COLUMBUS WAS LAST

                It is highly unlikely that Christopher Columbus was the first to sail to North America.  Here are some claimants to the discovery of a new continent.

1. The Vikings came possibly five times starting in the 900’s. The most famous of these explorers was Leif Ericson.  He landed somewhere in Canada and even attempted to establish a colony.  Hostility from the skraelings (Indians) caused the failure of the settlement.
2. In 1472, Danish navigator Deitrich Pining claimed to have sailed west and sighted a land mass in the year 1472. His report encouraged King Alfonso of Portugal and King Christian I of Denmark to sponsor a joint expedition to find a passage to the Far East.  Captains Johannes Scolp and Joao Corte Real explored Labrador, Hudson Bay, and the St. Lawrence River, but found no passage.  Thus, the expedition was considered a failure and there was no follow-up.  Apparently, being unsuccessful, it was not publicized.
3. The Chinese have their claims. Around 2,540 B.C., two astronomers corssed the Bering Strait and sailed along the west coast of North America all the way to Central America.  In 458, a Buddhist priest named Hui Shun, using information from the two astronomers, followed the same path to reach Mexico.  He supposedly stayed over 40 years.
4. Around 550, St. Brendan of Ireland sailed across the Atlantic in a leather-hulled boat called a ‘curragh”. He was gone for seven years and claimed he had sailed along a coast of a land he called “The Land Promised to the Saints”.  Historians have been skeptical, but in 1977 an Irishman named Timothy Severin constructed a curragh and replicated the voyage.