheries, researchers will be delving into older data. Spanish and Portuguese records of cod fishing on the Grand Banks are available from the late 1500s and early 1600s when there was strong demand for salted fish in Europe and a large fleet sailed the Atlantic.
"Basque fishermen and whalers knew about the area before Columbus 'discovered' America," Smith said.
Originally posted by Harte
Uh, pardon me but your link does not support this statement.
Micmac
Together with the Beothuk on Newfoundland, the Micmac were probably the first Native Americans to have regular contact with Europeans. This may have occurred as early as the 11th century with the early Viking settlements on the coast of North America, or perhaps with Basque fishermen who visited the Grand Banks before Columbus' voyage in 1492 but kept quiet about where they were catching all their fish. The first known contact was made in 1497 by John Cabot who took three Micmac with him when he returned to England. The Micmac may not have appreciated this, since Cabot disappeared in the same area during his second voyage a few years later.
Long before Columbus, however, Basque fishermen from the Bay of Biscay, had reached these Canadian shores. Henry Cabot, the early explorer, had reported seeing fish on the Newfoundland Banks, like a floor of silver! France was Catholic, a fish eating country requiring days of fasting. Thousands of its fishing boats were afloat from the North Atlantic to Newfoundland and the Gaspé.
Originally posted by snoopyuk
i will try to dig out some info for you from my friend at the fishing museum in Portugal.
they have very old records of cod fishing going way back ...
as i said earlier,thanks for this thread
Originally posted by thelibra
Originally posted by Harte
Uh, pardon me but your link does not support this statement.
Sorry if the link wasn't the best supporting info, I tried my best to carefully go over each source I used, but apparently I misread this one. The assertion that Basque fished off the coast of America before Columbus is still a valid one, even if I read the link's info incorrectly.
Here are three links to make up for it:
Compact Histories
Micmac
Together with the Beothuk on Newfoundland, the Micmac were probably the first Native Americans to have regular contact with Europeans. This may have occurred as early as the 11th century with the early Viking settlements on the coast of North America, or perhaps with Basque fishermen who visited the Grand Banks before Columbus' voyage in 1492 but kept quiet about where they were catching all their fish. The first known contact was made in 1497 by John Cabot who took three Micmac with him when he returned to England. The Micmac may not have appreciated this, since Cabot disappeared in the same area during his second voyage a few years later.
Originally posted by thelibra
In the book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Kurlansky provides a detailed and compelling case for the Basque having already discovered the coasts of North America long before Columbus.
Originally posted by thelibra
From Guyana News and Information:
Long before Columbus, however, Basque fishermen from the Bay of Biscay, had reached these Canadian shores. Henry Cabot, the early explorer, had reported seeing fish on the Newfoundland Banks, like a floor of silver! France was Catholic, a fish eating country requiring days of fasting. Thousands of its fishing boats were afloat from the North Atlantic to Newfoundland and the Gaspé.
Originally posted by thelibraAdditionally, a Google search will show various other sources, mostly detailed articles on the histories of cod or cod dishes, that make mention of the Basque fishing off America's coasts long before Columbus. Tonight, if you'd like, I'll inquire of my history professor where some additional credible material may be found. Rest assured though, it's a fairly well accepted assertion that the Basque knew about America long before Columbus did.
Historians have debated whether the Basques may have reached North America before Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1492. The weight of opinion today is that they did not. There are no historical documents demonstrating that they did, and there are no oral traditions in the Basque country of a pre-Columbian exploration of the New World. Fifteenth and 16th century Basque seafarers were not explorers or colonists in the tradition of some other European nations. Indeed, rather than publicize their voyages, the Basques desired to keep their discoveries secret in order to protect them from competitors.
This is primarily a Welsh legend, but behind all legends, there is a truth.. it is possible that this man made it to the New World, and at the end of the legend, he came back from the New World, told of its wonder, took a few settlers with them and went back, never to be heard from again.
According to this legend, Owain’s description has historians believe he landed somewhere around Mobile Alabama.. and after attaining a group of settlers for his second voyage, in the year 1169 Owain established a settlement in the Mississippi.
Sadly enough, historians hypothesize that it is rather likely that the Welsh settlers continued north into the Dakota regions, and where found by American’s during the Revolutionary War, and where entirely wiped out as a race…… by small pox.
Soldiers accounts said the Mandan Indians as they where called, where light skinned, light haired, and had long beards. Sounds almost European huh?
Historic insight into the language used, their writing skills which is few among Indian peoples, and their engineering abilities closely relate to Celtic in nature, possibly Welsh..
During the Revolutionary War, a Welsh soldier had reported once that while serving in the Ohio region, that he conversed in broken Welsh with one Indian Tribe, though it cannot be solidly verified.
According to research conducted by an English College professor, America did not take its name from Amerigo Vespucci, but from a senior collector of Customs at Bristol, the main port from which English voyages of discovery sailed in the late 15th century. Dr. Basil Cottle, who is himself of Welsh birth, tells us that the official was Richard Amerik, one of the chief investors in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot, which led to the famous navigator receiving the King's Pension for his discoveries.
John Cabot landed in the New World in May 1497, becoming the first recorded European to set foot on American soil. As far as Amerik's Welsh connection is concerned, the word "Amerik" itself seems to be derived from ap Meuric, Welsh for the son of Maurice. (The later was anglicized further to Morris). There was a large Welsh population in Bristol in the late 15th century.
Because Cabot's voyages were made before the year 1500, they pre-date Amerigo Vespucci's interest in the New World. Professor Cottle reminds us that new countries or continents are never named after a person's first name, always after his or her second name. Thus, America would have become "Vespucci Land" if the Italian explorer really gave his name to the newly discovered continent (i.e. Tasmania, Van Dieman's Land, Cook Islands, etc.). It seems that countries or territories are named after first names only when the name is that of a royal personage such as Prince Edward Island, Victoria, etc.).
“The Phoenicians were not confined to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. They landed in Britain around 3,000 BC and unmistakable Phoenician artefacts have been found in Brazil, as well as possible Egyptian remains in the Grand Canyon in America. The Phoenicians landed in the Americas thousands of years before the manufactured ‘photo opportunity’ better known as the journey of Christopher Columbus. The reason that the native legends of the Americas speak of tall ‘white gods’ coming from the sea bringing advanced knowledge is because that is precisely what happened, if you forget the gods bit.”
-David Icke, “The Biggest Secret” 63
Originally posted by TheWalkingFox
reply to post by mojo4sale
I'm of the belief that if we were to get a good analysis of Kennewick man, it would turn out he was related to the Polynesians or perhaps the Ainu, rather than the daffy claim that he was a North european.
I wish people would realize that human hair turns reddish as it decomposes and oxidizes, and this does not mean that a mummy with red hair was from Sweden or something.
Polynesians made contact with the west coast of South America as much as a century before any Spanish conquistadors, her findings imply.
The Polynesian voyagers reached the South American mainland and there are suggestions that they made contact with indigenous South Americans. Carbon-dating of chicken bones found by Chilean archaeologists on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile date from between 1321 and 1407 AD. DNA analysis of the bones match those found in prehistoric samples from Tonga and American Samoa, and a near identical match from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The sweet potato, known in Polynesian languages as kumara or kumala is widely grown around the Pacific but originated in the Andes. There are also linguistic similarities - sweet potato is kumar in Peru. There is no conclusive evidence that Pacific peoples actually settled on the South American mainland or that South American peoples voyaged into the Pacific.
Most scholars assume that the chicken, like the horse, was unknown in the New World before the arrival of the Spaniards. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in ocean-going canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe's "Age of Discovery."
Some 50 chicken bones belonging to five chickens were recently recovered from the site of El Arenal-1, on Chile's Arauco Peninsula. The site is the first excavated settlement of the Andean people known as the Mapuche, who lived on the southern fringe of the Inca empire from about A.D. 1000 to 1500.
Some people continue to believe that pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact may have occurred because such voyages were technically quite possible. After all, the only essential requirements for a successful trans-oceanic trip are a boat that can withstand the open ocean weather for a few months, and means to store or obtain enough food and water to keep the crew alive for that duration. The historical and experimental evidence gathered over the last few decades shows that these requirements could have been met even in remote antiquity, millennia before Columbus's time. This circumstantial evidence includes reliable records of several maritime trips of comparable distance, and modern attempts to retrace possible contact routes with reproductions of ancient boats. While these reports and experiments are only speculative, they do open up the question of such contacts.
Linguistic evidence has demonstrated that Madagascar, for example, was settled by Austronesian peoples from Indonesia. Their navigators were able to cross the Indian Ocean and large sections of the Pacific by the early 1st millennium.
In the 19th century, a Japanese junk lost its mast and rudder in a typhoon on its way to Edo, was carried by sea currents across the Northern Pacific, and reached the coast of Washington State 14 months later. One of the survivors, Otokichi, became a famous interpreter.
In 1982, Brazilian newspapers reported that fragments of amphorae had been recovered by professional treasure hunter and underwater archaeologist Robert Frank Marx, from the bottom of Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Elizabeth Lyding Mill of the University of Massachusetts has reportedly identified the finds as being Roman, manufactured at Kouass (Dehar Jedid) in Morocco, and dated them to the 3rd century. A bottom survey by Harold E. Edgerton a pioneer in the field from MIT located what seemed to be remains of two disintegrating ships.
The researchers claim that Abubakari's fleet of pirogues, loaded with men and women, livestock, food and drinking water, departed from what is the coast of present-day Gambia.
They are gathering evidence that in 1312 Abubakari II landed on the coast of Brazil in the place known today as Recife.
We are sons of Canaan from Sidon, the city of the king. Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of mountains We sacrificed a youth for the exalted gods and goddesses in the nineteenth year of Hiram. our mighty king We embarked from Ezion-Geber into the Red Sea and voyaged with ten ships. We were at sea together for two years, around the land belonging to Ham [Africa], but were separated from the hand of Baal and we were no long with our companions So we have come here. twelve men and three women, on a...shore which I, the Admiral, control. But auspiciously may the exalted gods and goddesses favor us!
(Ouoted from my GODS OF THE CATACLYSM. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1976, p.136.)
This inscription correlates very nicely with the bible, King Solomon making a pact with the same Hiram of Tyre to build ships for him to go to Ophir in search of gold:
It is a large stone vessel, resembling a libation bowl, possibly used for religious ceremonies. It was found in the 1950's by a farmer in the neighbourhood of Tiwanaku and has since been authenticated.