Facebook Twitter Pinterest

The European pioneers of America can be considered:
The first people who settled in America are Native Indians who crossed there about 30 thousand years ago from Asia along the Bering Land.
In the 10th century, around 1000, the Vikings led by Leif Eriksson. L’Ans-o-Meadows has remnants of a Viking settlement on the continent.
In 1492 – Christopher Columbus ( Genoese in the service of Spain ); Columbus himself believed that he had opened the way to Asia (hence the names West Indies, Indians )
In 1507, the cartographer M. Waldzemüller proposed that the open lands be called America in honor of New World researcher Amerigo Vespucci – this is considered the moment from which America was recognized as an independent continent.
There are reasonable grounds to believe that the continent was named after the English patron of arts Richard Amerike from Bristol, who financed the second transatlantic expedition of John Cabot in 1497, and Vespucci took for himself the nickname of the continent already called. In May 1497, Cabot reached the shores of Labrador, becoming the first officially registered European to set foot on the North American continent. Cabot made a map of the coast of North America – from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. In the Bristol calendar for that year we read: “… on the day of St.. John the Baptist [June 24] found the land of America by merchants from Bristol, who arrived on a ship from Bristol with the name “Matthew” (“metik”) “.
Hypothetical
In addition, hypotheses were made about visiting America and contact with its civilization by navigators to Columbus, representing various civilizations of the Old World. Here are just some of these hypothetical contacts:
in 371 BC er – Phoenicians
in the 5th century – Hui Shen (a Taiwanese Buddhist monk who traveled to the country of Fusan in the 5th century, identified by different versions with Japan or America)
in the 6th century – holy Brendan (Irish monk)
in the XII century – Madog ap Owain Gwynedd (Welsh prince, according to legend, visited America in 1170)
there are versions according to which at least from the thirteenth century America was known to the Knights Templar
in 1331 – Abubakar II (Sultan of Mali )
OK. 1398 – Henry Sinclair (de Saint-Clair), Count of Orkney (ca. 1345 – ca. 1400)
in 1421 – Zheng He (Chinese researcher)
in 1472 – João Corterial (Portuguese)