

Should we credit Columbus?

A painting of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus by Sebastiano Del Piombo. (AP photo)

Happy Columbus Day, everyone. Personally I don’t care for this holiday too much, as I feel like its the day that marks the white man’s imperialistic destruction of the Native American tribes that once filled this land. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to be living in this country, and I consider myself lucky to have been brought up here, but the idea of what happened hear many years ago still makes me sore.

However, should we really credit Columbus for discovering the Americas? It seems that recent discoveries would point towards the idea that Columbus may not have actually been the first person to discover the New World. A newly discovered Chinese map dating back to 1418 reveals that the Americas may have been explored by earlier settlers. The Chinese, as it would seem, and possibly other Asian cultures may have actually settled in North and South America decades before Christopher Columbus ever set sail. British historian Gavin Menzies, the discoverer of the map, claims that it was credited to Chinese explorer Admiral Zheng He, one of the most famous explorers in Chinese History.

This is a very controversial discovery that has the potential to rewrite history, especially given Menzies’s claim that Columbus may have actually had a copy of this map as a reference when setting sail across the Atlantic. In his new book “Who Discovered America,” Menzies describes his claims, and how he, with his teams of historians came to the conclusion that the map found in an 18th-century library was written during the Ming Dynasty, 70 years before Columbus set sail.

Other claims that the Vikings discovered the Americas around the year 1000 are commonly taken into consideration when debating the discovery of these continents. Nearly 500 years before columbus, it is theorized that a group of Scandinavians looking for new land had discovered the Americas. Fleets led by Lief Eriksson, or possibly his father, the notorious Erik the Red (sometimes changing depending on the story) wound up in a gorgeous place named Vineland after leaving from Iceland. It is widely believed that this land was most likely somewhere in North America.

Vince Marcellino, Cobleskill-Richmondville