Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester

was a man whose motives seem to have been directed to the general good and who left no legacy of harm, passes largely unremembered, little memorialised. True, there has been since 1964 an annual and presidentially proclaimed Leif Eriksson Day to honour the contributions of Nordic people to the United States. Minnesota and Wisconsin were the first to observe it, by closing some offices, and with some local merchants offering discounts. But in all other respects the American nation remains largely mute and oblivious to the Norsemen. Most Americans prefer pizza, as someone put it, to lutefisk.

      It seems a peculiar misreading of history, one that performs a small and nagging injustice to the long story of the Atlantic Ocean. Matters are changing, though slowly. Perhaps in time a wise counsellor will accept the inequity and will publicly suggest some measure of right by moving to limit the excesses of the one memorial and to restore to its proper degree the unsung other. But one has to doubt it.

      Perhaps the reason for this lies less in Italian chauvinism and Nordic modesty, and more in the one undeniable reality: that though Leif Eriksson got to North America first, he never truly realised he was there. Nor did he suppose that he was anywhere of particular importance. One might argue that he just didn’t get it. As the historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once put it: “What is remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while without discovering America.” And so their reputation has suffered for the lack of ambition of their wanderings, for their lack of vision, ever since.

      …

      And there is always one further question that niggles away at critics of colonial adventuring and white hegemony. Is it conceivable that the pre-Columbian peoples themselves, the original inhabitants of the Americas, ever tried to head out east across the ocean, to Europe? Could any of these - the Caribs, say, or the indigenous Newfoundlanders or Mexicans — have made the journey that Eriksson and Columbus eventually made, but in reverse?

      Circumstantial evidence hints at the possibility, certainly. Tobacco leaves and traces of coca in Egyptian sarcophagi. A sculpted bronze head in the Louvre, said to be Roman of the second century AD, and which displays features uncannily similar to those of Native Americans. Mosaics from near Pompeii with images of objects that resemble pineapples, chilli peppers, and lemons. And the suggestions — made with varying degrees of enthusiasm by a small army of competing translators — that Christopher Columbus encountered a husband and wife from the Americas, in of all places Galway, Ireland, in 1477. Whether he met them socially, or saw their corpses, or merely heard of their existence, remains tantalisingly unclear.

      “People from Katayo came to the east,” wrote one of the translators of the marginal scribbles Columbus made in a history text that he was known to have read. “We have seen many notable things, and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman on some wood dragged by the storm, of admirable form.”

      But could a couple have survived, in a dugout canoe - for that is the kind of craft most Caribs appear to have been using at the time the Europeans first saw them - for a journey that crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean, from the Americas to Ireland? The Gulf Stream might have carried them — it carries all manner of flotsam with it. But they would have sailed with it at a mere three knots — a total of fifty days of sailing to reach the Irish coast, and with neither food nor fresh water to sustain them. It seems highly doubtful that they came to Ireland by accident; and if it was by planning and design, which is the only possible manner in which any transatlantic voyage could reasonably be made, then one suspects that there would have been others who tried to follow them, that there would have been more artefacts of their journeying found, more evidence that such a voyage had happened.

      And none has ever turned up. The champions of the theory that Native Americans reached Europe by sea are as vocal as they are passionate, but thus far the arguments remain thin. The balance of probability suggests that it was Europeans - northern or southern — who sailed across the Atlantic first.

      9. REALISATIONS

      In a matter of months after the death of Christopher Columbus in 1506, three men — a Tuscan from Chianti who at one time or another was a sailor-explorer, a pimp, and a sorcerer; and the two others simply solid German cartographers from Freiburg — put the requisite two and two together and gave formal birth both to a continent that would be called America and to a recognizably self-contained ocean called the Atlantic.

      Columbus had found only the vaguest adumbrations of a continent-sized landmass. He had encountered, charted, and colonized hundreds of tropical islands, as well as a subequatorial coastline that sported rivers big enough to suggest that they drained something rather larger. But in all of his voyages he had found no real evidence of a great land that was large enough to block westward passage on all the navigationally available latitudes.

      But then towards the turn of the century news started to trickle in from other explorers that hinted that such a body might exist. John Cabot, for instance, had almost certainly landed in eastern Newfoundland in 1497, reporting back to his sponsors in Bristol on the presence of a large landmass. Then two Portuguese brothers, Miguel and Gaspar Côrte-Real, reached a variety of points also on the northern coast, and on their return to Lisbon in the autumn of 1501 suggested - and for the first time by anyone - that the land they had just encountered in what are now the Canadian maritime provinces might well be physically connected to the landmasses already discovered to the south - the body of land we now know as Honduras and Venezuela.

      A somewhat inelegant little map had also started to confirm the gathering suspicions of the educated European public. It had been drawn in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, a Cantabrian pilot who had twice accompanied Columbus and who would make five further voyages to the New World - only to be murdered by natives with poisoned arrows in 1509, on the Atlantic coast of Colombia near Cartagena. But his map, held today in Madrid’s naval museum, lives on; it was the first ever made that displayed a representation of the New World - an edge-to-edge border of territory on the map that lay far to the west of Europe. It was marked by an enormous concave embayment, with the lands found by Cabot on its northern side, those found by Columbus and company to the south (and all of the territory, thanks to the Treaty of Tordesillas,¹⁶ supposedly Spanish). But no names were offered on the map, either on the landmass or on the sea.

      That was to happen just seven years later, in 1507. It took the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller to fasten the name America onto what now even more clearly was a newly recognised continent. Waldseemüller and his poetically inclined colleague, Matthias Ringmann, did so despite a welter of confusions, deceptions and falsehoods that have intrigued scholars and occupied writers for centuries, because of a vastly popular booklet they had lately seen. This slender book, truly more of a pamphlet, was known as the Mundus Novus, and together with a subsequent brief document known as the Soderini Letter, was purportedly written by Amerigo Vespucci, the colourful Italian explorer and sorcerer (and in later life the aforesaid pimp) who appears to have been the very first to claim from his own navigational evidence that the great body of land in the west was in fact a separate continent, the fourth part of the world.

      The Mundus Novus is a prolix, flamboyant, and in detail quite unreliable work, thirty-two pages long, printed and written in Latin, addressed initially to his Medici sponsor and then published in 1503 simultaneously, like the opening of a modern feature film, in many cities around Europe. Printers in Paris, Venice and Antwerp saw to it that Vespucci’s graphic descriptions of his sailing adventures along the coasts of what we now know to be Guyana, Brazil (where he was the first European to enter the mouth of the Amazon), and perhaps even Patagonia, enjoyed a massive circulation.

      The book was indeed wildly popular - helped no doubt by Vespucci’s loving discussions of the cosmetic self-mutilation, anal cleanliness and sexual practices of the people he met along the way. It was a book that not only gave him personal immortality: it also led to the explosion of European interest in the New World and the beginnings of a rolling tide of exploration and immigration that one might fairly say has not abated since.

      The crucial sentence in Vespucci’s pamphlet stated simply that “[on] this