HC-66,
Box 11014
Crystal,
NV 89048
Approx. 1,033 words
© Copyright 1999
By
William E. Lopez
“In fourteen hundred and
ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”
Every school child knows the rhyme. We honor the discovery of America by celebrating Columbus Day each October 12th. Our nation’s capitol is named the ‘District of Columbia.’ Still, for generations, myths and folk tales have hinted that Columbus may not have been the first European to voyage to the New World. Some historians would like to credit Norwegian explorers as the first to arrive in what would become North America. Some would give credit to St. Brendan and Irish monks. Other researchers have their own theories.
In 1961, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife Anne Stine Ingstad found that Thorvald Ericsson, brother of Lief Ericsson, led an expedition of thirty sailors to the new world in 1004 AD. That’s nearly 500 years before Columbus made the famous voyage we now celebrate. In 1010 AD, another Norseman, Thorfinn Karlsefini, began a colony in Nova Scotia with 160 men and women.
Although the Vikings were strong warriors the natives of the new land outnumbered them. They gave these people the name skraelings, which means savage or wretch. We came to know these people as Indians. After just one year, the Viking settlers returned across the North Atlantic, but not before the first European child was born in America. He was a boy named Snorri.
Columbus is celebrated as the discoverer of the Americas because he left detailed writings, maps, and drawings of his voyage, even though he personally never set foot in North America. Columbus made several voyages to the New World, but landed only among the islands of the Caribbean.
The only records left by the Vikings were songs and stories called sagas. It took the discovery of ruins and artifacts in Nova Scotia, an eastern province of Canada, to prove that these sagas were fact and that Vikings arrived long before Columbus.
Other folk tales exist, yet remain unproved. There is the Irish tale of Saint Brendan and a small group of monks said to have sailed to the New World in a leather skinned boat called a curragh sometime before 600 AD. In the 1970’s, a group of adventurers constructed such a vessel, accurate in every historical detail, and recreated the voyage of Saint Brendan. They did not prove that the legend of Saint Brendan was fact, but they did prove that vessels in existence at that time could have made such a voyage.
Another famous explorer and writer is Thor Heyerdahl. He found legends among the South American Indians of ‘fair-skinned, red-bearded’ sailors who arrived from the East many, many generations earlier. Could these have been seamen from the Middle East, or the Mediterranean? Could this be a link between the pyramids of Egypt and the pyramids of the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca civilizations?
Heyerdahl thought so. He traveled to the Middle East and began construction of a reed boat. Made of papyrus reeds, this type of boat was used by Egyptians along the Nile River thousands of years ago. Similar boats are still in use today in some locations of South America. After a failed attempt aboard his first boat, the RA, Heyerdahl built a second boat named RA II and made a successful voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to South America.
Such a voyage could have been made. The Egyptians and Phoenicians of the time were wide-ranging mariners. Herodotus, a Greek historian, writes they had already circumnavigated the continent of Africa in a three-year voyage about 600 BCE (Before Christian Era). It wouldn’t be until 1488, more than two thousand years later, that the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Diaz would become the first European to round the tip of Africa.
The ancient historian Eratosthenes wrote that the Egyptians carried on trade with India. Using papyrus boats much like the RA, they voyaged as far as the island of Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka. Why not then trade also in the New World? They certainly had the capability of voyaging to South America, a relatively shorter and calmer voyage than sailing around Africa in the frigid and stormy waters of the Cape of Good Hope.
Is this why pyramids in South America and Egypt are so similar? Does this explain why both Egyptians and South American Indians worshipped the sun god? The Egyptians had knowledge of working in gold and copper. So did the early Indians. Did Egyptians teach them?
Gene Savoy is an adventurer and explorer from Reno, Nevada. In 1989, after years of work in South America, he claims to have discovered remains of ancient writings very similar to those found in Biblical lands and times. His theory is that Indian mines in South America may be the lost mines of King Solomon, as mentioned in the Bible.
Some scholars and historians agree with the discoveries of Gene Savoy. Others don’t. If Egyptians or Phoenician sailors did voyage to South America and shared their science and technology with the Indians, why didn’t they leave traces of man’s simplest and most useful invention, the wheel?
Each year science gives historians and archeologists new techniques, such as carbon dating and DNA analysis, to test old theories and verify new findings. In 1992, the German forensic toxicologist Dr. S. Balabanova, of Munich, discovered traces of tobacco and cocaine in Egyptian mummies and other ancient remains from Europe, Asia and Africa. Tobacco and cocaine are not known to have existed in the ancient world. Yet all the evidence indicates that these substances were in use long before Columbus made his first voyage to the New World. Do these findings prove that Heyerdahl and Savoy are correct in their theories? Did ancient mariners bring tobacco and cocaine from South America where it is known to have existed at that time?
It is now known for certain that Columbus was not the first European explorer to land in the New World, but simply another Johnny come lately. We may never know who that first adventurer was. All that we can be assured of is that Christopher Columbus had a better publicity agent!