It's Colombus, I mean...Leif Erikson Day?

What if I told you that everything you knew about Christopher Colombus was wrong? Well, thankfully that's not the case, except what you learned about him discovering America!

In the August of the year 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus left the docks of Spain and set sail for the west. His mission was to find an easy route to Asia. People had warned him not to go on this voyage because it was common knowledge at the time that the earth was flat – if Columbus sailed too far west, he'd sail right off the earth! Thankfully, Columbus proved everyone wrong when he landed on the shores of the America's. He was the first person ever to discover it. So we celebrate his discovery every 12th of October to commemorate his voyage of adventure and exploration.

That's the typical story we've all heard in school, but I found out something very interesting this Columbus Day: most of the story is a flat-out myth! While it's true that Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who sailed from Spain in 1492, he didn't discover the Earth was round and he wasn't the first one to reach America. After learning this, I felt betrayed by all those history books I read during grade school.

To learn more about the truth about Christopher Columbus' “discovery”, my trusty, junior photographer, Daniel P. Smithwater and I went to Animal Adventures Inc.'s very own historian (and newest resident) Aanisah the Aldabra giant tortoise. Her species naturally can get to be quite old; indeed, quite possibly the oldest known reptile on earth is named Jonathan. He's believed to have been born in 1832, making him 183 at the time of publishing. Aanisah doesn't break the record, at only 150, but she still has required quite some knowledge about the world in her time. (We'll be doing a full article about her in two weeks, so stay tuned!) Upon asking Aanisah about who first discovered North America, she was quoted for saying, “Many people believe Christopher Columbus was responsible for making that revolutionary discovery, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. In fact, the first people to make it here were clans that arrived here during the Ice Age, about 4,050 years ago. They came here from from Russia, migrating across the Beringia land bridge that formed when the water level was several hundred feet lower at that time. They were probably following the herds of animals they commonly hunted – reindeer, musk ox, woolly mammoths...just to name a few species. These were the ancestors of modern Native Americans.”

So we know Native Americans (well, not Native Americans themselves because they weren't “native” to America yet, but their ancestors) were likely the first people to reach the Americas. But Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover it, right? “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” Aanisah exclaimed as I tried to jump to conclusions. “Christopher Columbus wasn't the first European to reach America either, not by a long shot! A much better candidate for one of the first European to find American shores is Leif Erikson.” Aanisah explained to me that Leif Erikson was an Icelandic explorer who was born in 970 in Iceland of Erik the Red, founder of the Norse settlement Thjodhild in Greenland. “He and other vikings around his time sailed to and explored Vinland (that's the area of coastal North America and Newfoundland) around the year 1000 AD, some 500 years before Columbus 'discovered' America. Other vikings are known to have explored the area as well. Other Europeans might have landed in America before Erikson, but Leif Erikson and his crew are the first ones that we know for sure walked upon American shores.”

“And Christopher Columbus didn't make the discovery that the earth was round, not flat, either,” Aanisah added. “A round earth wasn't news to the people of that day. Even people back in the days of Aristotle, during the 4th century (quite some time before Jesus entered history), it was well understood that the earth was shaped like a sphere.” It turns out that the myth of the flat earth myth seems to have come about from Washington Irving's 1828 biography about Christopher Columbus. In the biography, Columbus' trip was viewed as extremely dangerous by people at the time because they believed in a flat earth. In truth, there wasn't a single knowledgeable person of Aristotle's time who didn't believe in a round planet.

So this year, I learned that the old wisdom rings true: don't believe everything you read. Having learned that Christopher Columbus didn't really discover America, I have to wonder, is it worth celebrating Columbus Day at all?

“Indeed it is,” Aanisah assured me. “Christopher Columbus did one thing that the vikings failed to do: he shared the knowledge of the New World to the other Europeans. And that's why we celebrate Columbus Day all these years later, and will continue to do so for a long time to come.”

Written by: Mr. Smiley
Photographer: Daniel P. Smithwater
Edited by: Christian Ryan

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