Columbus: Fact vs. Fiction report - Order Sons of Italy in America

Columbus: Fact vs. Fiction
FICTION: COLUMBUS DID NOT DISCOVER THE AMERICAS. THE VIKINGS DID.
FACT:
In 1950, a map surfaced in Europe that shows the “Island of Vinland” in the northwest
Atlantic Ocean. The map’s text in Medieval Latin explains that Leif Erickson and his Vikings
found Vinland in the year 1000 A.D.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., dates the map’s parchment to around
1434 A.D. – nearly 60 years before Columbus’s first voyage. But when researchers at London’s
University College used a laser technique to test the map’s ink, they found it contained a
chemical substance called anatase, which was not synthesized until 1923, proving that the map is
a forgery.
Did Columbus “discover” America In every significant way, he did. Even if others
visited the continent sporadically before he did, their voyages had no historical significance.
Columbus's voyages, however, marked the end of thousands of years of isolation between the
Western Hemisphere and the rest of the world. The recorded history of the Americas and the
Caribbean starts with Columbus.
Columbus’s voyages contributed to the emergence of the modern world, in making it
possible for the first time in history for all people to be in contact with one another.
FICTION: COLUMBUS FOUND SOPHISTICATED NATIVE CIVILIZATIONS.
FACT: Most of the native tribes Columbus found were hunter-gatherers who engaged in
bloody tribal wars and, in the case of the Arawaks, Caribs and Canibs, slavery, torture and
cannibalism.
To survive, the native populations depended on “slash-and-burn” cultivation of the land
along with hunting, fishing and collecting edible wild plants, seeds and shellfish. They had no
written language, history or literature. In their struggle for survival, these peoples were not the
environmental exemplars they are mistakenly portrayed today as having been.
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