Long before Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492, the Americas were a land of speculative arrivals and whispered encounters. Medieval European legends, fueled by biblical mysticism, spoke of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel crossing oceans to vanish into the New World—a myth later embraced by early colonists seeking to explain the origins of Native peoples. Far more tangible were the Norse sagas, which chronicled the exploits of Erik the Red, an outlaw from Iceland’s rugged fjords who founded Greenland’s Viking settlements in 985. His son, Leif Erikson, sailing from the family’s base at Brattahlíð, reached Vinland (modern Newfoundland) around 1000 AD, establishing a short-lived settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. Meanwhile, Erik’s fiery daughter Freydís—whose story straddles history and legend—allegedly fought off Skrælings (indigenous peoples) while pregnant, brandishing a sword in a scene straight from Norse epic.
Yet the most scientifically grounded pre-Columbian voyages were those of the Polynesians, whose celestial navigation and double-hulled canoes likely brought them to South America by at least the 12th century. Evidence abounds: Chilean sweet potatoes (kūmara), genetically linked to Polynesian varieties, and pre-Columbian chicken bones in Peru matching Pacific fowl suggest sustained contact. Even Basque whalers from the Pyrenees and Bristol fishermen from England’s Atlantic coast may have secretly harvested the rich cod banks off Newfoundland decades before Columbus. The Basques, Europe’s seasoned mariners, had long hunted whales in the North Atlantic, while Bristol’s merchants—eager to bypass Mediterranean trade monopolies—likely kept their knowledge of western fishing grounds quiet for competitive advantage.
These scattered threads—mythic, economic, and accidental—paint a hemisphere already flickering at the edges of the Old World’s consciousness. Columbus didn’t “discover” America; he was merely the first to turn speculation into a conquest that would reshape the globe. The true history of the Americas is one of many footfalls, some lost to time, others etched in saga or science—waiting to be remembered.
(Fun footnote: Leif Erikson’s voyage was preserved in the Saga of the Greenlanders, but it took a 1960s archaeological dig in Newfoundland to prove it wasn’t just Viking bravado.)