North American Exploration

Introduction

The narrative of North American discovery and exploration reads like a novel—a postmodern novel at that, in which definitions are elusive; claims are relative and subject to revision; and obscure, offstage characters are as vital to the outcome as those with documentable identities, personal histories, and catalogues of achievement. Any attempt to engage the history of North American exploration and discovery has to begin with some understanding of terms. For example, what constitutes North America? What do we mean by discovery? How does one define an explorer?

For the purposes of this work, we use the conventional geographers’ definition of North America, which includes Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean. The geographers’ definition also encompasses Greenland as well as the Arctic regions up to the North Pole, the destination of a generation of obsessive twentieth-century adventurer/explorers. We have divided the book into seven parts organized geographically as well as chronologically:

Part I: North America before Columbus

Part II: The Spanish Enter the New World, 1492–1635

Part III: The Atlantic Seaboard, 1497–1680

Part IV: Exploring West of the Mississippi, 1635–1800

Part V: From the Appalachians to the Mississippi, 1540–1840

Part VI: Across the North American Continent, 1720–1880

Part VII: The Arctic and Northernmost Regions, 1576–1992

Within each chapter, entries are arranged in alphabetical order.

The bands of prehistoric people who drifted over the Bering land bridge that once joined Asia and North America thousands of years ago might properly claim credit as discoverers of the continent that extends from the eternal chill of the Bering Sea to the rain forests of the Isthmus of Darien in eastern Panama. Neither the ancient Asians nor their Native American descendants who peopled the continent from time immemorial left a conclusive written account. The first people to provide evidence of setting foot in North America were the Norse who came ashore in Newfoundland almost five centuries before Columbus made landfall off the Bahama Islands in October 1492. They left a tangible record of their visitation in saga form and in the archaeological remains at L’Anse aux Meadows.

Columbus believed he had discovered the geographical outworks of Asia, not a new continent. But it would not be long before the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English, and the French were establishing that this was indeed a vast New World. They would eventually be joined by the Dutch, the Russians, the Scandinavians, and finally American conqueror/colonists from the sixteenth century down to the twentieth to explore, map, exploit, and subdue the vast North American landmass. The stories of these explorers—heirs of the first arrivals from Asia, of Leif Eriksson, of Columbus—contain elements of heroism, willpower, fortitude in the face of extreme hardship, and physical endurance all but inconceivable to the comfort-loving world of the twenty-first century. They contain elements, too, of lust, greed, meanness, betrayal, rapacious exploitation, armor-plated cultural arrogance, and unimaginable, sometimes genocidal, cruelty.

We define the category of explorer broadly. De Soto sailed to the New World for gold and conquest, but he traversed three thousand miles of unknown territory in what is now the southeastern United States and became the first European to cross the Mississippi. Scores of missionaries set forth primarily to convert the natives to Christianity, but in the course of their journeys they blazed trails through all manner of remote territories. The men and women of the Roanoke Expeditions came to plant a colony, but expedition leaders carried out important explorations of the North Carolina sounds and the tidewater interior. It would be more strictly accurate to treat Daniel Boone as a market hunter and pioneer colonist, but he did blaze trails into trackless places. So too is the term discovery problematic. We try to use qualifiers such as the first documented crossing of South Pass or the first European known to sight the coast of California, knowing only too well that these empty or virgin lands, these howling wildernesses, were in fact familiar landscapes to the natives who peopled them. Apropos of which, we follow the practice of most contemporary scholars and generally use modern place names rather than the Native American original names. Likewise, we generally use the modern names of geographic features such as lakes, bays, and other bodies of water, as well as islands, peninsulas, and other landmasses, even though these may have been named many years, or even decades, after our explorers encountered them.

One authority goes so far as to suggest that Alexander Mackenzie, who in 1789 traveled the river that now bears his name, went along as hardly more than a passenger on an Indian conducted tour of the Canadian Northwest. The point is arguable, and we recognize the crucial, often decisive role Native Americans played in what after all were discoveries to Europeans glimpsing the marvels as well as the terrors of North America for the first time. Many of the journeys here described would have been impossible without Indians as guides, interpreters, and providers of transportation, food, shelter, and guarantees of safe conduct. All the same, Mackenzie conceived the expedition out of his own rich and restless imagination, managed it with skill, survived hardships and danger, and bequeathed his knowledge of mysterious places to an eager world.

Entries on individual explorers make no attempt to be complete biographies of their lives, still less of their times. They focus on what, after all, is the theme of this book, the exploration and opening of the North American continent. We do, however, make an effort to present these pathfinders as personalities. We try to let the explorers speak for themselves, to let their voices be heard down through the centuries whenever possible, both in the entries and in companion extracts from letters, diaries, and official reports.

A note on format: For the reader’s convenience, cross-referenced entries will appear in bold italics the first time they appear in the text of an entry. If the boldface cross-reference points the way to an entry from another part of the book, its location will be identified with the part number in brackets; otherwise, the cross-reference will simply appear in bold italics.

This map shows the lands from Greenland to New England that are associated with the Vikings’ voyages circa A.D. 1000. There is no disputing their settlements in Greenland, nor that they reached Baffin Island, Labrador, and at least Newfoundland. What is in dispute is just how far down the Atlantic coast of North America they may have traveled.

PART I

North America before Columbus

There was a time, not all that long ago for many Americans, when the history of the exploration of North America began simply and abruptly with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. (It was no coincidence that generations of American schoolchildren all knew by heart the beginning of their history: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Today it is widely recognized that this history is more complicated—and certainly more exciting. Indeed, the history of pre-Columbian exploration of North America has become so exciting that it is sometimes in danger of becoming disorienting—literally as well as figuratively. To put it bluntly: Widely circulated accounts often make it hard for the general public to distinguish possibilities from probabilities, the claimed from the proven, fiction from fact.

One of the unfortunate results of this confusion is that many people focus more on the allegations and ignore the more interesting realities. More North Americans probably know of the claims about finding Atlantis in North America than of the actual finding of the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. And for every American who is aware of the French and Portuguese fishermen who were coming ashore on the coast of Canada by 1505, there are probably ten who believe that people from all over the Old World had been visiting North America long before then.

There is nothing wrong with considering the many unproven claims made for pre-Columbian events, expeditions, explorers, and evidence. In fact, this work has gone out of its way to recognize them all (including some that probably few except the more dedicated alternative theory buffs are aware of). We are as beguiled as the next person by the mysteries, the great unanswerables, of history. But we insist on examining these many claims with objective standards of proof: Merely asserting that something might well have happened does not prove that it did. When doubts remain, when there are still those possibilities, we readily admit as much. But people should not confuse serious scholars’ doubts and disagreements about certain details—such as exact landfalls made by early explorers—with the positive assertions made by proponents of various fanciful scenarios.

It does seem a shame that so many people are willing to believe the various questionable, and even spurious, stories when the proven history is at least as exciting. What is more interesting than knowing about those Norse up there in Newfoundland? They have left more than enough evidence to provoke speculation about their time in the far corner of the Northeast without making additional claims about their being present all over North America. Meanwhile, there are some genuine mysteries regarding other possible pre-Columbian contacts with the Western Hemisphere, mysteries that will be examined here with neutrality.

There exists an annotated bibliography of writings about these pre-Columbian contacts; it runs to some 5,000 books and articles, yet still the editors explain: We realize that the bibliography is incomplete, but so large a topic could never be exhausted. Here, too, we cannot claim to be exhaustive, but we have tried to include all the most relevant topics.

Africans

One of the least-known claims is that Africoid people (that is, Negroid Africans as opposed to North Africans, Egyptians, Arabic Africans, etc.) made contact with the Americas at several points in history before Columbus [II] discovered the New World he believed to be Asia. Yet even the primary proponent of this claim, Ivan Van Sertima, admits that this is a highly controversial thesis. He sees two main contact periods—one sometime between about 1200 and 700 B.C., and the other in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D.—and cites abundant specific evidence involving physical anthropology (burials of skeletons); cultural artifacts (from boats to sculptural depictions of Africoid types); textual references (including statements by Columbus himself); religious, ritual, and ceremonial parallels; and botanical specimens (including corn, cotton, and maize). The arguments are suggestive—and sometimes convincing. Thus, there is the claim that in 1312, Bakari II, the Malinke Emperor of Mali, led two hundred large pirogues on an expedition westward across the Atlantic, where he is said to have reached Brazil. The investigations into this broad topic will presumably continue, but for now, not even the main proponents claim that these Africoid people added to the geographic knowledge of North America.

IN THEIR OWN Words

Africans in Pre-Columbian America?

The Spaniards [in Balboa’s expedition] found Negroes in this province. They only live one day’s march from Quarequa and they are fierce. . . . It is thought that Negro pirates from Ethiopia [Africa] established themselves in these mountains after the wreck of their ships. The natives of Quarequa carry on incessant war with these Negroes.

—PETER MARTYR D’ANGHERA, DE ORBE NOVA, 1511

Large heads of this type (this one is nine feet high), found in the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz, were made by the Olmec Indians (circa 1200–100 B.C.). Those who claim that Africans must have been present in the Americas before Columbus often cite these heads, with their alleged Negroid features, as evidence to support their theory.

Antil(l)ia

Of the several legendary islands long believed by Europeans to be located in the Atlantic, Antilia is arguably the one that had the greatest impact on voyages of exploration that led to the real islands and mainland of the Americas. Although there have been countless explanations for the source of the name itself, it is most likely derived from two Portuguese words ante and illa, meaning opposite island. Its first appearance on a map seems to be that of the so-called Pizzi (or Pizzigano) Nautical Chart of 1424. From that date on, Antilia—in various spellings, shapes, orientations, and locations—appears on maps and globes for several centuries. Meanwhile, by about 1450 Antilia was also combined by some with another legendary island off in the Atlantic, the Island of the Seven Cities (which in turn often becomes combined with another legendary Atlantic island, Brazil, or Hy-Brasil). There are several authentic accounts of pre-Columbian voyages into the Atlantic in search of Antilia, but the one that matters most is that Columbus [II] himself believed in its existence and expected to find it en route to Asia. (In fact, he had been convinced by the letter of Paolo Toscanelli that he would find Antilia on the twenty-eighth parallel; had he held to that course, he would have made his first landfall in Florida.) Some of Columbus’s contemporaries believed that one of the islands he did discover was, in fact, Antilia, while some serious modern scholars believe that Antilia was inspired by pre-Columbian discoveries of actual islands such as Cuba [II]. In any case, the Portuguese and the French quickly applied the name Antilles to the newly discovered West Indies, and this name preserves the allure of the various imaginary islands in Europeans’ discovery of the Americas.

Asians

There is a long-standing and respectable school of scholarship that contends that peoples from relatively advanced cultures of Asia made a number of contacts with the Americas in the centuries before Columbus [II]. This thesis, usually summed up as trans-Pacific contacts, is extremely complicated because there are so many different claims made by so many different scholars. For example, one claim asserts that on various occasions rafts or small boats involuntarily drifted or were blown by storms across the Pacific, and the sailors aboard found themselves stranded in the Americas. At the other extreme are the claims that the Chinese deliberately sent forth maritime expeditions to explore the farthest reaches of the Pacific: Two periods—300–100 B.C. and the early 1400s A.D.—are usually cited. (The most recent claim is that the Chinese admiral Zheng He, on one of his seven famous voyages between 1405 and 1433, circumnavigated the globe, and some Chinese settled North America.) But once again, virtually all the pre-Columbian contacts advanced by serious scholars involve Middle or South America, not North America, and cultural influences, not geographical knowledge. Then there are those who claim that two classic Chinese texts refer to ancient Chinese visiting North America. One of these, dated to about 200 B.C., is the Shan Hai Ching (Classic of the Mountains and Rivers); scholars of Chinese literature insist its subject matter is mythological, not geographical. The other text, found in the Liang-shu (Records of the Liang Dynasty), allegedly describes the travels of a Buddhist monk, Hwui Shan, to a place called Fu-Sang around A.D. 500. Proponents of Fu-Sang as a place in the Americas locate it anywhere from Oregon to Guatemala and find American equivalents for all the most exotic elements in Fu-Sang: The La Brea tar pits are the sea of varnish; men with dogs’ heads are the Hopi Indians’ Kachina ceremonial masks; while the fu-sang plant that gave the country its name was anything from the prickly pear to maize. Once again, professional scholars reject all such claims.

IN THEIR OWN Words

Pre-Columbian Chinese in North America?

Have walked about three hundred li since Bald Mountain. Here, Bamboo Mountain is near the river which looks like a boundary. There is no grass, or trees, but some jasper and jade stones. The river is impeded in its course here by rocks, but flows on southeast to the great body of water . . . to the south, Lone Mountain is found. Upon this there are many gems and much gold, and below it many beautiful stones. Muddy River is found here, a stream flowing southeasterly into a mighty flood, in which there are many T’iao-Yung. These look like yellow serpents with fish’s fins . . . three hundred li to the south, Bald Mountain is found . . . wild animals are found here which look like suckling pigs, but they have pearls. They are called Tung-Tung, their name being given to them in imitation of their cry. The Hwan River is found here, a stream flowing easterly into a river . . . one authority says that it flows into the sea. In this there are many water-gems. . . . Three hundred li farther south, Bamboo Mountain is found, bordering on a river. . . . There is no grass, or trees, but there are many green-jasper and green-jade stones. The Kih River [water impeded in its course by rocks] is found here, a stream flowing into T’su-Tan [larger water of some sort]. In this place there is a great abundance of dye plants.

—SHAN HAI CHING (CLASSIC OF THE MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS), CIRCA 200 B.C.

This Norwegian merchant-sailor would be unknown to history except for the one reference to him in The Saga of the Greenlanders (written down sometime before A.D. 1263). According to this saga, Bjarni operated a trading ship that made annual trips between Iceland and Norway. He settled down every winter in Iceland with his father, but when he got there in A.D. 986 he learned that his father had sailed off to Greenland with Erik the Red. Bjarni decided to sail there, but due to conditions at sea he missed Greenland; continuing northwest, he spotted a land level and covered with woods—presumably Labrador; sailing on northward, he spotted another similar land—presumably Baffin Island [VII]. He did not go ashore but turned back and, sailing eastward this time, found Greenland. There he is said to have told Erik the Red of his sightings, suggested further exploration, and even to have lent his ship to Leif Eriksson to retrace his voyage. Except for the claim that he continued to make trading voyages to Greenland for the next fourteen years before settling in Norway, nothing more is known of Bjarni. But if there is any truth to this story, Bjarni Herjolfsson deserves to be known as the first European to report a sighting of continental North America—making him, in effect, the European discoverer of the New World.

IN THEIR OWN Words

The First European to Sight North America?

They [Bjarni Herjolfsson and his crew] put out [from Iceland for Greenland] and sailed for three days before losing sight of land. Then their following wind died down and north wind and fogs overtook them so that they had no idea which way they were going. This continued over many days but eventually they saw the sun and could get their bearings. They now hoisted sail and sailed that day before sighting land and debated among themselves what this land could be. To his way of thinking, said Bjarni, this could not be Greenland. . . . After this they sailed for two days before sighting another land. . . . In his opinion, this was no more Greenland than the first place . . . they turned their prow from the land and sailed out to sea three days . . . and then they saw the third land, and this land was high, mountainous and glaciered . . . they held on along the land and came to see that it was an island.

—THE SAGA OF THE GREENLANDERS, WRITTEN DOWN CIRCA A.D. 1200

Brendan was a historic figure, an Irish Catholic priest known as Saint Brendan of Ardfert and Clonfert. Born near Tralee, County Kerry, he was ordained a priest in 512, and during his life he traveled around Ireland, Wales, and Iona and founded several monasteries and churches. He enters the story of North America by way of a fifteenth-century Irish book, The Book of Lismore (in turn said to draw on much earlier works), which claims to contain a true account of Brendan’s voyages to lands far to the west and north. Most authorities are content to accept that he may have traveled around the coast of Ireland, to islands off Scotland, or even as far as Iceland, but there have always been some people who insist that he made his way to North America—in some versions alone in a small hide-covered boat, in other versions in a large wooden ship with a crew that numbered anywhere from 18 to 150. In the several versions that survive, Brendan reaches an island or island group that is warm and lush, and since this would not describe the islands of the northeastern Atlantic, some people have concluded from this that Brendan had reached some point along the coast of North America. Even earlier than the written accounts is a map of 1275 associating Brendan’s name with the so-called Fortunate Isles, generally agreed to be the Canary Islands off the coast of northwest Africa. A 1339 map then assigns his name to the Madeira Islands, also off northwest Africa, and in the next few centuries Brendan’s name is linked to various islands, real and imagined, all over the Atlantic. By the 1500s San Brandan Island is being located off the coast of northern Newfoundland. This led to modern claims that Brendan went ashore in North America and traveled well into the interior as a missionary. It hardly seems necessary to say that serious scholars reject all such claims.

There are no contemporary illustrations of Saint Brendan, but this 1621 woodcut captures the fanciful and exaggerated notions that surrounded the story of his sailing across the Atlantic to North America.

IN THEIR OWN Words

Saint Brendan Arrives in North America?

Then getting down from the boat they saw a spacious land with apple trees bearing fruit. While they were there it was never night. They took as many of the apples as they wanted and they drank from springs, and then for forty days they wandered over the land but they could not find an end to it. A certain day they came to a great river flowing through the middle of the island. Then Saint Brendan told his companions, We cannot cross this river, and we will never know how big this island is.

—VOYAGE OF ST. BRENDAN, WRITTEN DOWN IN THE NINTH CENTURY

Bristol, England

A port city in southwestern England at the confluence of the Avon and Frome Rivers, founded in the eleventh century and chartered in 1155, Bristol was already a flourishing seaport and trading center in 1245, when engineers improved the harbor by diverting the Frome and building a stone quay, known for centuries as the key, for seagoing vessels.

The original name, Brygstowe, means place of the bridge. The city lay eight miles from the estuary of the Severn up the narrow, difficult-to-navigate Avon. The river flowed through a rocky gorge; the tides, with a rise and fall of twenty-one feet, were among the world’s greatest in range, and tidal currents in the Avon moved with powerful, potentially destructive force.

Yet by 1400 Bristol had become England’s second-most-important seaport; in time, the phrase shipshape and Bristol fashion became a byword for maritime quality and attention to detail. Voyages to Iceland probably commenced before 1425. Columbus [II] may have sailed in Bristol ships in an alleged voyage to Iceland in 1477.

Bristol developed into an outlet for the export of Cotswold wool; an importer of dried fish, wine, olive oil, salt, and fruit; and the center of a triangular trade between England, Iceland, and the Iberian peninsula. By 1450 Bristol mariners were regularly involved in trade with the Portuguese cities of Oporto, Lisbon, and Faro. As the fifteenth century advanced, conflict with Icelanders and competition with Denmark prompted Bristol merchants and fishermen to begin looking elsewhere for trade. Although the city, with a population approaching ten thousand, prospered in the 1480s and 1490s, the Iceland trade entered a period of steep decline. Bristol sought new routes and opportunities, among them a shorter ocean passage connecting Europe to the spice markets of Asia.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the possibility that a voyage underwritten by Bristol investor Thomas Croft sighted Newfoundland in 1481, eleven years before Columbus reached America. In this account, sailors from Bristol then told some Spaniards about this new land, and they in turn passed on the word to Columbus; all of this is based on a misreading of the letter ascribed to John Day. Very likely Day’s remark was based on another questionable claim, namely that a Bristol shipmaster, Thomas Lloyd, had discovered Newfoundland while sailing the Atlantic in 1480 in search of the Isle of Brasil, or one of the other reputed but imaginary islands off to the west. Most serious scholars reject all such claims, but Bristol merchants and mariners would still play a significant role in the early explorations of North America.

The industrious, ambitious citizens of Bristol were open to investing in anything that promised a profit and—already heavily involved in commerce with various European countries—they would be quick to see the opportunities for trade in the newly discovered Americas. The object of John Cabot’s [III] voyage of 1497, however, was to discover a better route to the Indies. Sailing from Bristol, he mistook cold, remote, sparsely populated Newfoundland for Cathay at first, but his error led to the first English presence in the New World, and his disappearance (he perished on his second voyage in 1498) did nothing to discourage the search for the Northwest Passage [VII]. The Bristol-based Anglo-Azorean Syndicate, initially comprised of two Bristol merchants and three Portuguese Azores Islanders, evidently sponsored several voyages, probably in search of a passage through North America, in the early years of the sixteenth century. According to historian David B. Quinn, King Henry VII partly financed at least one of the ventures, the voyage of 1504.

Little evidence of these explorations survives. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison speculates that the controversial Oliveriana Map, probably produced in Florence between 1504 and 1510, contains evidence of a voyage toward Newfoundland in 1501 or 1502. He cites place names on the map that appear nowhere else. Morison also cites Henry VII’s household records—one of which, dated January 2, 1502, shows that the king gave five pounds to men of bristoll that found th’ isle, presumably Newfoundland. Other documentary evidence records gifts from the merchaunts of Bristoll that have been in the newe founde lande, including hawks and an Egle, among other items.

Bristol’s interest in discovery waned later in the sixteenth century. The city’s Society of Merchant Venturers, established in 1552, vigorously pursued trade and profits but proved less aggressive in seeking out new lands.

Celts

Among the many candidates proposed as the earliest visitors to North America, perhaps none have been more strongly promoted than the Celtic peoples. According to the proponents—the most prominent being Barry Fell, a Harvard marine biologist who published several books arguing that numerous peoples had visited North America before Columbus [II]—about 1000 B.C. Celtic mariners sailed across the Atlantic and made their way to New England. There these Celts established a kingdom they called Iargalon, Land Beyond the Sunset in Celtic. They built villages and temples, raised Druids’ circles of standing stones, and buried their dead in marked graves. Beyond such remains that Fell and others find at scores of sites throughout New England, other parts of the Northeast, and as far west as Oklahoma and Colorado, they find inscriptions using Ogam, the ancient Celtic alphabet. These Celts, according to the proponents, although related to the Celts of Ireland, were more closely tied to the Celts of the Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal); based on this connection, the proponents then contend that the Iberian Celts in the New World had also welcomed their Phoenician and Basque neighbors from the Mediterranean. These Celts and Phoenicians are claimed to have made frequent trips to and from the New World, carrying furs, metals, and other valuables back to the Old World. But although the proponents of the Celtic presence produce scores of Celtic and Iberian-Punic inscriptions in the New World, they have never demonstrated the presence of any artifacts of Old World derivation in the New World, nor vice versa. On the other hand, they claim that scores of free-standing stones and stone structures found in the Northeast (e.g., Mystery Hill, New Hampshire) were placed there by Celtic peoples.

Located near Salem, New Hampshire, is a complex of freestanding stones and stone structures–the one pictured is called the Oracle Chamber–that the owners call Mystery Hill and America’s Stonehenge. Although their exact nationality is left somewhat open, the original builders of the site were allegedly pre-Columbian visitors to North America.

John Day was a late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century English merchant with a somewhat shadowy, even dubious, reputation. He is known to have been in Bristol during at least part of the early 1490s, but by about 1500 he was in Spain, where he had long been conducting trade. In 1956, there was discovered in the archives of Simancas, Spain, an authentic letter from John Day, addressed to El Señor Almirante Mayor, almost certainly Christopher Columbus [II]. This letter from Day, composed apparently during the winter of 1497–1498, describes in considerable detail John Cabot’s first voyage to North America. But in the course of it, Day claims that this same point of land [found by Cabot] at another time was found and discovered by those of Bristol . . . and is presumed and believed to be the tierra firma which those of Bristol discovered. Although some scholars have been willing to believe that Bristolmen got to North America before Columbus, few accept this. The Day letter, however, remains a valuable document regarding the early voyages to the New World. Incidentally, a map he refers to as accompanying his letter has never been found.

IN THEIR OWN Words

A Bristolman Writes of a Pre-Columbian Visit to North America

You will note that he [John Cabot] did not go ashore save at one place of tierra firma, which is close to where they made the first landfall . . . and they found big trees from which masts of ships are made . . . and the land was very rich in pasturage . . . and along the coast they found many fish of the kind that in Iceland are cured . . . and it seemed to them that there were cultivated lands where they thought there might be villages, and they saw vegetation whose leaves appeared fair to them. . . . It is considered certain that this same point of land at an earlier time had been found and discovered by those of Bristol.

—LETTER FROM JOHN DAY TO COLUMBUS, 1497

disputed claims for pre-Columbian contacts

Ever since Europeans first came to the Americas, there have been claims that others from outside the Western Hemisphere (aside from the Norse of circa A.D. 1000, that is) made contacts with this region before the voyages of Columbus [II]. (For the moment, we shall not even impose the strict boundaries of North America on this discussion, although in fact many of the claims do not directly involve this continent.) If it is all too easy to accept such claims, it is equally all too easy to reject them out of hand. It is better to be willing to at least look at such claims objectively and apply the same rules of evidence that are required for all historical events.

IN THEIR OWN Words

The Jaredites Come to America circa 3000 B.C.

Which Jared came forth with his brother and their families . . . from the great tower [of Babel] at the time the Lord confounded the languages of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth, and according to the word of the Lord the people were scattered . . . and it came to pass that they did travel in the wilderness and did build barges in which they did come across many waters being directed continually by the hand of the Lord, and the Lord would not suffer that they should stop beyond the sea in the wilderness but he would that they should come forth even unto the land of promise, which was choice above all other lands which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people.

—THE BOOK OF MORMON

In their appropriate alphabetical locations elsewhere in this section, the claims made for the following peoples are examined: Africans, Asians, Celts, Egyptians, Greeks, Irish, Libyans, Muslims, Norse, Phoenicians, and Welsh.

But before considering any such claims, it seems necessary to establish a few ground rules for inclusion in an encyclopedia of exploration of North America. To rate entrance here, some link, some relatively tangible contribution, to geographic discoveries and knowledge is required. This link should be traceable in one of two regions: back in the region where the individuals originated (thereby contributing to geographical knowledge there of this New World) or in the region of North America where they made contact (and thus advancing knowledge of and in the New World itself). And no matter what the soundness of the claims for pre-Columbian contacts, such links are essentially always missing. Seldom do the proponents of the various pre-Columbian peoples argue that their discoveries were known to, let alone recorded by, their home cultures. And seldom do they propose that these pre-Columbian peoples contributed to, or advanced geographic knowledge, within the Western Hemisphere. In fact, almost all claims for contributions made by these pre-Columbian peoples fall under the rubric of cultural influences (such as religion, arts, and crafts), linguistics and alphabets, technology and science, and biological (that is, physical characteristics or botanical species). Perhaps the major exception to this would be any maps that are believed to incorporate knowledge from pre-Columbian visitors; in a few such instances, proponents contend that these maps contributed to the body of knowledge about the New World (although here again, it is seldom North America that is involved). (See Piri Reis map.)

IN THEIR OWN Words

Scandinavians in Canada in the Bronze Age

Woden-lithi of Ringerike the great king, instructed that runes be engraved. . . . A ship he took. In-honor-of-Gungnir was its name. For ingot copper of excellent quality came the king by way of trial.

—BARRY FELL’S TRANSLATION OF MARKS ON PETERBOROUGH STONE (PETERBOROUGH, ONTARIO), WHICH HE CLAIMS ARE SCANDINAVIAN RUNES OF CIRCA 1700 B.C.

Another distinction should be made. In addition to those who claim that various individuals or groups arrived in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus, there are others who insist that the Amerindians themselves are (at least to some degree) descendants of peoples other than the Asians accepted as their forebears by most authorities. Most reputable authorities consider these latter claims to be so totally unsubstantiated as to be essentially pseudoscience.

For the record, some of the groups that have been proposed by serious individuals as settlers before and alongside those recognized today as Native Americans are Atlanteans (i.e., from the Lost Continent of Atlantis), Assyrians, Basques, Canaanites, Catalans, Celts, Chinese, Cro-Magnons, Etruscans, French, Gauls, Greeks, Hindus, Huns, Irish, Israelites (i.e., The Lost Tribes), Jaredites, Nephites, Lamanites (the Mormons’ candidates, originally from ancient Israel or Palestine), Koreans, Lemurians (survivors of the lost continent of Mu), Madagascans, Malinke (Mandingoes), Portuguese, Romans, Scythians, Spanish, Tartars, Trojans, and Welsh. Although all these peoples have been promoted—some as contributing to the ancestry and culture of Amerindians, some as living apart and becoming extinct—in virtually no instance has it been claimed that they contributed anything to the geographic knowledge of North America.

Egyptians

The claim that ancient Egyptians visited the New World is largely based on alleged similarities between Egyptian pyramids and Mesoamerican temple mounds. But there are a few individuals who claim that a script used by the Micmac and other Algonquian Indians of southeastern Canada and northern New England is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. One of the chief proponents of this claim was Barry Fell, a Harvard marine biologist who devoted many years and several books to his linguistic analyses of alleged pre-Columbian scripts found throughout North America. To account for what he insisted were Egyptian hieroglyphics, Fell claims that Egyptian astronomer-priests visited North America about 800 B.C. and traveled about introducing Egyptian rituals and other aspects of Egyptian culture. In particular, Fell insists that a calendar stele found in Davenport, Iowa, in 1874 has Egyptian writing on it (along with writing in the Ibero-Punic and Libyan scripts). Fell’s claims are not accepted by most authorities in this field of study.

The Mississippian Mound culture phase, which existed throughout the Mississippi Valley all the way from the gulf to Minnesota between about A.D. 1000 and 1700, was distinguished by its large earthen pyramid mounds such as this one at Winterville, Mississippi. Some people insist that such mounds attest to the presence of ancient Egyptians.

His real name was Eirik Thorvaldsson, but he gained the nickname from his red hair, which was said to be matched by the proverbial hot temper. He was born in southwestern Norway about A.D. 950, and while he was still a youth his father took him and his family off to Iceland because of some killings, according to the sagas. On Iceland, Erik had only poor land until he married the daughter of a prosperous landowner; again, more quarrels and killings led to his being declared an outlaw, and he was banished for three years. Instead of returning to Norway, he decided to seek out islands that previous Norse voyagers had reported lying to the west. About 982 he took his ship, family, and crew and set out; whatever those islands were, Erik sailed on to make landfall at an unknown landmass. He continued to explore along the coast of this land until he came to its southwestern shores and found some relatively hospitable land. He returned to Iceland to organize a colonizing expedition, and in order to encourage people to accompany him, he named this new place Greenland.

About 985 he led an expedition of some twenty-five ships and several score of people back to Greenland (although only fourteen ships made it all the way). Once ashore near the tip of southwestern Greenland, Erik chose a prime locale as his property; the Norse colony quickly took hold and even spread to a second locale about three hundred miles up the coast to the north. Erik presumably served as the chief lawspeaker of the colony—what we might think of as the premier—and although he seems to have resisted Christianity, his wife did convert and had a small church built near their farmstead. Erik remained the colony’s leader until his death about A.D. 1003. Although he was most likely a difficult man, Erik the Red probably deserves credit for being the first identifiable European who deliberately sailed to, and colonized, the Western Hemisphere. He was also the father of the Leif Eriksson, who, it is now generally accepted, led the first landing of Europeans on the mainland of North America.

Greeks

Apparently the first serious proposal for the ancient Greeks as pre-Columbian visitors came from American Harold S. Gladwin, who, in his superficially reasonable Men Out of Asia (1947), claimed that after the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.), members of his fleet commanded by Admiral Nearchus sailed eastward and, gradually picking up scores of people from India and Southeast Asia, arrived on the shores of Central America. From there they dispersed north and south, and they and their descendants allegedly introduced most of the advanced cultural elements (e.g., metallurgy, textiles, pottery) to the primitive Mongoloid Paleoindians in North America. These people from the Mediterranean have been proposed as the bearded white men found in the legends and myths of Middle and South American Indians. Meanwhile, at least one amateur student of pre-Columbian North America claims to have found evidence of an ancient Greek presence in the languages of New England Indians. Serious scholars do not accept any claims about ancient Greeks having been present in the New World.

Greenland

Although most North Americans probably do not think of it as part of their history or environment, Greenland, the largest island in the world, belongs to North America by virtue of its geological connection to the tectonic plate known as the Canadian Shield (whereas its close neighbor, Iceland, belongs to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge). Most of Greenland is covered by an ice sheet, ice caps, or glaciers; there are no forests; prevailing cold winds and ocean currents make it even more inhospitable. However, Paleoeskimos had been living there since as early as 2500 B.C.; they came over from the Arctic lands to the west in a series of migrations. Scholars cannot be sure which group of Eskimos was present when the first Europeans settled there, some believing they were Dorset Culture, others arguing they were the later Thule Culture. Whoever these first visitors and settlers were, they stayed close to the coasts and did not contribute to later knowledge of the island.

Although it is believed that the Norse had sighted Greenland by about A.D. 875, the first Europeans to come ashore were Norse from Iceland, led by Erik the Red, about the year 982; it was he who is said to have named it Greenland so as to attract fellow Norse colonists to this rugged land. In any case, Norse from Iceland and Norway soon settled there, and by about A.D. 1100 there were possibly as many as 6,500 Norse living in Greenland. They clustered in two regions: The one known as the Eastern Settlement was located at what we today regard as the southwestern tip of the island; the Western Settlement was located about three hundred miles to the north of that, along the western coast (and only some five hundred miles from the mainland of North America). There is no evidence that these early Norse explored Greenland much beyond their coastal settlements; indeed, they never knew exactly what the land’s actual dimensions or boundaries were as they never sailed around it; in fact, for several centuries, maps would depict Greenland as an extension of the continent of Asia.

The Norse had enough to do just to survive: They set up farms to grow grain; They tried to maintain cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; they hunted—seals, polar bears, caribou, foxes; but surprisingly, there is little or no evidence that they fished. In the end, some combination of factors caused the decline, and then the closing out, of this phase of Norse settlement during the late 1400s; some evidence suggests that their attempts to impose their familiar crops and animals onto the land led to its devastation and so they were driven to starvation. Although European mariners occasionally put in to Greenland during the 1500s and 1600s, it would be 1721 before a Norwegian Christian missionary, Hans Egede, established a mission and trading center on Greenland. This next phase of the island’s history belongs to the story of Arctic exploration. It can be argued that the first settlement links Greenland more to Europe than to North America, but the first Norse of Greenland have a special place in history because it was they who set off to explore the unknown sea and land to their west and in so doing were probably the first Europeans to reach the North American mainland.

Helluland

According to The Saga of the Greenlanders, the medieval Norse account of Leif Eriksson’s first trip to what came to be known as Vinland, the first land he sighted west of Greenland was nothing more than rock and glaciers. Leif and his crew named it Helluland, Norse for slab-land. It is believed that this is what we today know as Baffin Island [VII]. Scholars feel virtually certain that the Greenland Norse continued to visit Helluland in the centuries after the end of the Vinland colony; the name Helluland survived on some maps until well into modern times, although the English renamed it after the Englishman who explored that region between 1612 and 1616, William Baffin [VII].

Any account of pre-Columbian exploration by Western Europeans must recognize the role of this Portuguese prince, even though he himself never sailed on any expedition. Henry—to the Portuguese, Infante D. Henrique—was the third son of King John I of Portugal; his mother, Philippa, was the daughter of the English Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. Henry was not drawn to court life so he moved to Sagres, on the coast of Cape Vincent, the southwesternmost point of Portugal. There, about 1420, he set up a research institute that drew scholars, mariners, and map-makers, mostly from Portugal but also from other European nations. Here some worked on developing better ships and navigational instruments, compiling all that was known of the new discoveries beyond Europe and incorporating this information in maps. Others set forth on exploratory voyages, and Henry’s expeditions deserve credit for revealing much of the coast of west Africa and for reaching the Madeiras, the Azores, and the Cape Verde islands. At least one of Henry’s expeditions—that of Diego de Tieve and Pedro de Velasco, in 1452—set off in search of islands reputed to be far off across the Atlantic, but they ended up finding only the westernmost of the Azores. Although there are claims that some Portuguese reached the Caribbean during Henry’s lifetime, there is no hard evidence that any of his expeditions sailed to, let alone returned from, the Western Hemisphere. There is no denying, however, that the support Henry the Navigator gave to explorers would greatly contribute to the eventual opening up of the New World to Europeans.

IN THEIR OWN Words

The Portuguese in New England

Miguel Cortereal by Will of God, here Chief of the Indians, 1511

—ALLEGED INSCRIPTION IN PORTUGUESE ON DIGHTON ROCK, MASSACHUSETTS, ACCORDING TO EDMUND DELABARRE (1936)

Irish

Although presumably descendants of the ancient Celts described earlier, the medieval Irish referred to here differ in their time frame and in the nature of their alleged contacts with the New World. The claims of the Irish monk Saint Brendan have also been examined. But there are claims for still other Irish in North America. Starting in the late seventh century, hundreds of Irish clerics and laypeople sought refuge in Iceland, the former from the controls of their Roman Catholic superiors, the latter from Viking raids. By the late ninth century, however, when the Vikings showed up in Iceland, the Irish fled, and according to several of the Norse sagas, many of them made their way to Greenland or Vinland (and even to the Carolinas, according to one scholar). No Irish artifact of this era, however, has ever been found in North America.

L’Anse aux Meadows

This is the one site in North America that has been accepted by virtually all scholars as evidence that the Norse reached North America (beyond Greenland, that is) before 1492. It is located on the northern tip of a region of Newfoundland known as the Great Northern Peninsula. As the French word anse (bay) indicates, the site is on a small bay (today known as Épaves Bay). The English word meadows might seem to refer to the relatively flat and grassy terrain adjacent to the water, but this does not seem to be the case: Most authorities claim it is merely the anglicization of the French word méduse (jellyfish); a more recent claim is that although it is a French word, it refers to an actual French ship, Medée, that put in to the bay some centuries ago.

In any case, local residents of this part of Newfoundland had long known that there were buried remains on this site, but they assumed they belonged to an Eskimo people. As early as 1837, the Danish scholar Carl Rafn was alleging that the Norse had in fact landed on the shores of North America, as stated by the sagas, but he could not provide any specific evidence. Then in 1914, William A. Munn, a Newfoundland businessman and amateur antiquarian, published a booklet claiming that the Vikings had landed at, or near, the site of L’Anse aux Meadows. In 1956, Danish archaeologist Jørgen Meldgaard did some excavating about twenty miles from L’Anse aux Meadows but found nothing.

It is now firmly established that the Norse spent about ten years circa A.D. 1000 at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Based on the foundation remains and other evidence of construction materials and methods, the Canadian government has reconstructed the largest of the sod communal houses and one of the smaller houses.

Then in 1960, Norwegian explorer/researcher Helge Ingstad and his wife, Anne Stine, a trained archaeologist, came to Newfoundland seeking remains of Norse settlers; they were directed to this particular site by a local man, George Decker. Ingstad and Stine began to excavate here in 1961 and almost immediately uncovered what they realized were remains of a Norse settlement. In the years that followed, they and other archaeologists uncovered the foundations of structures and various other artifacts (a soapstone spindle-whorl, a bronze pin, etc.) that establish the Norse presence. Based on the old Norse accounts, the site is regarded as probably the one established by Leif Eriksson about the year A.D. 1000 in the land he called Vinland. If this was the site described in the sagas, it is known that the Norse made at least two more serious efforts to settle here, and it is assumed that the Norse did not erect all the structures the first time; in any case, only the foundations survive. The main buildings are two great houses similar to Norse dwellings in Greenland; the larger is seventy by fifty-five feet. The walls were turf and stone fill, a total of six feet thick; the roofs were of timber covered with sod; inside the great halls were hearths and benches, and around the central hall were small rooms. There were also smaller houses outside the two larger structures, and each of these had a central hearth. There is also evidence that they had crude ironworks, with a forge, to make items such as nails from the bog iron, a crude metal that precipitates from minerals in water and collects in the roots of the bog vegetation.

Other finds excavated over the years suggest that this site may have served as something of a trading station, possibly a collection point for goods acquired by Norse farther south to be trans-shipped to Greenland and other Norse settlements to the east. According to the accounts in the sagas, the Norse traded, but also fought, with the natives, whom the Norse called skraelings, a term of contempt meaning something like barbarians or weaklings or even pygmies; they may have been Amerindians or possibly ancestors of today’s Inuit people. Exactly when and why the Norse abandoned this site is not known, but it would appear to fit into the sagas’ story of Vinland, which means that it was abandoned after only some ten to twenty years. In 1978, the site, with its excavated remains, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As his name indicates, Leif was the son of an Erik—Erik the Red. He was born in Iceland only a few years before his father took the whole family off to Greenland. According to two of the Norse sagas, Leif visited Norway in A.D. 999 and was charged by King Olaf Tryggvason with introducing Christianity to Greenland; sailing back, he was blown off course and ended up discovering new lands to the west; he landed and brought back timber, grapes, and other valued produce. This is almost certainly an apocryphal story, designed to enhance Leif’s image and Christianity’s role. In the other main saga, Leif was inspired by the tale of Bjarni Herjolfsson’s chance sightings of lands to the west; in this account, Leif actually sailed in Bjarni’s ship and retraced his route west. Considering that his father was a restless, intemperate, and acquisitive man, however, we need not look far to understand why Leif may have been quick to want to seek new lands. It would have been about the year A.D. 1000 when he took one ship with its crew off to the west. Exactly where they landed and how long they stayed ashore cannot be proven for sure, but the strongest candidate for at least his base camp remains L’Anse aux Meadows.

IN THEIR OWN Words

Leif Eriksson Lands on Newfoundland and Names It Vinland

They sailed toward this land and came to an island which lay to the northward off the land. There they went ashore and looked about them, the weather being fine, and they observed that there was dew upon the grass, and it so happened that they touched the dew with their hands and touched their hands to their mouths. And it seemed to them that they had never before tasted anything so sweet. . . . They afterwards determined to establish themselves there for the winter, and they accordingly built a large house. There was no lack of salmon there either in the river or in the lakes, and larger salmon than they had ever seen before. . . . They slept the night through and on the morrow Leif said to his shipmates: We will now divide our labors, and each day will either gather grass or cut vines and fell trees, so as to obtain a cargo of these for my ship. They acted upon his advice, and it is said that a second boat was filled with grapes . . . and when the spring came they made their ship ready and sailed away; and from its products Leif gave the land a name, Vinland.

—THE SAGA OF THE GREENLANDERS, WRITTEN DOWN CIRCA A.D. 1200

Almost certainly Leif sailed along the coast to the south, either to the eastern coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia or the eastern coast of the continental mainland—possibly even some way up the St. Lawrence River [II]. How long they stayed is also uncertain, but on his return, Leif told about such natural resources—meadows for grazing animals, great trees for ships and housing, and above all, grapes for making wine—that he named it Vinland. For whatever reason, Leif never returned there, but instead left it to his two brothers, first Thorvald, then Thorstein, to return. Leif would have been a prosperous landowner and had family obligations, even political power (as his father died about 1003 and he became the chief lawspeaker). It was enough for Leif to give his support to the subsequent voyages. (In fact, Thorstein failed to reach Vinland, and it was his widow, Gudrid, and her second husband, Thorfinn Karlsveni, who conducted the third, and most ambitious, expedition there.) If his father deserves to be known as the first European to have colonized the Western Hemisphere (that is, Greenland), then Leif Eriksson deserves to be known as the first European to have explored continental North America.

Libyans

Claims have been made that ancient Libyan inscriptions have been found in isolated locales throughout the United States. This Libyan language is said to be derived from the Coptic Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, and Nubian languages. Some even go so far as to claim that the Zuni Indians’ language and some elements of their culture are derived from the Libyans who settled in that region. Barry Fell tends to combine the presence of Libyans with Egyptians, dating both to about 800 B.C. Most authorities in this field reject such claims by Fell and others.

maps

The history of exploration is essentially inseparable from the history of maps. Certainly this seems true when it comes to the Europeans’ explorations and discoveries in North America.

When the first Europeans set off across the Atlantic—whatever their goals—they would have had no maps with correct distances or geographic features. This holds true no matter which Europeans one prefers to believe were the first. Even if one accepts the Vinland Map as authentic, the people responsible for providing its details could not have had such a map when they first discovered those details. But aside from the disputed Vinland Map, it has been generally accepted that there is no evidence that the early Norsemen who sailed back and forth between Scandinavia and Greenland—and at least three times to Vinland—contributed anything other than verbal accounts to early European mapmakers. This view has been challenged, however, by James Robert Enterline, a serious student of cartography, who makes a case for pre-Columbian Norse having gained knowledge of at least northeastern North America’s terrain through their contacts with the Inuit and then having passed this on to medieval map-makers. Enterline argues that details in the coastline of what these pre-Columbian mapmakers depicted as Arctic Asia actually correspond to features on the Arctic coast of North America. It remains to be seen how widely accepted Enterline’s claims become.

What the fifteenth-century Europeans who set off across the Atlantic did have were maps often filled with mythical islands and lands, as well as outright errors in distances and details. Above all, they had maps that showed no great landmass between Western Europe and Eastern Asia: Although they did believe that the earth was a sphere, they continued to believe that there was essentially one great landmass surrounded by the one Ocean Sea. If you set off from the one coast (Europe) of that great landmass, you would cross that ocean to reach the other coast (Asia) of the same landmass. At least since Ptolemy in the second century A.D., this had been the view of most people in the Western world.

Accepting for the moment that Columbus [II] was the first from the Old World (since the first Norse, that is) to complete a round-trip to the Western Hemisphere, he had available a certain amount of information. There were several of the mappamundi (world maps) and many portolan charts (coastal navigational charts) he would have known, but none that depicted the New World he would reach. There were also maps that Columbus did not know about, specifically the 1427 map by the Dane Claudius Clavus, which depicted Greenland as a large promontory of Asia extending into the ocean. There are stories about Columbus’s having different maps to guide his voyage—one from Spanish or Portuguese sailors who had been blown ashore in the Caribbean about 1483–1484 and returned, or a map sent to Columbus (about 1474) from the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli. Serious scholars, however, do not accept either of these claims. What is known is that Columbus essentially accepted the representation of the world as drawn from Ptolemy.

By coincidence, the oldest globe still extant was also made in 1492, by Martin Behaim, a German who had long lived in the Azores and for a time was keeper of the Portuguese king’s map room. Behaim knew about many maps and charts then available to the Portuguese, and he incorporated this information on his globe. It is possible that Columbus knew Behaim, but Columbus had gone off to Spain by 1488, and there is no evidence that he was in touch with Behaim by 1492. In any case, Behaim’s globe simply represented the conventional version of the world before Columbus’s voyage—namely, one landmass in one Ocean Sea: anyone who sailed west would arrive at Japan or other islands off Asia and/or the edge of the great continent itself.

When Columbus returned from his first voyage in March 1493, his discoveries were almost immediately publicized in the letter he wrote to his