Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
memory as well as some degree of imagination. But he was supposed to have remarked, “I have not told
half of what I saw.”
Although there had been contact between Europe and China for centuries, Polo's account, translated in-
to many languages, whetted the Europeans' mercantile appetite for expansion and domination of this trade
with the East. It was that trade that gave the impetus to the Portuguese to find a sea route around Africa,
as well as to Christopher Columbus's ambition to find a western sea route to the vast storehouse of riches
that Marco Polo had described.
Who Did “Discover” America?
Picture a day on the moon in the year 2250. (Please realize that this is not far off from 2013 in the spectrum
of history dealt with in these pages.) The Japanese-German consortium's lunar colony is preparing to cel-
ebrate the bicentennial of the founding of the colony. There will be big parades and huge sales at the inter-
stellar mall, all in commemoration of the first earthlings to land on the moon, in the year 2050.
But a small band of sign-carrying dissidents—members of the menial American drone class—is
protesting the event. They want the colony to recognize the first people to land on the moon, the Americans
who did so way back in 1969. They are dismissed as a band of crackpots by the mass media who note that
even if Americans had landed on the moon—a preposterous notion given their low social standing in the
year 2250—they started no colony and left no other indelible impression of having been to the moon.
Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus sailed from Cape Palos, Spain, and into the pages of
myth and history, his name excites extraordinary passions. The recent celebration of the five hundredth an-
niversary of Columbus's first voyage in 1492 reopened a boisterous debate over Columbus's accomplish-
ment and his rightful place in the history topics.
But even to use the word
celebrate
in the same breath as the name Columbus invites controversy. One
Native American group received substantial press coverage when they celebrated Columbus Day in 1991
as the anniversary of the last year
before
Columbus arrived in America. In Berkeley, California, October
12 is officially no longer Columbus Day. City officials there have instead determined to call it Indigenous
People's Day in honor of the societies that flourished before Columbus arrived. (Somehow it's tough to
think about running down to the department store for the Indigenous People's Day coat sales!)
Just about everyone, save for a few holdouts like the Knights of Columbus and the Sons of Italy, agrees
that Christopher Columbus did not discover America, as generations of children schooled in a folk-tale
version of history once believed. Much of the legendary Columbus story came from the imagination of
the famous American teller of tales, Washington Irving. But there is still considerable confusion about
what exactly Columbus did discover and whether someone else “discovered” the New World well before
Columbus.
Some historians have argued that yes, they did. It is possible, judging from a ship's bell found off the
coast of California, that Chinese or Japanese boats, driven by winds, could have reached the shores of
America. And ancient Roman coins have been found in South America, again presumably left by sailors on
a lost, wind-driven vessel. Perhaps the most famous of the pre-Columbian discovery theories came from
Thor Heyerdahl of
Kon Tiki
and
Ra
expedition fame. A Norwegian anthropologist, Heyerdahl has conten-
ded that sailors from Egypt or Phoenicia reached South America or Mexico and built the pyramids there.
Another scholar who has argued for an African discovery of America is Professor Ivan Van Sertima.
In his topic
They Came Before Columbus,
he primarily relies upon artifacts and sculpture from South and
Central American cultures that resemble African counterparts to support his theory. While intriguing, these
theories have problems. The first of these is the possibility that different cultures make the same devel-
