The European Discovery of America

What Hacker News says

1. cafardSep 2021
   'I have "serious reservations" about it--the polite scholarly term for saying that you suspect fakery.... Not one of the Danish and Icelandic scholars who I consulted at Copenhagen in May 1969 believes the Vinland Map to be genuine, although they have every national and sentimental reason to accept it as such.'

   Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, notes to Chapter III, "The Norsemen and Vinland".

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2. ilamontSep 2021
   This is a great summary of the analysis of the map over many decades. Before the map surfaced in the 1950s, there were other maps that portrayed "Vinland" extending to New England. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Harvard Professor Eben Norton Horsford and his daughter made maps, gave talks, and even built monuments to the supposed Viking presence in the Boston area (one of them, a stone tower, is located less than a mile from my home). They were not taken too seriously:

   Despite an apparently courteous reception by the American Geographical Society, among scholars Horsford has far more detractors than supporters. Critics take him to task for dubious linguistic analysis, wildly expansive readings of an ancient Norse saga, speculative analysis of early maps, and fanciful interpretations of archeological remains along the Charles. Samuel Eliot Morison puts the point crisply: “In his imagination, every colonial ditch or paved cow-yard in that region became Norse.” (European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, p.67)

   https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/norumbega-and-vinland-o...

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3. cafardDec 2020
   Francis Parkman mentions this derivation in his account of Cartier's explorations, in Pioneers of France in the New World. I mention this because Parkman's histories are quite readable, if overwritten.

   I find that Samuel Eliot Morison's The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, instead derives it from caignedatze, an Iroquoian word for red copper, or any metal other than gold.

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4. ZanyProgrammerApr 2016
   Of course a famous Norwegian thinks Columbus is Scandinavian! I'm reminded of the phrase Samuel Eliot Morrison used in his books on the European Discovery of America-"Scandinavery". Its about as realistic as the "runes" discovered in the midwest in the late 19th century. There's a bit of a cottage industry in the US of various ethnic groups either claiming Columbus was really one of their own, or claiming that some other ethnic group (theirs, coincidentally!) actually discovered America.
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5. cafardJan 2016
   I noticed yesterday in S.E. Morison's The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, a mention of a book of exploration (mostly toward the far north, apparently), Inventio Furtunata (or Fortunae), mentioned in a letter to Columbus from an English merchant. At the time Morison wrote, nobody had been able to find the book or a clear account of it.
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6. cafardNov 2012
   In Samuel Eliot Morison's _The European Discovery of America_, he has an early chapter on "Flyaway Islands and False Voyages". He remarks on how long some of these lasted on the charts, after regular shipping routes went past or "over" them. Of course, navigation was less precise in the days before Loran and then GPS.
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