Debunking The Myth About Christopher Columbus’ Discovery Of America

Columbus was born in 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, today part of Italy. His father, Domenico, was a prosperous fabric merchant who dealt in woven goods. He also owned a stall selling cheese, where his young son is said to have helped out.

Columbus first went to sea when he was just ten. Then, after a family move to Savona in 1470, he sailed on a Genoese vessel under the auspices of René of Anjou, a French prince who held various royal titles during his life. The ship’s mission was to attempt the seizure of the Kingdom of Naples.

Columbus continued his travels around Europe in the ensuing years, eventually landing in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1477. According to some accounts, he arrived there after being shipwrecked due to a pirate attack off Portugal’s coast.

The problem with the old Silk Road could be bypassed by traveling on the sea. That journey, though, seemingly involved sailing right around continental Africa. But what if a route that crossed the Atlantic to Asia could be found instead?

Columbus needed financial backing to test the theory that the Orient could be reached by traversing the Atlantic. To this end, he approached the Portuguese king, John II, in 1485. But the King’s advisers examined the proposal and declared it impractical.

The search for funding continued with many other rejections. Then Columbus tried Spain, where Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon had married and jointly ruled various parts of the country.

Eventually, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand agreed with the explorer to fund the trip. And the “Capitulations of Santa Fe,” as the contract was called, gave him precisely what he wanted.

So, after years of dreaming and scheming, Columbus finally set sail from the Spanish port of Palos de la Frontera with three vessels on August 3rd, 1492. After stopping at the Spanish-ruled Canary Islands, the small fleet crossed the Atlantic westwards.

Columbus and his men had made land on one of the islands in what we now call the Bahamas. Although exactly which one is unclear. The Europeans then met the islands' indigenous inhabitants, including the Arawak people.

Of his golden discovery, Columbus wrote in his journal, “[The islanders] ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion.” He also revealed his plans to take six Arawak back to Spain “in order that they may learn our language.”

Ominously, Columbus added, “These people are very simple in war-like matters… I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.” This did not bode well for the future of the island inhabitants. In fact, within 60 years, one of the indigenous peoples, the Tainos, was reduced from some 250,000 to just hundreds.

After making a final landing on Hispaniola — today an island divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic — Columbus decided it was time to return to Spain. One of his three vessels had been shipwrecked in the Caribbean, so the remaining two set sail. The journey wasn't easy: two fearful storms knocked the vessels around the sea like pinballs.

The first of those, in September 1493, saw him return to the Caribbean. He dispatched 500 indigenous people back to Spain as enslaved people on this journey. They were meant as a gift for Isabella I of Castile, but appalled, she sent them back. Her thinking wasn't entirely pure, though: The monarch believed that any people from newly discovered territories were, by definition, Spanish subjects and not to be enslaved.

Today, of course, Columbus Day is celebrated every October 12th in parts of the U.S. and some other countries. The day marks the explorer's first sighting of land and likely contributes to the myth that Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas. But if we ignore the other unsavory aspects of Columbus' legacy for a moment, was he really the first man to lead an expedition to the New World from the Old?

Many modern historians believe that Columbus didn’t discover the Americas for Europe. It was, it seems, Leif Erikson, an actual Viking. The evidence points to Erikson reaching North America and setting foot on it. This is something, need we remind you, that the Italian explorer never did. Columbus only made it to South and Central America.

With the passage of more than 1,000 years, many details about Leif Erikson's life are uncertain. As best we know, he was born in Iceland sometime around 970 or 980 A.D. He went by other names during his lifetime, but the one we like the most is Leif the Lucky.

Erikson’s father was Erik the Red, and his mother was Thjohild. Erik the Red had moved to Iceland with his father, Thorvald Asvaldsson after Asvaldsson was exiled from Norway for killing a man. Erik the Red was then banished from Iceland, so he landed in Greenland, founding a settlement there in 986.

Perhaps inspired by stories Erikson had heard from his father about mysterious lands to the west, Leif Erikson set sail from Greenland around the year 1,000 A.D. And we know this thanks to two Norse sagas written a few hundred years later. They are called the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders.

Both sagas record Erikson’s journey to what the Norsemen later called Vinland and what we today know as Canada. One claims that the Viking arrived there having been blown off course returning to Norway. The other asserts that he knew exactly where he was going, having heard tales of undiscovered lands from Bjarni Herjolfsson.

Whether Erikson got there by accident or design, he did something that Herjolfsson did not. He landed on Vinland. The Viking swiftly named the area Helluland, which translates as the distinctly unpoetic but perhaps accurate “Stone Slab Land.” Modern historians speculate that this location may have been modern-day Baffin Island.

Exploring this new territory, the Norsemen were seemingly impressed by its abundance. In particular, they noticed the grapes growing there. This gave them the notion to call the place Vinland, meaning Wine Land.

Erikson did not make multiple trips to Vinland like Columbus centuries after him. It seems he spent the winter in this new land and set sail for him. And after returning to Greenland, Erikson never again made the journey to Vinland.

However, although these Vikings continued to visit Vinland, they never seemed actually to move there. This is puzzling since the Canadian environment was much more inviting than Greenland's harsh, even barren conditions.

Much of the story of Erikson’s discovery of North America comes from Norse sagas. However, those were written centuries after the event and are not necessarily dependable. They are supposed to be adventure stories, after all.

That evidence comes in the shape of archaeological finds on the Canadian coasts. One of the best-known sites is L’Anse aux Meadows on the shores of Newfoundland, and it holds the key to this story. In 1960, a Norwegian explorer, Helge Ingstad, along with his archaeologist wife, Anne, made a spectacular find there.

Of course, this site doesn’t give any direct evidence about Erikson’s exploits in Vinland. But it does prove that the Vikings set foot in Canada and even perhaps settled there for a time. It also shows that this happened some 500 years before the explorations of Christopher Columbus.

So, while Columbus made some extraordinary journeys to the Americas, he was emphatically not the first European to land in North America. However, he did set the scene for colonizing the continent, first by the Spaniards and later by other Europeans.

Vikings did exist, of course, and back in the day, their terrifying raids were all too real. A new study has shown, though, that these marauders' genetic makeup is quite different from what we’d been led to believe.

Take it from Professor Eske Willerslev, who led that study. He’s the director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre in Copenhagen, so he knows his stuff. And Willerslev has explained just how vital his findings are.

So, how did we get to this point? A team of scientists from Denmark and England have been working on Viking DNA analysis. Specifically, they looked at genetic material extracted from the remains of 442 people found in Viking cemeteries.

And the analysis results have thrown up some groundbreaking conclusions about the Vikings. Yep, it seems we’ll have to think again about these fierce warriors, as much of what we know about them has turned out to be false. But there are some tidbits about the Vikings that are still true.

Long ago, the Vikings invaded Lindisfarne – also known as Holy Island. The raid was particularly shocking because Lindisfarne was the site of one of the oldest Christian monasteries in England. A monk called Aidan founded this holiest of places in 635 A.D.

Alcuin wrote, “Pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of saints like dung in the streets.” That had to be terrifying to witness. And even centuries later, the raid was remembered. A chronicle from the 12th century, Historia Regum – or History of the Kings – includes an entry about the attack.

So, that stereotype about the Vikings is true – up to a point, anyway. It’s also correct that they came from Scandinavia – the northern European countries we know today as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

The Vikings were actually pretty innovative, too. They mastered the art of propelling their boats with sails rather than oars alone and improved the hulls of their ships by using overlapping boards. The end result was fast-moving vessels that, crucially, could land on beaches.

One theory is that lack of resources drove the Vikings into pillaging. Fertile land was limited, and as the population increased, fields became increasingly cut up into sections until there weren’t enough agricultural acres. Or perhaps traders came home after their journeys, telling of wealthy countries overseas.

That Viking wave of terror became more established in the 850s when raiders began spending winters in France. They also camped in Ireland and the southern part of England. While using their coastal settlements as bases, they pushed their influence inland. Eventually, the Vikings built fortified harbors in places such as Dublin in Ireland.

The raids finally petered out in the 11th century, but not before the Vikings put one of their own on the English throne. That man? King Canute. You may remember him as the guy who managed to stop the tide from coming in. Well, sort of. That’s almost certainly a tall tale, but what is true is that the Vikings had now become an integral part of life in Europe.

But while the Vikings themselves are now long gone, the mythology surrounding them remains. You’ve probably seen depictions of these fighters in movies and TV shows and read about them in novels. They’ve even infiltrated opera. Yep, Richard Wagner, we’re looking at you. The German composer’s operatic classic Der Ring des Nibelungen glorifies the Vikings and their warlike culture.