Something Completely Different

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From Edge of the World to Leader of the World:
Trollheart's History of the United States of America


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I heard some snide little jibes when I started doing the history of England, to the effect of "why aren't you doing the history of the greatest country in the world, Trollheart?" To which I answer smugly, "I already am doing the history of Ireland." Then I remember Ireland is kind of a shithole, and the smile goes from my face.

But seriously folks, this was always on the cards. If there's one country that has an amazing - chequered and in some cases shameful - history (but then, what country does not?) it's the United States of America. In terms of being an actual country, or at least a recognised one, it's the youngest of the three we're doing here, though of course as a landmass it's existed as long as either of the other two. But in terms of being, shall we say, colonised, it was only discovered - by white men at least -  a little over half a millennium ago, yet it has managed to, as it were, pack a whole lot of history into that five hundred-odd years. But if you're expecting this history to kick off with a certain ship sailing from a certain rock, or even with the shout of "Captain Columbus! Land ho senor!" then you're going to be disappointed, because, despite what we've tried to do to erase it, America as a landmass had a rich and glorious history before an Italian explorer stumbled across what he believed to be the West Indies, and like all my histories, this one will go back as far as it is possible to do.
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I will freely admit, I have a lot of contempt for Americans. Well, for some. The prevalent idea that there is almost no world beyond the coast of North America, held by a large percentage of the population, annoys me, as does their insistence on rearranging the spelling of simple words with the laziness of a child who can't be bothered to learn how to spell. I mean, how hard is it to spell doughnuts, or night, or tyre? But those are personal niggles with me, and if, as an Irishman, I can write a faithful and not-too-biased history of England, you can rely on me to be as impartial as I can with this one.

Well, mostly.
:shycouch:

In some ways, many ways in fact, America as a country is quite a phenomenon. From pretty humble beginnings (historically anyway) as a rebel colony taking on the might of their powerful master to the world's number one superpower in less than two hundred years is nothing short of remarkable, and the indelible mark it has left on the world - not always for the better, it has to be said - is irrefutable. Germany coming back from the ashes of defeat in two world wars and rising to all but control Europe's finances, or Japan rebuilding after literally being bombed out of existence are both amazing feats, but the inexorable rise to power of the United States has all the hallmarks of a poor boy claiming his birthright as king at the end of a fantasy novel. Whether that boy is Aragorn or Sauron depends, I suppose, both on your politics and your morals, but nobody can deny it's been one of the great comebacks. For a country which was sneered at by King George III and expected to be pounded back into submission, the USA has bucked the trend and indeed turned the tables, with Britain (its empire all but gone, the sun finally set on its dominions) now very much reliant on and subservient to the power of America, as indeed is pretty much all of the world.
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I can't say for certain (will have to check) but I believe America may have been the first country to have had a president as its head of state. In a time when kings, queens and emperors ruled, America placed ordinary men, with no noble heritage or great claim on power, in the highest office they had. And more, the new colony was, I think I'm right in saying, the first modern country where power did not proceed along lines of inheritance or bloodlines. Just because George Washington was president did not mean his son (if he had one) was next in line. In fact, down through history very few members of the same family have held the office, with only two presidential dynasties springing to mind - the Kennedys and the Bushes - and it's become a position anyone can hold, regardless of their experience in politics or, as we've seen recently, their relationship with reality.

America is of course responsible for some of the worst genocides in human history, but while I will in no way be shying away from talking about them, I would be doing the country and its inhabitants - and its ancestors - a grave injustice were I not to accept that the USA has also been instrumental in advancing the course of human life, more so than any other country since England and the Industrial Revolution. Love it or loathe it, take it or leave it, America, like all countries, has its good and its bad, and very definitely its ugly too, and we'll be looking at all of them in turn. To put it in American terms, this journal will attempt to be as bipartisan as possible, though I can't promise there won't be times when I'll berate one side or the other. However I will do my best to share the blame, and there's a lot of blame to go round. A lot of credit, too, and we'll be exploring that as well of course.
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As ever, if anyone takes offence at what I write, that's really your problem and you can suck it. Everything here will be properly researched (see my very long list of source material in the next post) and I won't be making anything up. If you can't live with the fact that your ancestors did questionable things, tough: I've had to face up to a lot of shame about how my Irish forefathers behaved, and I have. History doesn't play favourites, and while it may be written by the winners, what's written, to paraphrase the opening of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is usually mostly true.  Sometimes the winners seem to think the atrocities they committed are justified, and have no problem telling the world, and generations of schoolchildren about them. I can admit to being somewhat unsympathetic to America, but I do not hate the country; if I did, I would have no business writing its history, nor indeed would I have any interest in doing so. I think it has an amazing history and am looking forward to chronicling it.

Despite what a certain, rather large percentage of the population would like to think (and I said this about England too) America is not a white country, and the people who live there are not the original inhabitants. The only "pure" or "true" or "real" American either lives on a reservation now or at least belongs to a tribe. Everyone else is, like it or not, an immigrant. So maybe those who seem to think they're "keeping America pure" by growling about "immigrants" would do well to look back into the history of the country they profess to love so well. Perhaps one day there will be a Native American president, which would finally go some way to atone for what we as white people have done to their people, though given how long it took to get a black man into the White House, I'm not exactly holding my breath.
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But snarky rhetoric and accusations aside, there's a lot to love about America. A lot. It has some amazing people, has been home to some of the world's greatest thinkers, musicians, artists, writers and of course leaders; it has some of the most breath-taking scenery in the world, and it's an undeniable truth that without the assistance of America (and Russia) World War II would not have been won by the Allies. Of course, on the other side of the coin we have a once-disregarded part of French Indochina, not to mention most of the Middle East. But we'll get into all of that. We'll also be asking how a country that prides itself on being the "land of the free" can have been one of the last to abolish slavery of fellow human beings, and indeed, had to go to war to resolve that. But hey, they gave us Springsteen and Prince, and Carl Sagan and Jackie Mason, Jackson Pollock and Jackson Browne, The Eagles and, oh yeah, baseball. :rolleyes:

In its comparatively short history America has been the hope of the world, the bully of the world, the saviour of the world, has gained the sympathy of the world and the enmity of the world, and most recently the shame of the world. Now this young nation stands at a crossroads, like a child with power he doesn't understand and can't control, trying to decide on the right path to take. One leads forward, to the healing of the nation and acceptance of all races, the repair of divisions and the long road back to being the foremost voice speaking out for democracy and truth and freedom(I said speaking, doesn't mean they did what they said); the other leads back, back into the dark and distant and troubled past, back to prejudice and hatred and racism, and ultimately into isolationism, fear, suspicion and xenophobia.
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Even with, to put it in very simplistic terms, the evil king deposed and the good king on the throne, which of these directions America will choose or be forced to take is a question that cannot be answered yet; the country is divided today as never before, and for the first time in history, or at least the first time since Germany in World War II, not only is there a battle between ideologies and faiths and politics and races, but between truth and reality. A massive percentage of the population - nearly seventy-five million Americans - have fallen for what has become known as The Big Lie perpetuated by ex-President Donald Trump and his cronies, and  having been led to the edge of the precipice like the devil at the end of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, are now in danger of tumbling headlong over it into oblivion, darkness, paranoia and hatred, while the man who enticed them to the lip of the cliff sits back and laughs.

How did it ever get to this, you might ask? Let's go back to the beginning, and try to find out.

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Part I: Happy Hunting Grounds: America the Beautiful, Before the White Man

Chapter I: Spirit Guides in the Land of the Free: The True Founding Fathers

God, the Man Maker, opened his oven and looked at the white clay figure he had made in dismay. "This white man is too pale," he moaned. "I did not leave the clay in the oven long enough. I must try again." The second time though he fell asleep and when he opened the oven the clay figure had burned. "Oh no," he sighed. "This black man is no use to me. I will try one more time." This time he sat watching attentively. When he opened the oven and beheld the red man, he was very pleased. "Perfect!" he exclaimed.


(Heavily paraphrased from Seminole, Shawnee and Pima myth)

There is of course a reason why Indians became known more accurately as Native Americans - they were the first inhabitants of the land now known as America. However calling them Indians might to some extent have been closer to the truth, as, though there is no definitive evidence as to how the land was first settled, generally it's agreed that people from Eurasia may have migrated across one of those handy land bridges we spoke of in the History of England journal, this one spanning from Siberia to Alaska, and known then as Beringia. If this is the case, then India is part of Eurasia and so they could be called Indians. However they were of course given this name because of a major blunder  by ostensibly one of the blind-luckiest navigators in history, who believed he had discovered the West Indies.

Nowadays they have also begun to be called the indigenous people of America or even the First Nation people, both of which are correct, and it is, I believe, now considered a racial slur to call them Indians, not to mention the confusion this engenders if you're actually referring to the inhabitants of India, the sub-continent. For the purposes of this journal, therefore, and out of respect we shall refer to them throughout as Native Americans. It's believed they moved into the American continent somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, which, while it may not come close to the colonisation of Britain by the English around 400,000 years ago, still means they have been there more than ten times as long as those who later would claim to be Americans, and still do.
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I know it's become somewhat popular to, as it were, take the side of the Native Americans in the issue of their expulsion from their lands - a hundred years ago it was seen as a sort of white privilege, or dare I say it, lebensraum? and things were seen much differently - and without question, the time before the coming of the white settlers was not some sort of idyllic golden age where everyone loved everyone and there was no conflict. Native Americans were not hippies, and surely there were, shall we say, disagreements. But it's become clear to me, reading about them, that in general - and I stress, in general - the larger part of the tribes who populated America at that time were peaceful. They lived on their own lands - which most if not all believed given to them by their gods - and were happy there. They were not a territorial people (other than protecting, if they had to, their own homes), neither were they an expansionist society. No Native American tribe - possibly with a few exceptions - coveted the land of another.

The main wars and struggles between the various tribes seem to have come about as a direct consequence of, and coinciding with the arrival of people like us in the New World. As much as they fought the invaders to preserve their own lands, they were also forced to encroach on the lands of other tribes, of necessity, as land became more precious a commodity, the white settlers taking it from them. In a very real way, while the Native Americans fought the white man and woman, these new enemies also pitted them against their own people, tribe fighting tribe as the strong realised they could only survive if they subjugated the weak. That's why, I believe (and as we go on I'll see if I'm right, which I may not be) the main wars between Native Americans broke out only after the arrival of men from Europe.
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To a great degree, it would seem, for a while anyway, the white settlers awoke a sleeping giant, who would just as happily remained asleep, and had the two forces been matched, it's doubtful that the Native Americans could have been chased off their ancestral lands by these interlopers. But the white man brought his technology, from better and more deadly weapons to industrialisation such as the railroad and the telegraph, and also played upon the naivete and innocence (in terms of being like children dazzled by shiny toys) of the original inhabitants of America, and the two forces were far from equal. A lack of cooperation between tribes prior to this also told in the enemy's favour as, had all the over five hundred separate tribes been somehow able to band together under common cause, they could have mounted such a defence, even attack against the invaders as might have driven them back east.

But such things were unknown among the Natives, who might have traded with this or that tribe, or raided their villages, but really kept themselves to themselves, many of them sedentary and staying in their own territory, some nomadic or semi-nomadic, and a few, as alluded to above, outright warlike. Confederations were attempted later, but too late. Although it wasn't that easy a victory for the settlers, for the new US Government, once the first few tribes were relieved of their land, whether through trickery, bribery, lies or outright genocide, all the rest would fall like dominoes in a reasonably short time.

Perhaps, in the end, the fatal flaw that undid the Native Americans was trusting their enemy, and believing he would honour his word, something no tribal chief could believe any man would fail to do.

There were over five hundred tribes or peoples spread across America before the white man arrived, and while I have no intention of writing about them all - you would have less intention of reading about them, I'm sure - here are some examples of what life was like before we arrived to mess it all up, and eventually dance gleefully on the bones of our ancestors.

Note: As this is the history of the USA, I have avoided mentioning or concentrating on any tribes who settled in Canada. This article only concerns those who moved into North America (possibly from Canada) and stayed there.

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Tribe*: Yupik (including Central Alaskan, Siberian and Alutiiq)
Territory**: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population*** (approx): 35,589


* Note: I struggled with how to categorise the various peoples; began with race, but that didn't sound right, and so I've gone with tribes. It may not be exactly correct, but for my purposes I think it does the job.

** As tribes, nations, peoples and even confederacies got moved and pushed around America by the government, many ended up far from their homeland, and insofar as I can, I'm trying to restrict this to the lands they settled in originally. Sometimes this isn't possible, as Wiki does not always differentiate between where the particular tribe began and where they ended up, but I've tried to concentrate, where I can, on what the descendants of these people would consider their ancestral homelands.

*** Population, on the other hand, refers to now; how many are left alive in America today.


An offshoot of the eskimo and aleut peoples, the Yupik's main subsistence is on fish. Often racist cartoons of eskimos sitting outside their igloos with a line dangling into a hole punched in the ice may not be too far from the truth. After all, there would be little available game in a frozen wilderness like Alaska, at least the region the Yupik settled in, and the only available food would be fish from the sea, and seals too, whose oil they used in their lamps. The original Yupiks would have been a form of hunter-gatherers, following the source of food across the frozen wastes, only all getting together in winter in the communal house or qasgiq to dance, sing and tell stories.

Unlike many other Native American tribes, the Yupik kept the sexes separate, women in one house, men in the other, though there were often interconnecting tunnels between the two. They also practiced a form of role-reversal I've not heard of before (certainly not in so-called civilised society) where for from between three and six weeks boys would be sent to the ena, or women's house, to learn skills such as cooking, tanning, sowing etc while the girls would transfer to the qasgiq and learn how to hunt, fish and use weapons.
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Tribe: Inuit
Territory: Alaska (mostly Canada, but we're just concerned with American settlements here)
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 148,863

If, like me, you think inuit is another word for eskimo, take my advice: don't use the word around any inuits, as it's considered offensive to them. They are a separate society from the eskimos, and their grouping with the other culture was more or less a result of we white men's tendency to lump races together if they look the same to us. I'll chance quoting a risque (though not really in the seventies) passage from the classic comedy Fawlty Towers, which illustrates in sad if comedic vein the way colonial whites saw blacks, or indeed anyone else.

The Major is telling Basil about a woman he once knew. In his typical rambling style, he goes on about how much he was attracted to her.
Major: "I must have been keen on her, because I took her to see, ah, India!"
Fawlty: "India?"
Major: "At the Oval!" (The Oval being an English cricket ground, which makes the joke that he took this unnamed woman to see a cricket match between England and India). "And the strange thing was, all through the match she kept referring to the Indians as niggers."
Fawlty: "They do get confused, don't they? I see it with Sybil all the time."
Major: "No, no, no! I told her. That's the West Indians! These chaps are wogs!"

Sure, you can frown now, but in the context it's framed it's mildly amusing. However it does show how the Englishmen and women of the Major's generation (he's about seventy, eighty at the time, which, if the programme's original date is taken as being the time he made this speech, would have had him a young man around about 1890, just in time for things like "the Scramble for Africa" and the Boer War) saw all black and brown people as one race, something that still goes on today sadly.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah: stay out of my  booze. But back to the inuits. They seem to have been one of the first societies, not to domesticate dogs surely, but to use them as transport. We're all familiar with the idea of huskies pulling sleds across the ice, and when you think about it, well, there weren't any horses and you can't exactly harness up a seal or a polar bear to your sledge now can you? This innovation - possibly as important for them as the invention of the wheel was for the rest of the world - allowed them to become one of the largest of the circumpolar peoples, resulting perhaps in their still being around and going strong in places like Greenland, Denmark and, as already mentioned, Canada, as well as Alaska.

Nobody would suggest, and neither will I, that everything was rosy before the white man stuck his nose in - just like the Native American tribes, the inuit had disputes and even wars with other peoples long before Columbus had even picked up a map. They're human after all, and we humans just can't stop finding reasons to hate and fight with each other. But these wars would of course have of necessity been primitive and very limited (no cannon or gatling guns on the frozen Arctic wastes!) though possibly quite brutal in their way. The first non-Arctic people they came in contact with was the Vikings, though there are no records existing to show how these meetings went.

Next came the Little Ice Age, in 1350, which forced Canadian inuits south as the whales they hunted began to seek warmer waters, and given that they would have been encroaching on the territory of the Alaskan lads, there was a probably a bit of name calling and pushing and shoving, maybe a war or two. Just a few friendly disagreements.

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Tribe: Alaskan Athabascans
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 6,400

The oldest of the Alaskan people, I can't see any figures for how long they've been around, but they appear to have originated in Alaska, which is odd, as the other peoples in that region all seem to have come from Russia, from Siberia. At any rate, they are another hunter-gatherer folk, fishing in inland creeks and waterways, with their only domestic animal - I guess pet - being the dog. They are a matrilineal society, meaning their children are more identified with the mother than the father (which I guess is different from a matriarchal society, where the women are in charge).
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Tribe: Ahtna
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 1,427

Though their name translates as "ice people" they are often called "Copper Indians", due to their ancestral homeland being the Copper River. Again I see no mention of where they came from, though they are said to have moved into Alaska about 2,000 years ago, but then again this seems to have been from one area of the state to another, which they occupied for 7,000. There aren't that many of them, about less than 1,500 in total. Whether eskimos actually live in ice houses called igloos or not I don't know, but the Ahtna live in houses, often half-underground, made of wood covered with bark and animal skins. They travel in moose-hide boats by water and toboggan by land.

While many would consider them uncivilised and "savage", they knew enough to keep an eye on the numbers of predators - wolves, bears, eagles - and cut them down so that the natural prey of these animals, the moose, caribou, sheep and rabbits would not be hunted to extinction and leave them without any means of sustenance. Oddly enough, wolves seem to have been sacred to their forefathers, and often the hide of a killed wolf would be propped up and offered sacrifices. A kind of "sorry dude, no hard feelings" idea? Weird. They originally had no currency and bartered for goods.

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Tribe: Gwich'in
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 4,375

There are only three clans of these people left, the third one reserved for those degenerates who marry within their own clan, something the Gwich'in consider on a par with incest, though it does not seem to be a crime as such. Nevertheless, this third clan is looked down upon as a lower stratum of Gwich'in society. They seem to have a fairly well-developed sense of morality, prizing kindness, intelligence, hard work, generosity and mercy among the most desirable of traits, and things to aspire to. Their gods, or legendary heroes, seem to be mostly of the trickster variety, the tales of them rife with buffoonery and humour. They believe that once animals could talk to men, and vice versa. They believe they and their main source of food, the caribou, were once one entity, and the animal holds very special significance for them as a cultural symbol, almost as much as the buffalo was to the Native Americans. In fact, they describe themselves as "the caribou people".

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Tribe: Tanana
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 900

Another matrilineal hunter-gatherer society, they had no tribal organisation but were fiercely territorial. They hunted caribou, moose, sheep and small animals, and were semi-nomadic, following the season shifts of their quarry. It seems they traded with the Ahtna for copper, which the Tanana used in their tools and weapons. These guys live and hunt in a subarctic boreal forest, and also hunt waterfowl such as swans, ducks and geese. They used, or use, canoes to approach the birds and then shoot them with bows and arrows. They also eat fruit and berries, roots and tubers and other plants, or use them for decoration and medicine. Unlike some of the other Arctic peoples, the Tanana seem to welcome, and even require, cross-cousin marriage. That isn't marrying your uncle's daughter who has a bad temper, by the way, but marrying the child of the opposite sex of the parent. Yeah. Still sounds incestuous to me.

No real surprise to see that the main religion here is animism, and like the Native Americans they revere the earth, the sky, the waters and the animals. The shaman or medicine man is the central figure in their worship, their high  priest if you will, as is the case again with most of the Native American tribes. The basic belief that "everything is nature is fundamentally spiritual and must be treated with respect" is something you really can't argue with, and surely a good motto for a good life. This belief in the power of animals and inanimate objects extended to the practice of, having killed a wolf, apologising to it and explaining that it was necessary to feed one's family.

There are a lot of important taboos in Tananan culture, mostly centred around ethics of hunting. Otters, wolves, wolverines, ravens, cranes, foxes and dogs are off the menu, as are bears for women of child-bearing age, and dogs may not be fed the bones of slain animals lest it bring bad luck to the clan in hunting. They also had an odd tradition that the only animal allowed to be domesticated was the dog. At midwinter the clans would get together in a gathering called the potlatch, which could go on for a week and covered anything from a marriage ceremony to a funeral one, though the funeral potlatches only took place a year after the death, and were more a way of honouring the dead than burying him or her.

Unlike many of their Alaskan brethren, the Tanana don't tend to use dogs to pull sleds, though they do often use sleds. However they pull these themselves. Mostly they just walk everywhere, in snow shoes.

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Tribe: Haida
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 10,764

Thought to have been one of the most warlike of the Alaskan peoples, the Haida are said to have practiced slavery, something that has not been mentioned with the others so far. They were also known for their seamanship and trading skills, with one anthropologist likening them to the Vikings. They also host potlatches, including funeral ones, and they carve totem poles as well as ornate jewellery and woven art. They wore transformation masks, masks carved to represent an animal becoming another animal, or a spiritual being, which were meant to illustrate their journey into the afterlife. The Haida believed in reincarnation and transformation of the spirit. They were one of the few Arctic peoples to embrace the idea of the vision quest, a spiritual - and physical - journey undertaken by young adults to determine their future by meeting the animal which would be their spirit guide. Their main god seems to take the form of a raven (making this bird sacred to them) and is or was called Ne-Kilst-lass.

The Haida were greatly feared as a fighting force. They often took revenge on enemies for decades-old insults or grievances, or to raid them for slaves. When victorious, it was customary to burn down the enemy's village and slaughter everyone in it. Warriors who had fallen in the victory were ceremonially burned, along with their slaves. They used daggers, bow and arrows and wore a highly effective form of armour, but never carried shields.
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Tribe: Tsimshian
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 8.162

Not at all nomadic, the Tsimshian people built longhouses of cedar wood and in fact towns sprung up, making them perhaps one of the first of the Alaskan peoples we've read about to consider such a premise. They lived mostly on salmon, fishing in the rivers and the sea. Their religion sounds very like Christianity: they worshipped a "Lord in Heaven", who would send sacred messengers to them in times of need, and they believed charity and purification of the body was the way to the afterlife. Their potlatch is called a yaawk (sounds like someone ate too much salmon if you ask me!) and their main material for manufacturing was red cedar, which they used to make clothes, tools, houses and to cover canoes.
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Tribe: Eskimo
Territory: Alaska
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 183,500

Although seen by many races as a sort of ethnic slur these days, the word eskimo is still in use, and it covers such people as the Yupik, Inuit and Aleut. For those of us who don't know any better, including me, eskimo is the word we use to describe anyone living in the Arctic Circle, at the North Pole, or living on any sort of frozen wasteland. Interestingly, though it might have been thought to have been apocryphal, the idea that eskimos have over fifty words for snow has been accepted by academics. But Captain Kirk still never said "Beam me up, Scotty" and the people who tried to overturn democracy on January 6 2021 were all Trump supporters.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/Abenakis.jpg/440px-Abenakis.jpg)

Note: Tenses were a real problem for me here. Did I write about a tribe who was still extant as in the present tense, or past? Given that this is meant to be an exploration of the peoples who came before the whites, and we're talking about the past, I've gone with the latter. If such things as rituals and things are still practiced, it's mostly still shown as being in the past, as I'm trying to concentrate on that timeline. Sometimes I may forget and wander into writing in the present tense; if so, bear with me. I catch these instances where I can, but one or two are bound to slip through.

Tribe: Abenaki (Tarrentine) including the Eastern, Western Abenaki and the Kennebec
Territory: New Brunswick, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 9,775 (less than a third in the USA, all the rest in Canada)

The Abenaki seem to have been the enemies of the Iroqouis, who warred against them and invaded their lands. Despite this, they were described by priests as "temperate in the use of liquor, ingenious, docile and not profane." They were also said to be "not cannibals". Well, that's a relief, isn't it? They cultivated crops (not something your average cannibal might do I would think), hunted game and fished, and also ate plants. These are the first tribe we come across who were patrilineal, as I imagine most Native American tribes were, but we will see. They lived in small villages of about 100 people, more easily defended than large settlements, but also more easily overrun by superior numbers.

Here, too, we find the first of these people who lived in actual wigwams, so it wasn't just an invention of Hollywood. We all know what wigwams are, right? Conical tents that... oh wait. Shit. No. Wigwams are, apparently, permanent dome-shaped structures, whereas the ones we see on the movies (but which are often referred to - inaccurately and incorrectly, it would seem - as wigwams) are in fact teepees. An Abenaki with a piece of leather attached to his scalp, his head otherwise shaved except for the ponytail denoted a married man, while single men kept their hair loose, but tied it into the ponytail when they acquired a mate but were not yet married. Before he could get married he had to secure the agreement of everyone in the tribe, though how they resolved getting that last holdout to agree I don't know: ritual combat? Running a race? Kicking the crap out of each other? Most likely the last I'd imagine.

The men were the hunters (no surprise there) and the women the farmers, planting the crops. A pretty democratic society, these people. All decisions had to be made by consensus of the whole tribe, each clan of which elected a spokesperson, and a facilitator would weigh the arguments and if there was not consensus, send them back again to be reviewed. In any decision to be made, the Three Truths had to be taken into consideration:
One - Peace: is this preserved?
Two - Righteousness: Is this moral?
Three - Power: Does it preserve the integrity of the group?

The Abenaki had a high moral code and taught their children through stories, never punishing them but using mythology and fables to show them the error of their ways. As you might possibly expect, their main god is a Great Spirit who created the world, mostly while dreaming, and, rather interestingly, first created a giant turtle who carries the world on its back. Sound familiar? They believe there were three ages, the Ancient Age, during which men and animals were equal, the Golden Age, when men began to separate themselves from animals and the Present Age. Most of their gods and heroes, in common with much Native American mythology, are both animal spirits and tricksters.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Mohawk_king_engraving.jpg/400px-Mohawk_king_engraving.jpg)
Tribe: Mohicans (Housatonic)
Territory: Massachusetts, New York
Current Status: Still around (so much for The Last of the Mohicans, huh?)
Population (approx): 3,000

Their chief was advised by a council of elders and the Mohicans were another matrilineal society, they hunted and fished and in times of war were familiar with stockades to protect their villages. Their main enemy appears to have been the Mohawk tribe, with whom they were constantly at war.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Kaskaskia_Illinois.jpg)
Tribe(s): Illinois Confederacy
Territory: Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 2,925

This was a confederacy of about twelve tribes, made up of the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Peoria, Tamaroa, Moingwena, Michigamea, Chepoussa, Chinkoa, Coiracoentanon, Esperminkia, Maroa and Tapouara tribes. Only five of these tribes still remain today, all amalgamated under the Peoria name. They had a lot of enemies, including the famous Lakota-Sioux, Pawnee, Osage, Arikara, Shawnee, Quapaw and Chickasaw. The Illinois tribes were polygamous and so men could have several wives, but the first wife maintained a lot of power in the family. Women also held positions of trust and honour, such as shamans or priests. Although they were sometimes allowed to hunt, women were forbidden from carrying weapons. Guess they had to nag the animals to death, then! :laughing:

Women were accorded great respect if they had many children and were faithful to their husband, and if they were not, the consequences could be dire, such as having parts of their face cut off. Doesn't say what happened to unfaithful men, if anything. High-fives from other men, probably. A man's reputation rested on his hunting ability, and the more respected he was the more wives he could have. Outside of this though they seem to have had a somewhat relaxed and enlightened attitude to gender stereotypes, as some of their men dressed as women, and if a boy displayed feminine tendencies when growing up he was treated, dressed and tattooed as a girl.

These are the first tribes we hear of who hunted the bison or buffalo, which was the main quarry of the Plains Natives, and which would forever be tied and linked to them by Hollywood, though interestingly, at least until the arrival of white settlers, the Illinois tribes would hunt the bison on foot, using bow and arrow to bring them down. Also interestingly, the main aim of the Illinois in battle was to take prisoners, not kill the enemy. They gained many slaves this way. When they won, that was, of course. When their own fell in battle, the war chief was required to compensate their families and lead reprisal attacks.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Map_of_the_Country_of_the_Five_Nations_belonging_to_the_province_of_New_York_and_of_the_Lakes_near_which_the_Nations_of_Far_Indians_live_with_part_of_Canada_taken_from_the_Map_of_the_Louisiane_done_1730.png/660px-thumbnail.png)
Tribe(s): Iroquois Confederacy
Territory: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 32,550

Also known as the Five Nations, this league comprised some of the most powerful and best-known Native American tribes - the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Cayuga, as well as the Oneida and Onondaga tribes. The league, or confederacy, was formed in order to bring together the five - later, with the addition of the Tuscarora, six - tribes who were constantly warring against each other and other tribes also. With a totally egalitarian society, there was no servitude or forced leadership within the Five Nations, and to some degree as the later Five Families of the Mafia would be organised, all decisions were by consensus and all the council of fifty had to agree to them. The consolidation of the tribes and the subsequent cessation of hostilities between them allowed the Iroquois to become one of the strongest, most powerful and most feared tribes in America.

A strange custom was that of raiding another tribe to take captives, either to replace one of their own dead or to be tortured. Either process was supposed to unleash the grief that a mourning family would feel on the death of a member, and such raids were known as "mourning wars." Due to this desire for captives to swell their own ranks, and the use of wooden body armour, as well as relatively primitive weapons with little real killing power, many of the battles the Iroquois fought resulted in few actual deaths, being more a show of strength and superiority than actual war, and also a sort of courting ritual for those who wished to take wives, as women admired the valour and courage of a warrior. Conversely, any man who was unlucky enough to be branded a coward by the clan mothers was forever destined to remain single, as no woman would marry a man without bravery and honour to his name.

One thing it seems Hollywood got right, at least in the case of the Iroquois, was the tying of a captive to a pole and dancing around it. Captured prisoners would be stripped naked - regardless of sex or age - tortured by being burned mostly, and then have to dance naked for the village, whose inhabitants would decide if the captive was worthy or not of adoption. If not, the sorrow and grief assuaged by their torture, they would be given a quick death.

Okay, reading further, not a quick death. Not at all. The rejected captive would be returned to the prisoner pole, tortured for a full day, including having parts of them chopped off, then would be scalped alive (you know what that is of course) before hot sand was applied to the skull. Finally, their heart would be cut out and they would, obviously, mercifully, die. Hey, that's a whole lot of grief assuaged, guys! Couldn't you just have scalped them and let them die? What's with all the torture? Not quite the worst of it (though the captive, being dead now, wouldn't care) as the body and heart would be cut up and everyone would tuck in. Yep, they were cannibals, at least of these captives. Time heals all, I guess, but apparently if you can't wait that long, then brutal ritualistic slow torture does it better.

"Spoilered as the drawing is a little graphic"

(https://scd.community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.executedtoday.com%2Fimages%2FWilliam_Crawford_burned_detail.jpg&hash=8e0c63c0a607afe12015f8e595bb6e361e090203)

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The Iroquois did not accept losses in battle, as it diminished the community, and so, despite their ferocity, killing one or two of their number could rout a whole war party. Those who did die were said to spend eternity as angry ghosts wandering the world in search of revenge for their death, and their bodies were not buried in community cemeteries, as the tribe did not want angry ghosts hanging around making trouble. In battle, they relied on sneak attacks and ambushes, and retreated if outnumbered. They were also known to prosecute a scorched-earth policy, by burning their crops to deny the enemy sustenance as they retreated to their villages for a siege. If the enemy was very powerful, they would even burn the village and leg it into the woods, hiding until the foe went away.

They lived in villages but would move as resources ran out, and transport themselves to other areas, where they would build new villages. These consisted of twenty to thirty  longhouses surrounded by palisades, and sometimes with ditches dug around them, leading later settlers to characterise them as castles. Up to eighteen families could live in one of these longhouses, so in ways the white folks weren't all that wrong. They were also very defensible, often built on a hill with good commanding views of the surrounding territory, and near to water. The Iroquois were, however, despite their warlike tendencies, mostly farmers and fishermen, and made medicines from plants and herbs.

Children and youth of the Iroquois went naked, while adults merely covered their loins with a patch of leather or hide, though they did wear moccasins, which became very fashionable among civilised whites much later, and are still worn today for their comfort. Original moccasins were made of deer hide, though now of course they're synthetically manufactured. Women wore their hair long and tied at the back, while men wore the style which has come to be known, and favoured among punk rockers and others, as the mohawk. Men painted their faces while women did not, in a reversal of western civilisation. Being a matriarchal society, the Five Nations did not allow any one person to own land, believing it all belonged to the creator spirit, but women were said to be its stewards and wardens. With a lot of power among the tribes, clan mothers chose the leaders and could, if he became corrupt or lost the faith or support of the people, dismiss him and choose another.

The Iroquois had three different societies for practicing medicine. The False Face Society wore masks carved from living trees, used to frighten away bad spirits, while the Husk Face Society worked their healing through dreams and divinations. Finally, the Secret Medicine Society used rituals and dances to spread their healing powers. They believed that when someone died, their soul went through trials and journeys to reach the afterlife, or sky world, and this took a year, so that twelve months after the death they celebrated the soul's arrival in the sky world. They seem to have invented the game of lacrosse, as it was one of their favourite sports. They also played the snow-snake game, which involved throwing, or rather sliding, a five to seven foot pole across the snow to see who could get it the furthest, and the peach stone game, which was a form of gambling, something like an ancient form of dice-rolling similar maybe to craps or Yahtzee.

The wampum belt was very important to the Iroquois; it could signify many things, from condolence for a loved one gone to a treaty signed. Wampum belts were made of elm bark with purple and white mollusk beads. They also symbolised the office of the clan mothers who wore them.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Kickapoo%2C_Babe_Shkit%2C_Chief_and_Delegate_from_Oklahoma_-_NARA_-_523854.tif/lossy-page1-340px-Kickapoo%2C_Babe_Shkit%2C_Chief_and_Delegate_from_Oklahoma_-_NARA_-_523854.tif.jpg)
Tribe: Kickapoo
Territory: Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 5,000

All right, I'll just say it: it would be tempting to call these guys the shitkicker tribe, wouldn't it? Okay, now we've got that out of our systems, let's go on. Aw now come on! They had a chief in 1900 called Babe Shkit? This is just too funny. That's him in the picture, by the way.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Lenape_Languages.png/500px-Lenape_Languages.png)
Tribe(s): Lenni Lenape
Territory: Pennsylvania, Delaware, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Massachusetts
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 16,000

This covers a shitload of tribes, and I'm not joking. I count no less than fifteen separate tribes affiliated with the Lenape people, and I'm just not going to list them all. In addition to being matrilineal, these peoples were also matrilocal. What's matrilocal, I hear you ask. Damned if I know. Oh wait, I do. It means that newly-married couples had to live with the wife's mother. Nice. Never get rid of the mother-in-law and get our own place, will we? Lenape had a different way of hunting to other tribes: they didn't run after their prey with bows and arrows, but would stand at a river, beating thighbones upon their palms to drive animals into the river (not sure why the animals would do this; maybe the sound scared them) or surround them in a circle and then set the brush on fire. Sounds like that might be a badly-calculated strategy, as fire is hard to control, and can turn on you in an instant, but there you go.They would also lasso and drown deer, and putting chestnuts in the river apparently made the fishies dizzy, and thereby easier to catch. None of this sounds particularly brave, but that's what they did.

Women wore their hair long, while men shaved off all but a small round crest, about two centimetres in diameter. Men wore loincloths and women skirts made of animal hide, and also sometimes buckskin leggings (both sexes wore these) as well as mantles made from beaver or raccoon pelts in winter. They played pahsaheman, an ancient form of football with teams of up to a hundred, men against women. Men could only kick the ball while women could pick it up and carry it, GAA-style, and once a woman had the ball a man could not tackle her, though he could try to dislodge the ball from her grasp. In dances, men were exuberant and lively while the women were more demure.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/ChiefOshkosh.jpg/440px-ChiefOshkosh.jpg)
Tribe: Menominee
Territory: Wisconsin
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 8.700

Not at all warlike, the Menominee (doo-doo-bi-doo-doo - sorry) were known for being peaceful and getting on with other tribes, and were not involved in any wars or territorial conflicts, despite owning a huge territory of over ten thousand acres. You'd have to wonder, given how peaceful they are supposed to have been, why some other more warlike tribe did not try to take this land from them, but it doesn't seem to have happened (until, of course, the biggest and most warlike of all tribes arrived in their land).
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Hombres_ojibwe.jpg/440px-Hombres_ojibwe.jpg)
Tribe: Anishinaabeg (including Algonquin, Nipissing (hur hur), Ojibwe, Mississaugas, Saulteaux, Odawa, Potawatomi
Territory: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Oklahoma, Kansas
Current Status:: Still around
Population (approx): in excess of 370,000

Yes that's a shitload of peoples to put under the one banner, but come on: there are hundreds of separate tribes and I don't intend to write about all of them. They're all seen to come under the basic banner of the Anishinaabeg anyway, otherwise I'd be treating them separately. At any rate, it seems the Anishinaabeg consider the Abenaki to be their ancestors, and call them "the Fathers", except for the Cree, but you know what they're like.

Tribe: Assateague
Territory: Maryland
Current Status:: More or less extinct
Population (approx): 0

These fine chaps had the idea to removed the flesh and organs of the dead before they buried them, actually storing the bones of their ancestors in  long huts for years. Charming. Although there may be some still living who can trace their heritage to the Assateagues, the tribe as such is no longer extant.

Tribe: Chowanoke
Territory: North Carolina
Current Status:: More or less extinct; current descendants trying to renew their tribes
Population (approx): Unknown

In their time the most powerful tribe in North Carolina, the Chowanoke had a leader and a noble class, according to evidence found by archaeologists, as well as temples and burial grounds.

Tribe:  Choptank:
Territory:  Maryland
Current Status:: Extinct
Population (approx): 0

Not much I can tell you, except that to my knowledge none of them ever chopped a tank.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Shawnee_Prophet%2C_Tenskwatawa.jpg/440px-Shawnee_Prophet%2C_Tenskwatawa.jpg)

Tribe: Shawnee
Territory: Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 14,000

A well-known name thanks to movies, the Shawnee practiced burial of their people in mounds (not literally practiced: I don't mean they had dry runs with live specimens or anything! All right braves, that's a wrap! We'll pick it up again tomorrow!) and also built effigy mounds, one of which still stands in Ohio, the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County. They believed the Lenape people to be their grandfathers, their greatest and most famous leader being Tecumseh, whose name would be given to the great Civil War general Sherman. The Shawnee, unlike many of the tribes, were patrilineal, though for some reason their kings were chosen through the matrilineal line. Odd.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Henry_Inman_-_Sequoyah_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/440px-Henry_Inman_-_Sequoyah_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

Tribe: Cherokee
Territory: North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, Mexico, Oklahoma
Current Status: Very much still around
Population (approx):  Over 1 million

Who hasn't heard of these? Along with the Apaches and the Comanches they're probably the best known tribes, again thanks to Hollywood, TV and books. Their names still exist - apart from in their own tribes - in products such as jeeps, aircraft and sports teams, and despite their usage in western movies as the bad guys, the Cherokee actually believed war to be a polluting activity, preferring to farm and hunt. For this reason they had two councils of elders, one, the "white" council, looked after their spiritual well-being, taking care of prayers, healing, purification and so forth, while the "red" council - staffed by younger men - was in charge of preparations for war. After the battles, the men had to be spiritually cleansed by the white council before they could be reintegrated back into society.

Though a matrilineal society, polygamy was practiced among the Cherokee, especially the elite men; this was not seen as a bad thing, nor did it disrespect women, who were held in very high regard among the tribe. Women owned the land and the home, farmed and chose the leaders of the tribe. They were also expected to keep the cultural history of the people alive, being its guardians. Cherokees are of course identified with the Trail of Tears, but that's much later and we'll be looking at that in detail when the time comes.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Coeehajo.jpg/340px-Coeehajo.jpg)
Tribe: Seminole
Territory: Florida, Oklahoma
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx):  18,600

They seem to be one of the younger tribes, only coming into being around 1700, and technically then not so much affected by the incursion of the white man, or to be more accurate, they didn't enjoy the freedom that other tribes did, as they weren't in existence at the time. Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but they appear to be one of the very few tribes that actually increased rather than declined in population, beginning with about 4 ,000 - 6,000 of them in the nineteenth century and now with today almost five times that.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Chief-59.jpg)
Tribe: Apalachee
Territory: Florida
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx):  300

It seems these fellas invented the modern game of football, including rules governing its (mis)conduct. :laughing: Didn't quite get it right though. They kicked the ball - made of dried mud covered with buckskin - against the goalpost (there was no net), and points were scored if you hit the post (unlike now, when it's a goal opportunity missed) as well as if you could kick the ball into the nest which would be put atop the post, complete with a stuffed eagle. Whether the stuffed eagle was real or not I don't know. I doubt the Apalachee, or any Native Americans, were familiar with taxidermy, so maybe it was an effigy? Anyway, you got more points if you kicked the ball up onto the goalpost and into the nest. But the best thing were the rules of strategy.

Players would  fall upon whoever fell during the game, walk on him, kick him in the face, punch him, stuff dirt in his mouth and pull his arms and legs. A red card offence, surely, ref! Whoever had the ball was told (presumably by the chief/manager) to die before he let it go. Players would hide the ball in their mouths and be choked or punched to get them to release it. There were forty or fifty men per team, and bones were broken and even some deaths resulted. Many matches ended in full-scale riots. Just like today, then. As well as this, good players would be given the best houses, goods and excused from any misdemeanours in order to keep them on the team. So again, just like today.

"Welcome, and you join us at the start of the seventh round of the All-Nations postball tournament, where the two villages of Mudflat and Deerhide are fighting it out for the trophy. We're all expecting great things from Kicks-in-the-Teeth, Mudflat Village's to scorer, who has two deaths to his tally and has broken more bones than any other player in this tournament, some even on the opposition side. Bought from Riverside Village for the then-unheard of transfer fee of seven runner beans, Kicks-in-the-Teeth has had a controversial career, including four quashed convictions for robbery, which the village elders ordered hushed up lest he be tempted to move to the rival Deerhide team. That's professional postball for you; the fans will forgive anything. Now, let's settle back for what promises to be an entertaining, not to say necessarily lethal, final."

As you've probably worked out by now, the name of this tribe gives rise to the cultural region now known as Appalachia.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Six_Blackfeet_Chiefs_-_Paul_Kane.jpg/600px-Six_Blackfeet_Chiefs_-_Paul_Kane.jpg)
Tribe: Blackfoot
Territory: Montana
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 130,000

An actual confederacy of originally three, now four Blackfoot-speaking nations, they occupied large swathes of what were then the Great Plains, and had warrior societies, into which only the bravest could be inducted. Blackfoot hunted the buffalo on horseback, though originally they had a less sophisticated method of killing the animals. This was called the buffalo jump, and involved the Blackfeet driving the herd over a cliff, where later they would descend and take what they needed from the mangled corpses. They also developed, or at least used, camouflage, draping buffalo skins over them to disguise their scent while they hunted the beasts. The women would process and prepare the carcasses for food and clothing and other uses.

Every part of the buffalo was used, nothing went to waste, not even its dung, which was used, dried, to light and fuel fires. The skins were draped over the sides of the teepees to keep them warm in winter and cool in the summer, and protected them against wind. The heart was usually eaten by the hunters soon after the animal was brought down, the stomach and bladder used for storing liquid, and the fat for making soap.

The Blackfoot were one of the warrior tribes mentioned earlier, and they placed great store upon bravery, using the method known as "counting coup", which involved doing various brave things behind enemy lines, such as taking a weapon, killing an enemy or loosing a horse, all of which added to a warrior's reputation. Among their enemies were some of the bigger and more well-known of the Plains tribes - the Crow, Cheyenne and Sioux.

In midsummer, all four nations would convene for the Sun Dance, a ceremony of spiritual healing. Here they would pray to the creator for good and successful hunting and health. Women were highly valued in the Blackfoot nation, weaving quilts, decorating shields, helping prepare their men for battle, taking care of the children and bringing them up in the traditions of the tribe, and of course as already mentioned, turning the buffalo the men brought home into everything from edible meat to clothing.

Marriage was a slightly more complex deal among the Blackfoot. Although a man could choose a wife, she had to accept him and her decision would also hinge on whether or not her prospective husband could impress her father with his deeds of bravery. The marriage had to be blessed by the girl's father. One thing Hollywood got right is that some - not all - Native Americans did wear headdresses, and the Blackfoot were one of these, possibly due to its being so cold out on the Great Plains. The headdresses were usually made either from eagles' feathers or from a bison horn attached to a felt hat.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Edward_S._Curtis_Collection_People_084.jpg/440px-Edward_S._Curtis_Collection_People_084.jpg)
Tribe: Cheyenne
Territory: Montana, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 22,970

Another well-known tribe, also of the Great Plains, they too hunted the bison. One of their greatest prophets, known as Sweet Medicine, predicted the coming of the white man. It was believed he had received the sacred arrow bundle and the sacred buffalo hat which are two of the most important holy relics in the Cheyenne nation. In the beginning they ate fish and crops, but the prophet convinced them to switch to a diet of bison meat - and so began the hunt - as well as wild fruits and vegetables. Another warrior society, the Cheyenne are the first I've heard of who used the tomahawk, something made almost ubiquitous in western movies and series; among their enemies they numbered the Crow and Blackfoot, Sioux and Pawnee. They also took on the Apache and the Comanche, though they allied with the Arapaho. They would later ally with the Sioux in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Comanche_Osage_fight.jpg/440px-Comanche_Osage_fight.jpg)
Tribe: Comanche
Territory: Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 17,000

Once the greatest and most powerful tribe on the southeast plains, the Comanches commanded a huge area and warred upon other tribes, and are believed to have been the first of the plains tribes to have acquired and used horses, which became absolutely integral and vital to their way of life, and turned them into even fiercer warriors than they already had been. They would also end up making something of a living as horse traders. Comanche boys learned to ride a horse literally before they could walk, and were expected and hoped to grow up and be great warriors, while girls were shown by their mother how to do household tasks and carried a doll made of deerskin that they must learn to make the clothes for, in preparation for their lives as a warrior's wife. Comanches did not believe much in discipline, but instead led by example, though if punishment was required they would sometimes, um, dress up as ghosts and frighten the children, particularly with the story of Big Maneater Owl, who caught naughty children and ate them. How original.

Boys were expected to be able to ride and handle a horse before they were five years old, and were given small bow and arrow weapons to familiarise themselves with the real thing. As their fathers would most likely be out on a hunt or a raiding party, the boy would tend to identify more with his grandfather, who would be his mentor, trainer and teacher, and show him all the things he needed to know in order to grow up and be a brave warrior. No matter his age though, no boy was allowed go on a war party unless he had distinguished himself on a buffalo hunt. Then there was a great feast thrown for him by his father. Girls were taught at age twelve how to cook, sew clothes, prepare hides and other womanly duties, and were at this age considered eligible for marriage.

When a warrior died, his body was wrapped in blankets and placed on a horse, and taken to a secure cave or other burial site. On return, the rider who had taken the corpse on its last journey would slash his arms in honour of the deceased, and all of the dead man's possessions would be burned by the village.

Horses were the status symbol within the Comanche nation, a man's worth measured by how many horses he had. Raiding parties would often go in search of horses to steal, and other than the advantage horse-mounted attack gave the tribe, the animal was respected as it ate no meat, unlike dogs, and so the food that was to nourish the tribe did not have to be shared with the beast of burden. Another thing they took pride in was their hair, which they wore long and hardly ever cut, in two long braids. Unlike other plains natives they did not wear headdresses, or indeed anything on their heads. Women did the opposite to their men, wearing their hair short, apart from very young women, who might keep it long and braided until they were older.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Crow_Indians_by_David_F_Barry%2C_1878-1883.jpg/580px-Crow_Indians_by_David_F_Barry%2C_1878-1883.jpg)
Tribe: Crow
Territory: Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 14,000

Enemies of the Cheyenne and Sioux, but allies of the Apache, the Crow became breeders of horses and thus the target for horse raids by, among others, the Blackfoot. They, too, hunted the bison, originally on foot and, somewhat like the Cheyenne, disguised, though with wolf pelts rather than those of buffalos. They killed the buffalo with spears and lances. Later of course they used horses and the hunts were much more successful and efficient. They lived in teepees and, though I can't confirm if they were the only ones, they're the first ones I've heard of who actually used fires inside the tent. Doesn't sound very safe, but they appear to have done it anyway.

There was no sexual ambiguity among the Crow, unlike some of the other tribes we've read about. Men literally wore the trousers (breeches or leggings) and women wore dresses. Men wore their hair much longer than the women, sometimes being in danger of tripping over it! They also often wore it in the pompadour style, coloured white with paint. They could theoretically have been called the Bead People, as just about everything they had, from costumes to horses to teepees were decorated with beads, and they knew the importance of colour and its significance, reflecting this in the face and body paint they wore, and in the tattoos also.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Kiowa_Apache_Essa-queta.jpg)
Tribe: Apache
Territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Mexico, Colorado
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 111,810

A by-word and catch-all term for "Indians" in western movies, Apache are probably the best-known of the Native American plains tribes, and actually comprised more than a dozen tribes affiliated with them. Historically they tended to live in high mountains, valleys and deserts and canyons. They are related to the Athabaskan peoples whom we met in the far colder climes of the Arctic. Very much nomadic, the Apache did not leave much behind archaeologically speaking to denote how they lived, but we do know they were a closely-linked community, living together and the tradition being if a man's wife died that he married her sister, and if a woman's husband died then her brother was expected to take over. How that worked if he was already married I don't know, but most Native American tribes seemed not to have a problem with polygamy, so maybe it was just that, two wives.

Chiefs were chosen if they fulfilled the main criteria: industriousness, impartiality, generosity, forbearance, conscientiousness and eloquence in language. Oddly enough, for a warrior people, courage or honour or prowess in battle does not seem to have figured in the requirements for choosing a leader. Within the Apache culture all tribes were autonomous and independent, and certain tribes even fought against each other. Apache lived in three different types of dwelling, depending on the territory. Plains natives lived in teepees, those in the mountains and highland regions in a domed structure called a wickiup (sound like the research I do!) and the desert tribes preferred a hogan, which was an earthen dwelling which helped them keep cool.

Although the Apache hunted various animals, to some of the tribes certain of these were taboo, and not to be consumed. Among these were bear, turkey, coyote and owls. Apache used bow and arrow to hunt, and also whistles to lure their prey. The most famous Apache of all, and indeed one of the most famous Native Americans, was of course Geronimo, but we will meet him a lot later into this history.

Tribe:  Conoy or Piscataway
Territory:  Maryland, Virginia
Current Status:: Still around
Population (approx): 4,103

Another of the more permanent tribes, the Conoy were not hunter-gatherers but farmers, though they hunted of course for their food - wolves, bear, elk, deer, squirrels, beavers, turkey and more were their quarry. They lived in long houses protected by a wooden palisade, and they fished in the nearby rivers as well as using canoes to navigate them.

Tribe:  Erie
Territory:  Pennsylvania
Current Status:: Extinct
Population (approx): 0

After a hard and brutal war with the Iroquois, the Erie people's villages were burned, which destroyed their stores of maize and eventually led to their total extinction.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Waa-kaun-see-kaa.jpg/340px-Waa-kaun-see-kaa.jpg)
Tribe:  Ho-Chunk (including Winnebago):
Territory:   Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota
Current Status::  Still around
Population (approx): 7,000

They were a hunter-gatherer people who followed the source of food, hunted and fished and used the local plants in their medicine. Like most Native American tribes, they did not just eat the game, but used its skin for coverings for their houses, for clothing and for making tools. They also followed the practice of Vision Quest, for the young boys, a rite of passage. Although now patrilineal, the Ho-Chunk are believed to have been originally matrilineal and they also practiced the custom of marrying outside of their clan, of which there were originally twelve, each associated with a spirit animal such as buffalo, eagle or bear.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Navaho_spinning_and_weaving_page_928.png)
Tribe: Navajo
Territory: Arizona, Utah, New Mexico
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 399,494

Related both to the Apache, and therefore the Athabaskan people, the Navajo are another matrilineal tribe, with property passing down the mother's line to the wife, and she retaining the children by law if the parents separate. In the reverse of western tradition, a man intending to get married is expected to bring money, property or other forms of wealth in what is called  bride wealth. The Navajo appear to be unique (at least, in what I've read so far) in building specific types of different dwellings, or hogans, for men and women. A male hogan is square or conical with a rectangular entrance, while the hogan of the female has eight sides. They are built of logs covered in mud, the entrance always facing east, to welcome the sun in the morning. The hogan is sacred and goes all the way back to their beginnings, when the Navajo trickster god Coyote is said to have built the first one for the First Man and First Woman.

Navajo belief seems to be centred around the idea of nomadism, of moving on; they teach that they began in one world, had to transition through two more before arriving here, in the fourth world. They strive to maintain the balance between man and nature, creating harmony in their own lives through their efforts. Like many of the tribes they perform dances as part of their ritual ceremonies, including the Night Chant, which is used to help people back to health.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Sitting_Bull_by_D_F_Barry_ca_1883_Dakota_Territory.jpg/440px-Sitting_Bull_by_D_F_Barry_ca_1883_Dakota_Territory.jpg)
Tribe: Sioux
Territory: Minnesota, Wisconsin
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 170,110

Another extremely famous tribe, not least due to the great chief Sitting Bull, who defeated General Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Sioux are in fact a Nation, made up of two major divisions, the Dakota and the Lakota. They see the natural and supernatural world as very much linked, and important to each other, and teach that all things must be accorded the same respect.

"We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as He intends" - (Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe: Black elk's Account of the Sacred Rites of the Oglala Sioux)

Kind of sounds like where Lucas may have got the idea for the Force, doesn't it? Prayer and dreams can both invoke the spiritual world, and allow the Sioux to call upon their ancestors for aid or wisdom. Dreams were also believed to have the power to confer supernatural abilities on the dreamer. The ruling body of the Sioux was known as the Seven Council Fires, and they met in summer to discuss policy, choose new leaders, hear disputes and also to renew kinships between the tribes, which was a central tenet of their civilisation, in fact the most important. Leaders were chosen based on a mixture of virtues including bravery, fortitude, generosity and wisdom, and also based on their lineage.

The Sioux also had warrior societies, some of them used to train young warriors, some used as a sort of internal police force. Their burial practices were different from other tribes: they did not bury their dead but put the body on a platform raised over the ground, along with their personal effects, and mourned them for a year, speaking to the corpse as if it were still alive and offering it food. Must have got pretty rank after a few months, never mind a year! The body was always placed with its head towards the south, and the Ghost Dance was performed to aid the progress of its soul into the afterlife. Only if the person had been a victim of murder would they be placed directly in the ground. Perhaps they didn't think someone who allowed himself to be murdered was likely to get into the afterlife? I really don't know. Maybe it was seen as a sign of disgrace, to let your guard down and not die honourably in battle?

I'm sure I don't need to tell you, but the most famous names we know in Native American history come from the Sioux: Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and of course Sitting Bull.

Tribe:  Honniasont
Territory: Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia
Current Status:: Extinct
Population (approx): 0

Nothing I can tell you about these guys.

Tribe:  Unami (including Acquackanonk, Okehocking and Unalachtigo)
Territory: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
Current Status:: Extinct
Population (approx): 0

Not much information on these lads at all.

Tribe:  Manahoac
Territory: Virginia
Current Status:: Extinct
Population (approx): 0

They were allies of the Monacan but not of the Powhatan, and buried their dead in burial mounds or barrows, unlike a lot of other tribes who tended to either bury corpses as they were or strip them of flesh and organs and then just cover the grave with a board. These burial mounds were not just for one person, but have been found with the remains of hundreds, even thousands of corpses inside. Hunter-gatherers, they lived along rivers and fished and farmed.

Tribe:  Mascouten
Territory: Michigan
Current Status:: Extinct
Population (approx): 0 (There are descendants but they have been absorbed into the Kickapoo tribe)

Other than that they were called the Fire Nation, shrug.

Tribe:  Massachusett
Territory: Massachusetts, duh!
Current Status:: Still around, barely
Population (approx):150

Occupying some of the most fertile and flat land in New England, the Massachusett were of course farmers as well as hunters.

Tribe:  Meherrin
Territory: Virginia, North Carolina
Current Status:: Still around
Population (approx): 900

Connected to the Iroquois League and related to the Tuscarora.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Kim_Douglas_Wiggins_painting_of_the_Fetterman_Massacre.jpg/440px-Kim_Douglas_Wiggins_painting_of_the_Fetterman_Massacre.jpg)
Tribe: Arapaho
Territory: Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas
Current Status: Still around
Population (approx): 10.861

The Arapaho, like many or most of the tribes of the plains, centred around the notion of the warrior and had warrior societies, with leaders elected according to the ancient practice of counting coup, explained earlier. They decorated their bodies and horses with war paint, each warrior choosing his own personal colour and pattern which was specific to him and held special significance for him. They were enemies to, among (many) others, the Blackfoot, Pawnee, Navajo, Apache  and Crow. They also fought against the Cheyenne and Sioux, but later became their allies.

Although their gender roles are set along traditional lines - men being hunters and warriors, women staying at home with the kids and doing the cooking etc - the Arapaho have a third gender, called Haux'xan or Two Spirit, which seems to conform to the modern idea of a woman born in a man's body. These are not seen as freaks, rather, as divinely-touched beings with supernatural powers, and highly revered. There does not seem to be a female-to-male contemporary though. The Haux'xan assume the responsibilities and roles of women, dress like them and - oddly enough - are allowed/expected to marry men. Whether that indicates an acceptance of homosexuality in this tribe or not I really can't say, though you can't imagine any other way this would be accomplished. Perhaps, if the Haux'xan are seen as female in the eyes of males, they become so in their minds?

*********************************************************

This is just supposed to be a small, representative sampling of some of the major (and a few minor) tribes of peoples who inhabited what would come to be known as America in the early period before Columbus. Of course there are hundreds of tribes and nations left out, but this isn't intended to be the history of Native Americans, and the actual history of America itself is a huge undertaking, so we need to get to that without too much delay. I nevertheless wanted to be sure not to simply dive in at the discovery of America (or, as he believed it, the West Indies) by an Italian explorer as the starting point for the history of the country, since there is so much more to America than that. So hopefully this has given you an idea of the people living there prior to the arrival of the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta, and some basis upon which to understand the culture and way of life we so callously rolled over and annihilated in our successful attempt to take the land away from those who had a prior, and more just, claim upon it than we did.

(https://i.postimg.cc/L54L79M6/hunt2.jpg)
Chapter II: Rolling Hills, Open Sky:
Pioneers of the Wild Frontier

"The world was full of rumors just then, a marvelous thing had happened: a new land had been discovered, and just when it was needed. The people had wandered to the end of the world, in quest of food and safety. Like sand in an hourglass, pouring grain by grain. Over many thousands of years, wandering bands of people drifted toward the end of one world and crossed over into another."

Though you will find much anger among Native American tribes now at the concept - generally held - that their people originated in Asia and crossed over during one of the Ice Ages into what is now America, arguing that this makes them, in the words of one Lakota scholar, Vine Deloria Jr., "latecomers who had barely unpacked before Columbus came knocking on the door", it seems unlikely that they were always there. Other than Africa, where life is more or less now agreed to have begun, every race migrated from somewhere to somewhere. In my history of Ireland journal and my corresponding one on the history of England, I mark how each of those who believe themselves the original inhabitants came from other countries and settled there. It's a familiar scenario, and there's no reason to believe that it was any different for America.

Certainly, it makes more sense than the various origin myths espoused by some of the tribes, such as arriving through a giant log (Kiowa), being created by a trickster god (Crow) or even sung into existence, to the accompaniment of celestial objects getting it on with each other (Pawnee). While of course those are myths and despite the value each tribe puts upon them, I doubt there's any member of those peoples still living now who truly believe this is how they came into being. But even if the accepted theory is true, I don't quite get Mr. Deloria Jr.'s beef, as the last Ice Age, during which the huge ice land bridge known as Beringia stood and which may have provided a kind of "immigrant highway" for the people of Asia who sought out the new land, was about thirteen thousand years ago, so at least twelve thousand years before Columbus stood on the bow of the Santa Maria, intent on claiming the New World for Their Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Some even argue for a longer habitation, going back as far as thirty-five thousand years ago. Hardly johnny-come-latelys, as Deloria Jr. seems to grump his people would be seen.
(https://i.postimg.cc/Pfv6zK5L/buffalo1.jpg)
Die Hard the Hunter: Surviving and Thriving in America

Whatever your opinions on hunting these days, when little if any of it is due to hunger or a requirement for meat, back when the first Native American tribes roamed the continent, hunting was quite literally a choice between life and death. Yes, you could farm and grow crops, and many did, but these things take time. You plant your seeds and then wait through the seasons for the harvest to spring up. And even then the food has to be prepared. Not a whole lot of fun if you're starving as you wait. Hunting is immediate, in comparison. Go out today, get lucky and come home the same evening with enough meat to feed the family, maybe the tribe. One thing America had in abundance at this time was game, from the herds of buffalo and oxen and deer that covered the country to smaller quarry such as wolves, foxes, beavers and squirrels. And then of course there was bear.

But these animals had not survived as long as they had by being stupid; they were not going to come running into a trap. Anyone, I assume, who hunts will tell you that you have to stalk your prey, and have a certain amount of skill in order to succeed. So hunting became a necessary, a vital skill among the tribes; anyone - any man - who could not hunt likely did not eat, and certainly could not provide for his family. From a very early age, most tribes would train their male children in the art of hunting, and it became second nature. But another thing herds of animals do is have a tendency not to stay in one place, ranging across the plains and the prairie for food themselves, and they'll go where their prey, or the grass they wish to eat, is, which meant that most tribes had to be nomads or semi-nomads, following the herds as they moved across the country, relocating their camps and villages in an effort to ensure they did not go hungry.

The first believed peoples in America, known as the Clovis, flourished around 13,000 years ago, and so were necessarily primitive, and restricted to very basic weapons made of bone, wood and stone for their hunting. However, even today (as I'm sure dedicated hunters will tell you) it's not necessarily how powerful or effective your weapon is that gets you your kill, but how well you know both the territory and the habits of your quarry. The Clovis people studied their prey, and were able to tell to a reasonably certain degree which way they were going to go, what spooked them, when they watered and so on. All of this helped them greatly in their hunting exploits, indeed there are those who blame the sudden (in geological terms) extinction of a whole raft of species on over-hunting by the Clovis. Mammoths, short-faced Bears, sabre-tooth cats, mastodons, giant sloths, camels, lions, cheetahs and, um, giant beavers the size of bears, all disappeared around the end of the Pleistocene era, about ten thousand years ago.
(https://i.postimg.cc/zB2KsmDC/horsehi2.jpg)
Rather surprised to read that horses, too, became extinct at this time. I guess they mean they became extinct in America, and were not seen again until the sixteenth century when the Spanish explorers brought them to the New World. Odd though: I had no idea horses had ever been classified as extinct in any country, least of all America, if prehistoric America. Learn something new every day. One of the theories put forward as to why the Clovis were so successful in such a relatively short time - and against such large and, on the face of it, fierce predators - contends that none of these animals had, up to the arrival of the Clovis, seen a human, and had no idea what to expect. Their weapons were new to them, they were a new species and they had an intelligence and organisation the animals did not. And they were ruthless, and hungry. There was only one way that encounter was going to turn out.

It should be noted, in fairness, that most scientists now discount this "blitzkrieg theory" as it's called, believing that climatic changes resulting in weather patterns altering and also the supply of food for these animals vanishing, as warm-weather short grasses replaced the tall-grass prairies on which the larger beasts had subsisted. The bow and arrow, which eventually became the hunting weapon of choice until the arrival of the Spanish with their guns, seems to have begun with our friends the Athabaskans, inuits and eskimos up in the Arctic anything from 9,000 to 6,000 BC, and didn't reach the southern states, as it were, until nearly 600 AD, when they were found to be in use in Texas, and later California.

But unlike today, I assume, hunting was a spiritual as well as a physical activity. The Native American peoples had great respect, both for the land and for the animals who shared it with them. The idea that everything has a soul, or a spirit, including trees and grass and rocks, reflects in the mythology of the many tribes, most of whom worship or at least revere gods who are animals or take the shape of animals, such as eagle, bear, wolf and of course coyote. They would perform ritual dances and offer sacrifices to these gods before going on a hunt, in the hope the spirits, their ancestors, the gods and anyone else they looked up to would bless their venture, and they were always very careful to afford the creatures they killed the proper respect. As I noted earlier, many tribes did not allow the carcasses of animals slain in the hunt to be fed to dogs, which they believed disrespectful and which would then bring bad luck.

They were also very much aware of the worth of every kill, and wasted nothing if they could help it. Whereas today, a hunter might eat the cooked flesh of a deer or whatever hunters hunt these days, the Native Americans used everything, as I have already related, from skin and hide to sinews and even blood. In some ways, perhaps they believed that the spirit of the animal, which probably could not die anyway, lived on and protected, for instance, teepees covered in its skin, or warriors wearing its horns on their head, or whatever. At any rate, it would most likely have been seen to be a mark of disrespect again if they just ate the meat and threw the rest of the animal away, so they made sure everything had a purpose and could be used. This of course made them even more dependent on the animals they hunted, creating something of a cyclical sequence, a circle of death, if you will, that they took very seriously.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/84/56/69/8456690c88bd5b55ef2e793f414d8817.jpg)
Then of course, there was the spirit guide.

Most people know the idea, that when a young warrior who was of age went on the mysterious often drug-induced trip known as the vision quest, it was usually to try to contact his spirit animal. For everyone this could be different: anything from a beaver to a snake or a bear to a wolf, an eagle or a spider. This animal was then inextricably linked to that warrior, would protect him and advise him, and became sacred to him.

One animal that thrived after the extinction of the larger ones by the Clovis (maybe) was the buffalo or bison, which spread out across the prairies and the Great Plains, running from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The buffalo soon became the Native Americans' quarry of choice, a single animal quite possibly feeding a family of twelve for a week. Buffalo moved in herds, though, seldom found alone, and so rather than hunt singly or in small groups, the Native Americans would organise large parties, sometimes whole villages, sometimes one or more villages, to take part in a communal buffalo hunt, and share the kill. Doubtless there were many deaths. In the earlier parts of their existence on the Plains, the tribes hunted on foot, and given that buffalos weigh in the region of a ton and tend to move fast in all but stampeding herds, anyone who wasn't quick enough, agile enough, or fell or slipped during a hunt was not likely to be going home to the village, nor was anyone likely to be helping him up.
(https://as2.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/72/40/39/500_F_272403961_HgcEVyroLeUG6famxauvRu8sEP3bA0aI.jpg)
In addition to hunting, the tribes practiced gathering of fruits, herbs, grasses, roots, tubers, seeds and plants, some for use in food or drink, some for medicinal purposes, and some for ceremonial purposes. They were also squashed and their juices used as ink to decorate shields, clothing, armour and utensils. Gathering these was the job of the women, as was preparing the meat which the hunters brought in. One can almost envisage a Native American stomping into his teepee, tired but happy, jerking a thumb outside the tent. "Kill's outside, love, take care of it would you?" and putting his feet up while the little woman went to work. Probably not very accurate, but maybe not too far from the truth. Everyone in Native American society had their place and their responsibilities, and each took theirs very seriously. A woman would not have to be told to start skinning a deer or buffalo or antelope; she would know it was her duty to transform the dead animal into edible meat and other useful products.

Many of the tribes settled along the coast, and these mostly became fishermen, drawing their bounty from the sea and the many rivers that run through America. Fishing techniques would of course have been very basic - probably nets weighted down with stones, or the traditional figure of standing in a shallow river with a spear, ready for any unsuspecting marine life to swim by - though there were of course bigger game to be had if you could put to sea, or river, in a canoe: sea otters, seals, even whales were fished by these people. What exactly they did to land a whale I have no idea, but then after watching Moby Dick it seems the plan was always to go out in the smaller boats and finish off the whales - usually the smaller ones - so they probably did that.

Whatever, the abundance of fish, especially salmon, one of the coastal First Americans' food staples, particularly at the time of what was (and probably still is) called the salmon run, when the fish would return to their spawning grounds, led to the first real trading settlements. So many people would gather at these spawning grounds, particularly in The Dalles, a site upstream of the Columbia River, that this became a place for meeting, socialising, catching and eating the fish and for trading same, leading to the world's first ever trade fair on the banks of the Columbia.

The first salmon of the season caught would traditionally be shared among the children of the village, and the bones of any eaten were to be thrown back into the river, as a gesture of respect to the fish's spirit, to ensure the fishing would remain plentiful. Women were prohibited from touching salmon during their menstruation cycle, as it was believed the "unclean" blood would pollute the fish, though I doubt they were prevented from eating it. Not really sure.

Whales were dealt with in the same manner, ie the rituals had to be observed, as the Native Americans believed that a whale would only condescend to give up its life to hunters who had paid it the proper respect. After it had been killed, women would say special prayers for its spirit. Nothing was taken for granted; every fisherman knew that the caprices of wind, weather, heat, landslides of rock, or other natural disasters and phenomena could put paid to their fishing, cutting them off from their supply of food, so they took care to chant the right prayers, appeal to the spirits and the gods, and observe all the necessary rituals in the hope their food source would remain plentiful.

They were also all but horticulturalists, even ecologists, tending to the trees and plants, clearing away weeds and competing flora, using fire to clear paths and create growth, and providing enticing habitat for the animals they hunted. Just as with the fish and the buffalo, the Native Americans believed the plants, even the very grass they walked on, had a life of their own and deserved to be treated with respect. Respect was a reciprocal tool among these early peoples; if you treated something with regard then it would in turn work for you, so to speak. Respect cut both ways, as they saw it, and was a vital ingredient in ensuring their survival.

(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ptZRi8Qj7yD-XmZ9T_n3EA_tFSO0KwCs08x8lmXpcjEg7RwMZWThLZhaAgvQ5ep90l8y6c26l7HeHpNQzw1Wf0Hg03XyQqF9tyXhwR6PUBl7tfs7ebXjOn8)
Journeys of Survival: The Exigency of Movement and Migration

It seems to be generally accepted now that Athabaskan peoples such as the Eskimos and Inuits moved west around 1,700 years ago, perhaps as the boreal forest around Hudson Bay began to retreat due to climatic changes, bringing them into the more fertile and temperate regions beyond the Arctic Circle, and giving rise to such peoples as the Shawnee, Illinois, Foxes, Kickapoo, Miami and Menominee tribes, and later the Blackfoot and Cheyenne peoples. Those who had settled across what is now the border with Canada also migrated south, bringing them into our history, as they introduced the bow and arrow to America. These then would have been the historic ancestors of two of the bigger and more famous tribes of the Plains, the Apache and the Navajo.

As they moved across the continent, bigger tribes began to split and form newer ones, for various reasons, leading to the huge variety of Native American peoples who ended up inhabiting America, many of whom survive today, in one form or another. Western Sioux fragmented into Mandans, Hidastas and Crows, Eastern Sioux gave birth to Ioways, Missouris, Otos and Winnebagos. Given the tradition of storytelling and mythology that surrounds Native American history, and their lack of any written accounts, it's hard to pin down exactly what happened (though the theory is pretty much discounted among archaeologists and scholars that some of them were, for instance, dropped onto the land by a huge eagle, or dreamed into life by a creator god). It is clear though, that the early history of these peoples involved much movement, transition, resettlement and migration as they progressed deeper across the continent, seeking the best farmland or hunting grounds or the most clement weather or abundant fishing. One thing is certain however: these peoples moved into a land unpopulated by other human beings, and displaced no other living civilisation. To paraphrase Woody somewhat, this land was most certainly their land.

However, lest it be somehow misinterpreted that these were all peace-loving, mi casa su casa kind of people, consider the village at Crow Creek, on the Missouri in North Dakota, where evidence exists that 486 men, women and indeed children were killed, mutilated and scalped around 1325, in an apparent attempt at a land-grab.
(https://image.shutterstock.com/image-vector/attractive-animation-girl-clothes-american-260nw-453573676.jpg)
A Woman's Place: Gender Roles Among Native Americans

When the first explorers encountered their first, as they called them, Indians, they were shocked and often revolted at how backward and savage they were, in their eyes. These were no civilised people, and though they used them initially to gain knowledge of the New World and often tricked them into believing the Spanish conquerors friendly, in the minds of Europeans there were only two things that could be done for these heathen: convert them, or exterminate them. It's of course an example of the massive hubris of the white man that he believed - and still believes, mostly - himself to be the shining star in the human cosmos, the very pinnacle of evolution, the arbiter of class and the decider as to who should, and does, live or die. There's an old saying that men fear the unknown, and men in fear often resort to violence to assuage that terror; if you can't convert it, kill it, might be an appropriate axiom for early European settlers, and to be fair, we as a race haven't really advanced all that far from that idea.

But the truth of it is, the Native American peoples were far more civilised than the Europeans, far cleverer and far more in tune with nature, and in terms of gender politics and sexual equality they were centuries ahead of the luddites who eventually claimed the title of Americans. Based on a rigid class system that had held for thousands of years, Europeans could see little use for or value in women, other than for the obvious. Women could not vote, could not own property, could not own businesses or have any sort of independent wealth of their own. In the eyes of class and gender-conscious Europe (and this includes England of course, and Ireland) women were created to serve men; they were to stay at home, bring up the children, look after the house. They were to be courted, protected, defended and bullied, they were to be devalued and overlooked, condescended to and thought little of beyond marriage and breeding children. Their interests were totally separate to those of men, their ideas not worth the time it took to listen to, their endurance all but absent from their frail bodies and minds believed equally fragile and empty.

It took until the  late nineteenth century for women to achieve any sort of proper standing in society, and the twentieth before their voice would be heard in decisions that affected them, before they could start speaking for themselves instead of having men speak for them. In Native American culture though, which had been around for, as we noted above, in the region of fourteen thousand years, and possibly longer, women were not only highly valued but were often given not only an equal, but a superior standing in society. We've spoken before of the matrilineal nature of some tribes, and the idea of matrilocation. But we've only sort of nodded to them in passing before moving on. Let's take a proper look at those concepts, and how they were implemented in the society of early Native American man.

Here's how Wiki defines the term: Matrilineality is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's lineage – and which can involve the inheritance of property and/or titles. A matriline is a line of descent from a female ancestor to a descendant (of either sex) in which the individuals in all intervening generations are mothers – in other words, a "mother line". In a matrilineal descent system, an individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as their mother. This ancient matrilineal descent pattern is in contrast to the currently more popular pattern of patrilineal descent from which a family name is usually derived. The matriline of historical nobility was also called their enatic or uterine ancestry, corresponding to the patrilineal or "agnatic" ancestry.

So essentially here, the woman has all the power. All lineal descent goes through her family, not that of her husband, and it's her female children who stand to inherit any land, property or other bequest. In Native American terms, some of this has to do with many of their spirits and gods being female, such as Sky Woman and Bright Shining Woman, Owl Woman and even Mother Corn or Corn Mother (depending on tribe), one of the most vital staples upon which the peoples of early America subsisted. Martilienal progression also led to the clan mothers, who, though not actual leaders or chiefs, were in effect the power behind the throne in many Native American tribes, being the ones who chose the leaders and who could, if they were seen not to live up to their responsibilities or to fail the people, be replaced at the clan mothers' command.

There's no need for surprise that such a "savage" people should value women more than the so-called civilised Europeans. The wonder is that women were trod upon for so long in the western nations. After all, if there is one great power in this universe, mightier than all, it is life. Without life, nothing exists. And women are the only ones who can give life, bring life into the world. Native Americans recognised and celebrated that fact; they knew that without their women they would be doomed to die out as a race, and being a highly spiritual people, the cycle of life and death was very important to them, possibly a reason why older people too were revered and respected, perhaps believed to be closer to communing with the spirits of their ancestors, whom they would soon join, than the younger in the tribe.

We've touched on the role of women in the creation of the world, too, in Native American myths. We've met Corn Mother, Mother Corn or in some versions First Mother, but there's also Big Turtle, who created and carried the world on her back, Star Woman, Hard Being Woman and Spider Woman (no, seriously). In the myths of the Arctic Athabaskan peoples, Sedna is the daughter of the creator, Anguta, and it is she who creates the world. There are plenty more examples, but we don't want to get too bogged down in legends and myth. The fact is that Native Americans recognised and valued the role women played in their society; they prepared the kill so that it could be eaten and preserved, they made the clothes the people wore, they made baskets and decorations. They were in charge of sowing crops and gathering herbs and other plants for use in medicine, and for ritual ceremonies too.

And of course, women took care of the children they had brought into the world. While it was the man's duty to instruct and train the males, the females would be taught by their mothers and her sisters how to cook, clean, prepare meat and so forth. An interesting effect of the matrilineal society was that it was not the father, or husband, who was the most important male member of the family, but the uncle or brother-in-law, usually the eldest brother of the wife. This was because the clan the mother belonged to was the one through which the line of succession passed, and since, as in most Native American tribes, the husband was generally of another clan, he (or his clan) had a much weaker claim upon his children.

In other words, the line of female succession decided who would be mentor and almost father figure to her children (even if they already had a father); as mentioned previously, the father - and most likely the uncle too - would often be away hunting or raiding, so many times the task of training the boys fell to the grandfather, the father of the wife, who would be too old to join any such party. Land was managed, and in some tribes actually seen to be owned, by the women, and parcelled out as they thought fit among their family and extended family.

Clan mothers were generally not elected or chosen, but descended as a hereditary right through the female line, so the title would be passed from mother to her sisters and then to her daughters and on to their daughters, and so on. Clan mothers were often responsible for giving every clan member its name, and Faithkeepers were charged with arranging weddings, funerals and other ceremonial rites. Legend, at least Iroquois legend has it that the Great Peacemaker, the greatest prophet in their mythology/history, who brought together the Five Nations during the twelfth century, first converted a woman, Jigonhsasee, and thereby she became the first clan mother. The legend goes on to explain that before the formation of the Five Nations there was war between the Hunters, a cannibal tribe made up exclusively of men, and the Cultivators, all women, who knew the secret of farming. When some of the men joined the women and the Hunters were defeated, the Great Prophet decreed that from that day forth, men and women should be equal, and that the clan mother should not lead the clan, but should choose its leaders, in a sort of perhaps very early power-sharing arrangement.

The Great Prophet put it thus: The lineal descent of the People of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered proprietors of the nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall the status of the mother. (I'm assuming the missing word after "shall" is maybe "honour" or something like that).

The clan mothers also conduct what is known as the "cross-over ceremony", which I guess is a coming of age/rite of passage/bar mitzvah thing, marking the end of childhood and the onset of adolescence. These involve fasting, meditation, teaching and a period of seclusion lasting twenty days. During this time, the clan mothers are on hand to provide advice and encouragement to the fasters. Once the ceremony reaches its end there is a big dance and festival to welcome the ex-children into the world of adolescence. We've heard of the "mourning wars" the Iroquois and other tribes would launch when a member of a clan died and they wished to find a replacement, or alternatively find someone to torture to death so as to assuage the clan's grief. Well, those were apparently also under the control of the clan mothers, showing further the power of women to urge the men on to violent action by calling them cowards if they did not obey the order.

In his Iroquois Culture and Commentary , Doug George-Kanentilio writes "In our society, women are the center of all things. Nature, we believe, has given women the ability to create; therefore it is only natural that women be in positions of power to protect this function. ... We traced our clans through women; a child born into the world assumed the clan membership of its mother. Our young women were expected to be physically strong. ... The young women received formal instruction in traditional planting. ... Since the Iroquois were absolutely dependent upon the crops they grew, whoever controlled this vital activity wielded great power within our communities.

It was our belief that since women were the givers of life they naturally regulated the feeding of our people. ... In all countries, real wealth stems from the control of land and its resources. Our Iroquois philosophers knew this as well as we knew natural law. To us it made sense for women to control the land since they were far more sensitive to the rhythms of the Mother Earth. We did not own the land but were custodians of it. Our women decided any and all issues involving territory, including where a community was to be built and how land was to be used. ...

In our political system, we mandated full equality. Our leaders were selected by a caucus of women before the appointments were subject to popular review....Our traditional governments are composed of an equal number of men and women. The men are chiefs and the women clan-mothers. ... As leaders, the women closely monitor the actions of the men and retain the right to veto any law they deem inappropriate. ... Our women not only hold the reigns of political and economic power, they also have the right to determine all issues involving the taking of human life. Declarations of war had to be approved by the women, while treaties of peace were subject to their deliberations."

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The Omnipresent Mother-in-Law: Matrilocal Tradition in Native American tribes

Oh yes, there was no escaping the dreaded mother-in-law if you were part of, or married into a matrilineal society. You were expected to move in with your new bride's mother, and she and her sisters and aunts would be at you night and day, pointing out all your little inadequacies (hey, it's cold out, you know?) to your wife. You'd probably kill - literally - for the chance to get away from the jabbering women on a hunt or raiding party. Hell, you might even hope you didn't make it back!

But seriously, this was the tradition. The couple either lived in or near the wife's mother's house, and she, the mother, would be very involved in the raising of the children, who would always be brought up as part of her clan, not his. If a man misbehaved or brought shame upon his wife, he had no right to be in the house (whether they lived with or close to the mother) and could be ordered by law to leave the gaffe. Any children from the marriage remained, of course, the property or at least the responsibility of the woman, and the husband might never see them again if he strayed.

Finally, and linked to both the above, there is matrifocality, which occurs when the power of the household is centred in the hands of the mother; she makes all the big decisions, keeps the family together and is the main voice in the family. The husband may not even be very much involved in the family, almost seen as a visitor at times, and certainly would not be able to override any orders or edicts put down by the mother (who would be his mother-in-law): a fate worse than death for many men, especially on our side of the divide! But despite hysteria that such a "topsy-turvy" way of doing things would result in disaster, giving the women so much power that the men would become little more than subservient sperm donors, this method worked for tens of thousands of years for the Native Americans (not all, but many) and even then, the men remained proud and noble warriors, and any outsider coming into their society would view them as being the ones in charge. Further proof, perhaps, of the cunning way the clan mothers manipulated their power, or maybe just proof that women could be in charge without it going to their heads.

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A Kind of Magic: Ritual, Ceremony and Prayer in Early America

Another reason why explorers, and later, settlers, regarded the various Native American peoples as "savage" and "uncivilised" and "heathen" was that they could not, or would not, understand the processes by which these people lived. To a people who believed all of nature was tied together, that man was not all that far above the animals - that they, as mentioned, willingly gave themselves up to the human hunters thanks to the proper rituals being observed - and that even the grass and the trees and the sky had to be respected, it was vitally important that the proper ceremonial offerings be made, not only to ensure good hunting but to reaffirm their bond with animals, plants, the rocks and the earth, the trees and the rivers and the sky. A working dogma for almost every Native American tribe could have been "all is one". They certainly believed themselves superior to animals, but only because the Great Spirit said so, and not in the same way as we do. We believe animals are there for our use and have no say in the matter. Native Americans worked on a sort of symbiotic relationship with, well, everything, but especially the animals they hunted.

It is a matter of huge hypocrisy (not that religion isn't based on the nastiest and most violent form of hypocrisy anyway) that Spanish missionaries, and later English, German and others, took offence at the "barbaric" rituals observed by the various Native American tribes. In effect, what the people of America were doing when settlers first encountered them is exactly what those settlers were doing themselves, just in a more overt, and some would say honest way. What was the first thing Christopher Columbus reportedly did when he set foot on the land that would be known as America, and which he believed to be the West Indies? Knelt down and thanked God. To a higher civilisation, would this not be seen as a pointless, savage, uneducated ritual? What role had God played in their adventures? How could they believe he had guided them to their destination? Faith alone drove them, and this same faith in their gods was what spurred the Native Americans to be respectful and careful in their dealings with all other creatures.

However, having given thanks to his god, it was not so very long before Columbus was killing and making slaves of these new peoples, taking their resources and, quite literally, claiming their land in the name of his sovereigns. Native Americans made no such claims, and generally once they had made peace with or come to friendly terms with another people or tribe, kept those promises, which is why it must have seemed like such an amazing and disheartening betrayal to them when the men from across the sea did not keep their word, and this would forever colour the relationship between the two civilisations, the white man never failing to live down to the expectations of the red, culminating in the culling and ethnic cleansing of the latter by the former, and their subjugation as little better than slaves.
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Fantastic Journey: The Vision Quest in Native American Belief

Although they would of course see many rituals, dances and other ceremonies be enacted while young, the first real encounter a Native American male would have with the actual powers that his people believed ruled and ordered their world would be through the medium of the vision quest. This word has, like Iroquois for those people, some distasteful connotations, as it is not the word they use for the spiritual journey, but in the world of the white man it has become more or less accepted as the umbrella catch-all term for what is a sacred rite of passage for Narive American youths, and so you'll forgive me if I use it. What it's called is though not as important as what it signifies, which is much more than a farewell to adolescence and ascension to adulthood in the nature of a boy's first car, or kiss, or even the first time he has to be bailed out of jail. The vision quest was the point at which the boy's future was, literally decided, revealed to him, his path in life laid out before him by the spirits of his ancestors and the gods, who would often appear in animal form, and came to be known as spirit guides and spirit animals.

In order to get a better understanding of the ideas behind the rituals of the Native Americans, particularly that of the vision quest, I've turned to Lee Irwin's Dream Seekers: the Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains, and here's how he or she describes how the Natives saw and interacted with the world:

"One of the most fundamental aspects of the Plains religious topology is its implicit, undivided wholeness. This wholeness institutes the interactive relationships between many beings, both visible and invisible, whose homes are identified with particular ecological environments. The center of this wholeness is the earth itself, regarded as a living being-usually (but not always) a life-giving female. Human beings, the "two* leggeds," live on the earth in shared relationships with all other living creatures, particularly grazing and herding animals- the "'four-leggeds" or "grass-eaters." Below, or perhaps more accurately, within both the earth and the water, is another group of beings with special or unique abilities.

Above, yet another group of beings extends from the earth up through the sky, the home of the "wingeds," and into the celestial realm of the sun, moon, and stars. Thus there are three interpenetrating strata and their respective realms that constitute the wholeness of the natural world: the above realm, the middle realm, and the below realm. The relationship between these realms can best be described topologically as a distinctive contrast, more or less emphasized, between the above and the below, with the middle representing the mysterious realm in which all beings meet and interact."

So if you followed all of that (wouldn't blame you if you didn't) it seems that the spirit world, to the Native Americans, was not some vague half-formed idea of Paradise or the afterlife as we know it, or indeed a vast drinking-hall to which entry was only granted if a Viking died a glorious death, or even the dark, murky world of terrifying more after-death than afterlife the ancient Greeks waited in fear of being called to. For the Native Americans, the spiritual world and the "real" world, the world of the now, the world they lived in, existed both independently and co-dependently. If you sinned in this one, your actions had - usually dire - consequences in the other. Your ancestors were watching you, not as some idea of ghosts floating about, but really, truly there, watching from the world to which they had gone after death, and to which you too must pass when your life was over. You did not want to upset them, and you really wanted to make them proud.
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However, what I read tends to give me the idea that a vision quest was not the sort of meditation till you attain Nirvana kind of thing we might suppose, and more the idea of someone, quite young, who was seeking his way in life, looking for meaning and purpose, and seeking advice from his much older ancestors, in the way a young man might turn to his father or grandfather to dispense his wisdom of the world. Nor were these quests simply completed. Irwin titles the chapter which deals with them "Isolation and Suffering", and so it was. The young warrior would be taken, or be directed to a place of solitude, usually a sacred place, there to remain for several days without food or water, praying and endeavouring to make contact with, be noticed by or form a relationship with the spirits. When one of these deigned to impart its wisdom and power, it most usually took the form of some animal, which was thereafter sacred to and connected with the individual. Often, the "spirit animal" would present the quester with items - special plants, herbs, songs etc - which would then aid his path through life.

Most often, these vision quests would take place on a hill or other high ground, often one sacred to a particular spirit, the idea being to get as close as possible to the spirit world, and also to make the quester visible to those who dwelt above by raising himself above ground level. The quest was usually undertaken in spring, as this was seen as a time of renewal and rebirth, when the spirits were at their most potent. Seen, too, as a time when animals and plants who had been hibernating or sleeping through the winter would wake up and again "come alive", there could be no doubt about the strong symbolism of spring, and its power.

Even those of us with the most rudimentary knowledge of Native Americans will be familiar with one tradition, the rain dance, though in truth there were several different dances important to the tribes, all of which served different purposes.

The Grass Dance

Honours the tribe's ancestors (and also helps flatten the grass as the dancers stomp about) and in which the dancers, attired in bright colours and wearing stalks of sweetgrass in their belts (from which practice the name of the dance comes) sway in time like the movements of the grass on the prairie.

The Hoop Dance

This, on the other hand (and legs, and body) looks to be about the most ambitious multi-hula hoop challenge ever attempted, as various hoops, symbolising the never ending cycle of life, were used to tell stories and impart wisdom. The dance began with one hoop, representing the world, to which others were added, in turn signifying animals, the wind, humans, water and seasons. The hoops were used to create stylised shapes, and the Hoop Dance is still popular today.

The Snake Dance

By contrast, this one was practiced mostly by one people, the Hopi, and involved - you guessed it - live snakes. And not harmless ones either: most of the ones used in the ceremony were rattlesnakes. But the Hopi revere the snake, believing it to be the guardian of water, so precious a commodity, and consider them their brothers. Not quite sure what the snakes thought of it all. The Snake Dance was not a spontaneous event; the snakes were gathered and then watched over by the children of the tribe for sixteen days, then carried by the dancers in their mouths. After the dance the snakes were let free, in the four directions, to carry the prayers of the tribe to their ancestors. No figures exist for how many, if any, dancers have been bitten by a snake during the performance of this ritual.

The Stomp Dance

This was performed at night, for the health of the community, and as part of the Green Corn Festival, of which more shortly. It seemed to have been a sort of early conga line, with the leader circling the fire and those who wished to join in following behind him, in order of age and experience, men and women in alternate positions. Another night time dance, it usually involved the taking of certain herbs, fasting and continued on till sunrise. And that brings us to one of the most popular and well-known, and perhaps feared, and certainly most depicted in movies, of the Native American tribal dances.

The War Dance

Surely needs little explanation, as it does exactly what it says on the tin. Surviving in some sort of semi-way in the Haka, performed by the South African rugby team before a match, it is designed to rile up the blood and to stoke feelings of bravery and resolution just before a battle or raid. The war dance could last all night, and usually involved painting of the face, smoking of pipes and the handling of sacred items. Animal masks would be worn to symbolise and conjure the spirits.

The Sun Dance

Performed at the summer solstice, the Sun Dance was a ceremony to allow the tribe to offer sacrifices and prayers for the continuing health of the family and community. Sometimes the body would be pierced, and often eagle feathers and buffalo skins would be used, as both animals are considered central to the dance. There is also one of the more important dances, the Ghost Dance, but as this only came into being in the nineteenth century, and as a direct result of oppression by the US Army and government, I'll hold that one over until we get to that point in the timeline. For now, then, that leaves the big one.


The Rain Dance

It's not hard to understand the idea behind the Rain Dance. For a people who lived on the plains, where the weather could be arid and dry, rain was a vital, life-giving gift, needed not only for the health of the people but for their crops too, and for their animals. Without it, all three would die, and of course given the already mentioned affinity of the Native American people for them, they would have been concerned for the welfare of the earth, the grass, the trees and so on almost as much as for their own. The Rain Dance, then, served as a petition to the spirits to send down rain to irrigate the fields and allow life to flourish on the plains. Usually, and not surprisingly, it was a spring dance, performed when the need for rain was greatest.

It was somewhat unique in that not only men participated in the dance, unlike others apart from the Stomp Dance, and although many different costumes and types of jewellery were used, feathers and the colour blue predominated, these signifying the wind and the rain, respectively.

Healing Rituals

Unlike western medicine, Native American rituals, while they could be and were used for individual purposes, such as curing a wound or treating a disease, were often also used as a sort of ceremonial healing of the tribe, village or community; a way of bringing harmony to, or back to, a large group, and re-establishing the ancient and important links between the people and the land. Sacred objects such as a medicine wheel or healing hoop would be used, and these communal healing ceremonies could take several days to conduct. Among the first of what are now called ethnobotanists in the world - in other words, people who studied, understood and knew how best to use plants, herbs and grasses in medicine - roots, tubers, plants and herbs all played a big part in Native American healing. They had, after all, no access to the sort of pharmaceuticals we have today, with the invention of things like penicillin hundreds of years away, and so they had to use what nature provided.

Of course, using the plants which grew in the ground was second nature to the Native Americans, who believed all life connected, and so were taking from Mother Earth her bounty, and using the spirits of the herbs and plants to help them heal and be better. One of the most widely-used herbs was sweetgrass, but they also used sage, bear berry, red cedar and even tobacco in their medicine. They also utilised sweat lodges, perhaps an early iteration of the sauna, in which sick or ailing individuals would sit, rubbing herbs upon their body, smoking a remedy and/or watching while a holy man conducted sacred rites to drive angry spirits away and make the man whole again.

Peyote was another thing used, ground down in tea for ceremonies such as baptisms, funerals and healing. The peyote is the dried fruit of a small cactus, and in current times has been used as a hallucinogenic, most famously by the band The Eagles while recording their first album in the desert. Perhaps they knew of the rites which lasted from sundown to sunup and utilised eagle feathers, as well as incense and fire, for cleansing mind and body. Apparently you can get just exactly the same high by taking LSD, not that I would know, Lucy.

Green Corn Festival

Probably best described as a harvest festival, this took place in midsummer and was, of course, inextricably tied in with the importance of corn as a staple of the Native American people. The ceremony would typically last three days and entailed dancing, singing, feasting, fasting (isn't it odd how, with the removal - or addition - of one letter that word becomes its complete reverse?) and religious observation. No corn could be eaten until the Great Spirit had been appeased, and the Green Corn Festival also served as an opportunity for village committees and councils to meet and consider infractions and past sins of the village, which would usually be forgiven at this time. It was also a naming festival, where babies would be given names, and a time of coming of age for youth. Sports would also be played, and spiritual as well as physical purification practiced, including the burning of waste and the cleaning out of homes, while at the end of each of the three days a feast was held to celebrate the good harvest.

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Chapter III: Christopher Who?
The Pre-Columbian Discovery
and Exploration of America

"Never have we praised somebody so highly for being so wrong" - Patrick Huyghe, Columbus Was Last: From 200,000 BC to 1492 - A Heretical History of Who Was First

"The very definition of culture hinges on accumulation, transmission, and cross-fertilization of knowledge." - Professor Paul Shao, Iowa State University.

Note: While this journal is concerned only with the history of North America, the entire continent, including Canada and South America, need to be looked at in terms of who arrived there first, and when, so for this chapter only I will be expanding my reach to include South America, Mexico and, if necessary, Canada. Because the entire thing forms one giant landmass, the idea of people arriving in one part and either sailing to or just migrating into another has to be considered, so we can't ignore if say Chinese sailors landed in Mexico or Indian ones in Peru or whatever. Only by looking at the full picture can we build up a proper narrative of what may, or may not have happened before Senor Colon.

Trust can be a very powerful thing. You trust your parents, when you're little, believing they know everything and that what they tell you is true. You trust your teachers, when you go to school - they are older and founts of knowledge, so what they tell you, what they teach you must be the truth. And you trust the history you learn. Well, why not? Who would lie about events that took place hundreds or even thousands of years ago?

And then you grow up, and you start to question these things, and you think to yourself that something may not sound right, and that possibly you have not been told the real truth about it. And there are many reasons why this will be so. Existing power structures wish to remain in place, control of the narrative is an effective tool for the control of the people, and sometimes the real truth is just something those in authority, those in whom you have, from an early age, placed your unquestioning trust, don't want you to know.

For many years - hell, right up to yesterday, in fact - I, like so many others, believed the myth that America was discovered by an Italian navigator and explorer working for the king and queen of Spain. He may even have believed it himself, at the time. But the truth - the real truth - is that when Christopher Columbus first sighted land and placed his feet on the beach at what he called San Salvador in the Bahamas, he was in fact following the journeys and walking in the footsteps of men who had passed that way over ten times the length of his life. Columbus was not in any way the first man to walk on the shores of what became known as America, not even the first white man, just the first European.

But as in all things, history is not only written by the winners but almost invariably by the powerful, the rich and almost exclusively by the white race, and so the story was spread throughout the Christian world of the time that the brave Italian Cristobal Colon, or Christopher Columbus, had "discovered" America, also known (erroneously) as the West Indies and more popularly (and, at the time, accurately) as the New World. His was the fame, his was the glory, yet time was not kind to him and the country he "first discovered", as the history books will tell you, and as we all know, did not end up carrying his name, but that of another Italian explorer. More of that in the next chapter, however.
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It would probably be a little glib, though no less true, to say that the various other people who walked on American land before the Italian Admiral of the Ocean have been forgotten, or willfully pushed to one side, by history, because they don't matter, but in many cases this has to be seen as the case. Most, not all but most, were black, and we know what European expansionist white supermacist history thinks of blacks. If they have a role at all, black people take the part of the slaves brought back from Africa to create the enduring and annoyingly indelible stain of human trafficking practiced, not only by America it must be said, but practised by that country for the longest period. When other nations had given up - or been forced to outlaw - the heinous crime of slavery, Americans stubbornly clung to their outmoded and by now unfashionable and seen as reprehensible practice of holding human beings in bondage for their own enrichment.

And this, generally, is what history will tell us about the black man and black woman. The word SLAVE is written large in deeply-incised letters of blood and fire across the entire history of the black community, the people now often referred to as African-Americans, and even today that horrid legacy persists, while under certain recent administrations its inhuman and misshapen shadow has begun to crawl out of the dark caverns of history and stagger across the landscape of politics, crime and human rights.
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But how much different would it be did people know how important black people were to the discovery of America? How humble might so-called "real Americans", "patriots" and "pure Americans" feel if they knew that they were little more than what we call here blow-ins; Johnny Come Latelys arriving in the fifteenth and sixteenth century to a land which had known the tread of the red man for over ten thousand years, and that of the black for over five hundred? Not much difference, probably, knowing people today. All of what we are about to record here might very well be dismissed as "fake news" or "BLM propaganda", or any of the other myriad and pathetic excuses certain people have to explain away that which they cannot contemplate, agree with, understand or expect. In desperation, such facts might just be ignored, as they have been so far for over a millennium. But history can't be ignored. The truth will, eventually, out.

This is the truth.

It may surprise you.

That does not make it any less true.

Note: All of the following information is taken from They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima. For those who may wish to examine his credentials, Van Sertima is a Professor teaching at Rutgers University. He is an anthropologist and linguist, and has written on this same subject for the New York Times. His book was written over forty-five years ago, in 1976, yet this is the first time I have ever heard of it. Not that I should necessarily know of such things, but if, as I assume it is, proof for his conclusions are given in this book, should that information not by now have been used to update or even let's say correct the history of the discovery and exploration of America? Of course, such updates would  not go down well in the Land of the Free now, I understand that; but if this is a deliberate attempt to keep the world in the dark about the critical and pivotal role black people had in the exploration of the United States of America, then I think it's doing everyone a huge disservice.

There is, of course, and has been, a very fragile and delicately-balanced state of mutual distrust between whites and blacks in America for, well, as long as the latter were forcibly introduced to the country by the former. You might even characterise it as an uneasy truce, and in very recent times this truce has wavered, snapped and now looks to be about to bend and reverse what little progress has been made in race relations in America. Despite a black man having risen to the highest office in the land, the racial divisions in America have never been wider, and truth to tell, they were never that narrow anyway, despite the fine work of people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and of course Barack Obama, so a suggestion now that America was discovered by black people would be likely to strike a fuse to the tinder box that is just waiting to go off, and thrust the country into a full-on racial war.

So maybe it can be understood that this information had not been made public. But as the slogan goes, and it's very true of course, black lives matter too; so does black history. If their ancestors were here before the whites, today's blacks should be told this, and be able to point with pride and even a little arrogance towards their brave forebears, claiming once and for all their inalienable right to be here.

But such things are for Americans to decide, and there's nothing I can do to speed or engage in that process. All I can do is tell you what I've learned, which is, to me anyway, nothing short of earth-shattering.

Professor Van Sertima's own work is based, in part, he says in the foreword, on that of another acamadecian, Professor Leo Wiener, whose own research resulted in a three volume discussion entitled Africa and the Discovery of America, itself published six years before he began writing his, so at least the tail-end of the 1960s, possibly a little further back, as I don't know how long it took Van Sertima to write and publish his own book. But either way, we're looking at a minimum now then of sixty years of the truth being ignored, or most likely suppressed.

Time to do what little I can in my own small way to try to set it free.

I:  Sailing the Green Sea of Darkness  to the World's End

(https://cdn.worlddata.info/pics/soc-africa.jpg)

Living as they did in its heart, while North Africans respected and feared the mighty, pitiless expanse of the Sahara Desert, they were more in awe of the great sea which lay beyond the rivers they knew, and where, it was said, the gods plucked up the vessels of those who wandered too far - whether due to bravery or accident - and flung them over the edge of the world into a dark hole from which no man returned. But times were changing, and scholars from as far as Morocco had begun to challenge such ideas, including the inherent one of the world being flat. No, said these men: the world is like a gourd, and could you but travel far enough, rather than fall off its edge, you would return to the point from which you started.

Given that more enlightened areas of the world such as Europe, and especially Greece, centre of learning and science for much of the ancient world, had long disproved or at least abandoned the theory of a flat earth, this might seem a little backward. But it is important to remember that we're talking here about the thirteenth century, when Africa as a nation had little if any trade with the other side of the world, and not much to counter this argument. It should also be borne in mind that a country as relatively advanced as China retained the belief that the world was flat right up to the seventeenth century.

Abubakari II

There are those who say he did not exist, and they may be right, but our information comes from Arab accounts and writings, and whether or not they refer to him, or someone else for whom he is the model, the name we're given in Abubakari II, King of Mali. Everything after this will be written with respect to those who have given us the accounts, and therefore taken, in so far as possible, to be true. Abubakari then, came to the throne of Mali young, and with a young man's boredom for rituals and pilgrimages, and worn out by endless wars, he envisaged instead enshrining his reign with an undertaking nobody before him had considered, or dared. He would cross the Green Sea of Darkness, and see what lay beyond.
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Though technically a Muslim, Abubakari rejected many of the more stringent disciplines of Islam. He is said to have believed the teachings of the imams as "crickets singing at sundown in the darkened savannahs", and he felt that Muslims in general were "terrified of real life, terrified of the primitive power of sex, terrified of the senses." He laughed sharply when they recoiled from the sight of his daughters swimming naked while they "entombed their women up to the eyes in cloth." Somewhat like perhaps you might think King George messing with steam engines or Nero competing in the chariot races, Abubakari left his affairs of state to his underlings and surrounded himself with the best and brightest, the forward-thinking men whose minds rejected, like his, the warnings and the superstitions of the elders. He was trying to usher in a new golden age of knowledge and enlightenment, and such ideas as his ancestors - and some in his present time, even some at his court - espoused got in the way of that attempt. You can't go forward while looking back, he may have thought, and so he set his sights on the future.

To this end, he sent forth a summons from his court for all men who had experience and skill in shipbuilding, navigation, exploration and all associated skills to come to him, and assist him in launching his great adventure. From the Gambia they answered his call, from Senegal and the Niger they came, even from far-off Lake Chad. From these men he learned and was taught many things, such as that having a large boat might not necessarily be the best way to go, that even though the great ocean could be tumultuous and savage with its currents and storms, often it was more dangerous when calm, when the winds dropped and not a breath stirred the sails, and a ship could lie becalmed for days, even weeks, or longer. He was told of tiny islands which certain men had visited, but found to be barren and lifeless. However discouraging those accounts might be though, others did theorise that beyond the great expanse of water there could, in all possibility, lie new, undiscovered lands.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/7d/73/e07d73b3fb6d68e0c145246bf24dd3af.jpg)
Though many suggestions were made as to what sort of boat he should build - some said it must have a sail, but others that to rely on a sail alone was asking for trouble, referencing the already-noted deadly calms, and that oars should also be included, Abubakari decided in the end to play it safe and have made not one type of ship, but to take note of all men's advice, and ensure he had the best possible chance of survival in the fleet at the head of which he would put to sea. Minor skirmishes on his border were called off as he recalled his soldiers to aid in the building, caravan guides and navigators, who knew how to plot courses, were put into service, also holy men, magicians, philosophers and thinkers. An extensive programme of deforestation was embarked upon as trees were cut down to provide the wood for the fleet, and with supply boats intended to follow the main ships in order to ensure they did not run out of provisions should some disaster strike, the whole thing would resemble a seaborne version of the great Arab caravans that traversed the unforgiving desert.

A fine adventure indeed, but one must wonder what the people thought? No doubt the shipbuilding cost immense amounts of money, and no doubt also this was paid for by them, in the form of taxes levied on them. Did they believe - secretly, of course, for who would openly criticise the ruler? - that the prince was being too single-minded, devoting all his energies to what could be called a pet project, even a white elephant, while he neglected his kingdom? Were there the kinds of sullen mutterings that accompanied Man's efforts to reach the Moon, over seven hundred years later, while people back on Earth starved and had nowhere to live? We don't know: none of this is recorded in the writings, as I suppose it might have been forbidden, or considered indelicate or even dangerous, certainly controversial, to voice such doubts about the soundness of the prince's decision. At any rate, once the fleet was assembled, Abubakari instructed its captains "Do not return until you have reached the ends of the ocean, or until you have exhausted your supplies of food."
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Castillia.jpg)
Perhaps the last part of that instruction might be seen as superfluous; if they ran out of food, was it likely they could make it home? You would have to assume that was an afterthought, and what Abubakari II really meant was "find the new world or don't bother coming back." When some time later (it's not made clear when, but I would imagine weeks, maybe months) one of the captains appeared at court to advise that he had watched his fellow captains sail over the horizon and get caught up in a strong current, but fearing it he had turned back, Abubakari feared the worst. All was lost. He had gambled on this great expedition and it had turned to dust in his hands. Now he would not be the toast of the Arab world, but its joke. People would point (not in reality, but in their minds, and in private) at him and call him reckless, a dreamer, a failure. The sea voyage would be called "Abubakari's Folly", and worse, nobody would even think of exploring the great dread dark ocean again. Mali would remain in ignorance and isolation when it could have been at the vanguard of a new world of discoveries.

He would not let such a thing be, he decided, and people privately thought their prince had gone mad when he announced his decision to build a new fleet, far larger than the first, and, more, to captain it himself. He personally would command the expedition which would go in search of the first one, and see what had happened.

The year was 1311, almost a hundred and fifty years before Columbus was even born.

It can be more or less accepted that as he embarked on this voyage Abubakari essentially abdicated, as he transferred all power to his brother as regent, telling Kankan Musa that if he did not return he was to assume the monarchy in his stead. He described the period his brother should wait before taking  power as "a reasonable amount of time", but I'm not sure what any court in the land would see that as covering: months? Years? The moment the prince's ships had vanished over the horizon? At any rate, his brother got to take power as Abubakari never returned to his kingdom, sailing instead into history.

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What has the last story to do with the discovery of America? Nothing, really; I just used it as a way of demonstrating that Columbus and his fellow Europeans were not the first to explore by sea, and that it's not that much a stretch to believe the following accounts, which do involve the New World.

It's an interesting point that Patrick Huyghe, quoted at the beginning of this chapter making a quip that will rankle with many respected historians (not the least because it's true) makes when he says that of all the landmasses in the world, the continent of America - north and south - was the very last inhabitable area to be colonised. This is of course mostly due to its being originally cut off by huge ice sheets and glaciers stretching across what would become the border between it and Canada. Only when the thaw began, about an estimated 12,000 years ago, were primitive humans able to move down south and into the continent of America. Still, given how so many of its proud denizens go on about America being the greatest country in the world it's rather sobering to find that, technically speaking, it was the last choice for humans to live in, way back then.
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But come - eventually - they did, driven by changes in weather and hunting patterns, and as we've already noted earlier, the first recorded people to settle in what would become America were called the Clovis, after the area in Mexico where the first fossilised remains were discovered. It has in fact been theorised that there was another race there before them, a race who have been somewhat obviously perhaps named the Pre-Clovis, but no evidence of their existence has been uncovered, and as it stands they're more a sort of working theory, like many ancient civilisations who have vanished without a trace, but who are expected to have existed, even if their presence cannot be proven.

As the descendants of the Clovis, who vanished suddenly and were replaced by what we came to know as Native Americans, are believed to have come across the land bridge of Beringia from Asia, it's actually not too surprising that a certain Italian mariner, arriving in America just before the turn of the sixteenth century, mistook it for Asia. The characteristics and features of many of the people would have added fuel to his hypothesis, and indeed Columbus is believed to have been right in identifying the people, if not the continent, as Asian. It's certainly more or less accepted now that the ancestors of the first Americans came over, either by foot or in small boats, from places like Russia and China, accounting for some of the more mongoloid and oriential features of even today's Native Americans.

(https://cdn.countryflags.com/thumbs/japan/flag-3d-250.png)

Pottery found in Ecuador, in a place called Valdivia is dated to around 4,000 to 3,000 BC, and has been identified by experts as being so similar to that made in the Japanese island of Kyushu that the almost inescapable conclusion is that somehow, Japanese explorers were in America at that time. The pottery, it is said, could not simply have developed out of influences over time, as it is too complete, too perfect, and doesn't show signs of having slowly developed, leaving archaeologists with only the one workable hypothesis. There is support for the possible shipwrecking/stranding of Japanese fishermen in South America, so the voyage, as it were, may not have been one of exploration, or intentional, and therefore the sailors may have "discovered" America - at least, South America - by accident.

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Like many of the theories, although most are at least backed up by some sort of evidence, the idea that Chinese explorers were in America long before the Spanish cannot be corroborated, and much of what we know comes from what may very well be stories and myths. However we do know that the Chinese were exploring long before Europeans were. The problem, as I say, is proof, of which there is none. No archaeological finds, no pottery, no skeletons, no monuments. What we do have are accounts that speak of Ta-Chang (no, not Ca-Ching!) and Shu-Hai, who were said to be the greatest explorers you've never heard of, and served someone called the Great Yu. No, no, I'm serious, that's what he was called. If he existed. Which we don't know. But he probably did. Maybe.

He in turn served an emperor who again may have been a figment of some literary scholar's mind, one of five who may not have existed, called Yao. Yeah I know. Anyway, around 2250 BC (this is BC, people, when the likes of the Sumerians and Babylonians were feeding unwanted children to their fire god and Europeans were happily worshipping trees and stones, possibly indulging in the odd bout of human sacrifice too, maybe at weekends or every second Thursday) he thought it would be a spiffing idea to see what the world was like, but had no particular wish to leave the comforts of home. So he detailed, you guessed it, Ta-Chang and Shu-Hai to do it for him. Off they went, travelling north and south, and just to be absolutely sure they covered everything, west and east too.

Actually, no. They went before 2250, probably more at the beginning of the twenty-fourth century, as his master had already passed on before Great Yu was asked by his successor, the hilariously-named Shun (can you imagine? "Bow down, people! Shun the Emperor!" Um, what did he say?) to compile a report on how his boys had done. Great Yu said sure, he'd do it after tea, just leave it with him. He must have put it off for a long time though, as Shun had bought the farm before he got around to it, leaving the throne free, a chance which Yu did not pass up, showing he was not called Great for nothing. With more time on his hands now, flunkies galore to carry out the mundane day-to-day tasks that had occupied him and kept him from fulfilling the edict of both his predecessors, Yu got right down to it and by 2208 had written it all down. It became known as Shan Hai Ching, or The Classic of the Mountains and Rivers.
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There's no way to know when it was actually written, as the page with the copyright date on it is all smudged, and the only copy we have today is as recent as the sixth century, and not BC either. We're talking after the birth of himself here, not before. It is however regarded widely as the first proper text of the geography of the world, though as I mentioned in my journal on world exploration, The Men Who Drew the Map of the World, like Odysseus's journeys, the text is filled with detail that makes it unreliable and hard to take as factual. Fantastic beasts (and where to find them), strange people and odd places which cannot be correlated even today with any known land sit side by side with sharp, precise accounts of rivers, mountains and measurements, descriptions of flora and fauna, and directions of rivers and seas.

The text is divided into thirty-two books, though only half that number survive today, and it is in Book IV, entitled "Book of the Eastern Mountains" where some scholars believe the two intrepid Chinese navigators are referring to America. Almost all of this study is made thanks to a lady from Chicago called Henriette Mertz, who was quite an explorer herself, and served in World War II as well as on the Manhattan Project to build America's atom bomb. She identified a range referred to as Aspen Mountain as Long's Peak in northern Colorado. With this as a marker, she reckoned she was able to follow the journey of Ta-Chang and Shu-Hai down the coast of southwestern America along the Rio Grande down into Texas. Once she had this established, Mertz could trace the path of the two Asian explorers from Canada and Alaska down to Mexico.
(https://alchetron.com/cdn/henriette-mertz-a2844b0d-a070-436d-8b66-0b6c5e40dc1-resize-750.jpeg)

(You know, this may not be her, but it's the only picture I can find, and it is linked with the books on American discovery written by Mertz. I have to assume it is her, as she died in 1985. What her cat thought about the ancient exploration of America is not recorded).

Placing the two boys sailing the coast of America, some of their descriptions of animals, which would have seemed outlandish and fictional to readers in China, who knew of no such things, actually now make some sort of sense, Mertz decided. From Huyghe's book the following: "The pelicans that looked like ducks with men's legs and derived their name from their cry were whooping cranes. The beast that looked like a rabbit with a crow's bill, an owl's eyes, the tail of a snake, and that pretended to sleep when seen was surely a possum. The striped cattle whose cry resembled a person stretching and yawning were caribou. The man-eating, white-headed birds the size of domestic fowl with tiger claws and rat's legs sound like an exaggerated reference to bald eagles. And the birds that flew backward, as absurd as that might have sounded to Chinese skeptics who later mocked the account by drawing ducks looking over their shoulders and flying backward, were undoubtedly hummingbirds, a bird indigenous to America."

So now it becomes obvious how people seeing strange animals they had never encountered before might make what might seem wildly fanciful observations of them which, in reality, tally up quite well with what we on this side of the Atlantic would call ordinary animals. The eye of the beholder, huh? This bit, however, seems a little less likely: "Book IX also states outright that the Great Yu had sent Shu-Hai to "walk from the farthest limit of the East to the farthest limit of the West." Having done so, the dauntless surveyor came up with the measure of the world: "five hundred thousand and ten times ten thousand paces and nine thousand eight hundred paces." Mertz did not double-check this statement."

I bet she didn't. There is however an interesting so-called observation (more likely a myth) about an archer who travels to the sun's birthplace, but finds ten suns instead of one, and shoots down nine. I'll have to check, but this sounds familiar and I'm sure there's a Chinese myth somewhere in one of my other journals about someone shooting down six out of seven moons or something, so maybe Ta-Chang and Shu-Hai were adapting one of their own legends to what Mertz believed has something to do with the Grand Canyon. I mean, the Chinese always were and to a great extent still are big on symbolism and metaphor, and nobody believes for a second these guys met an actual archer, so there's probably a grain of truth hidden in there somewhere, though likely one we will never unearth. It may even be a creation myth told by one of the Native American tribes to the two Chinese (or one of them, assuming they split up, which they surely must have done).
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The more you look - or the more she looked, anyway, or at least others with more time on their hands and better reason to than I, peeping over their shoulders and copying down their conclusions like some schoolkid cheating at an exam - the more really odd descriptions start to make some sort of sense. As Huyghe says, "Floating Ghosts Country" could be a northern European country where the aurora borealis appears. The "Sunken Eyes People" may be a reference to Europeans. The "Land of Arms" might be a country where the sleeves of people's clothes ballooned out, "Three Head Land" a place that had three heads of state."

I particularly like the "Floating Ghosts Country" one: you can really see how this could impress itself upon the minds of men who were, certainly, men of science and yet came from an age and indeed a culture wherein the spirits of ancestors were firmly believed to roam the earth, and they might even have considered that these ghosts were watching over their enterprise.

The Olmec people are recognised as one of the mother cultures of Central America, a culture that gave rise to many others, including the famous Maya. It's believed now that explorers from the Shang Dynasty, which flourished around the period between the eighteenth and twelfth century BC, had an undeniable effect on the Olmec. The parallels are numerous, from the similarities between feline cults (tiger for the Shang, jaguar for the Olmec), the dragon gods both worshipped and their use of jade, both for decoration and in burial ceremonies.
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Despite the amusing story of the Chinese emperor who attempted to cross a river in a ferryboat held together with glue, which of course evaporated and caused the boat to fall apart (lending new meaning to a popular Irish phrase, I will in me glue!) the Chinese are credited with pretty much the discovery of everything, from gunpowder to fireworks and writing to tea, and in that same vein they are accepted to have been one of the first sea-faring nations. That then would tie in with crossing the Pacific Ocean over three thousand years before Columbus made his way across the Atlantic.

Another point made to legitimise the theories of Chinese contact with the Olmec is the appearance of bark paper. This is, apparently, made from - anyone? And is at the heart of the bark-cloth and paper-making industry that flourished among the Maya and other civilisations in South America. I surely don't need to say bark paper originated in China, do I? I do? Bark paper originated in China. There. Sadly, there are few examples of this sort of process left in America, as once the god-fearing Catholic Spanish missionaries stuck their collective oar in and pronounced these bark-paper books "evil" (duh) they set about collecting and burning them (double duh), consigning any evidence of previous civilisation - whether intentionally or just as a by-product of their arrogance - to the flames.

You can't burn stone though (well you can but it won't destroy it and these guys weren't exactly going to go to that much trouble!) so we're left with runic symbols that represent cosmic energy on pyramids, mounds, altars, murals and carvings, as well as the winged serpent, the cosmic eye and the good old yin-yang that link the two cultures. Some time around the sixth or fifth century BC it's postulated that Chinese sailors arrived and created a colony in, of all places, El Salvador, where Columbus would fall on his knees almost a thousand years later naming the land San Salvador. How's that for history taking the mickey huh? From this small colony rose the great and ancient Maya civilisation, which stretched into the jungles of Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala and which, with the help of their new Asian allies, battled and defeated the powerful Olmec. Possibly.

Meanwhile, a new form of art based on scrolls, popular in Asia, began to spread throughout South America, one of the greatest examples being found in Izapa, Mexico, carved on rocks and featuring a host of symbols known to relate to Asian culture and mythology, such as tigers, fishes, turtles, serpents, rain clouds and plumed birds, as well as that old mainstay, yin-yang. 

Strangely enough, the primary motivation of Chinese explorers for setting out across the sea appears to have been a search for immortality, and this can be taken literally. When I read that I thought it meant to ensure that their names went down in history, but no: they actually were searching for eternal life. They believed a form of hallucinogenic mushroom (cosmic, man!) grew on three mountainous islands they called Phêng-Lai, Fang Chang, and Ying-Chou, and which would grant humans immortality or deep wisdom. They envisioned an enlightened, immortal civilisation living there, consuming the ling-chin, as the fungus were called, which enabled them to stave off death. Needless to say, they're still looking. ;)

Despite our long and mostly successful tradition of barging in everywhere we're not wanted, sticking our noses in where they're not needed and loudly proclaiming that our god is the only one, and all others are hereby evicted (an attitude which has surely landed more than one pious missionary in the boiling pot of water among the potatoes and carrots), this kind of behaviour is not unique to white men. While we certainly can claim to have "civilised", or at least converted more of the world than any other race, the Chinese weren't above a spot of preaching and attempts at conversion themselves. In fact a Buddhist monk called Hiu-Shen headed over to what was believed to be America (called Fu-Sang) around 438 and spent forty years wandering the country, preaching to anyone who would listen, then sodded off back home. Once there, like any good traveller and explorer, he began to write down an account of his time spent in Fu-Sang.

Named for the Fu-Sang tree, with its red, pear-shaped fruit and its leaves like bamboo shoots, the country was, according to Hiu-Shen, populated by men who did not make war and who lived in "houses without walls" - possibly a reference to Indian wigwams and tepees - and who made paper and cloth from the bark of the Fu-Sang tree. They had domesticated horses, which pulled their carts, and though these people were clearly intelligent they placed no value on gold or silver. He also wrote of the "Kingdom of Women", located 350 miles east of Fu-Sang, where children grew to adulthood in four years, and where the women were "shy and hairy". References were made to mountains which were covered all year round in snow, and a black gorge. Also a luminous dragon. Um.

However, among all the marvels and rather fanciful descriptions given by the monk - women copulating with serpents, birds that gave birth to humans, a fountain of wine - the one thing the court of the emperor could not believe was the idea of women choosing husbands. How, they asked, could females be granted such power? Ludicrous! Next you'll be asking us to believe mountains of fire can exist - oh. Oh. You are asking us to believe mountains of fire can exist. Well, you know, maybe they can. We've heard stranger things. But women choosing husbands? Come on brother: you're pulling the proverbial here, aren't you? Do us a lemon; we have brains, you know. You're not talking to a bunch of uneducated savages now. The very idea!

Notwithstanding the above, scholars now believe that the Chinese did indeed start a colony in California around the fifth century, and in 1751 a French academic was perhaps the first to voice the opinion or theory that Columbus had been beaten to the discovery of America. Well beaten. By about a thousand years, give or take. This was long before the West was opened up, of course, before even the Louisiana Purchase, and before the very existence of Alaska was known. The west coast of America didn't even appear on maps at this time, and would have been looked upon with as much mystery and trepidation as the old "Darkest Africa", a place to wonder about but never to contemplate visiting, where strange beasts and even stranger humans might roam, where odd and savage practices might be carried out, and where the chances of escaping with one's life if one ventured there might be very low indeed.

A century later, arguments erupted as to a) the actual authenticity of the account (many believed it was nothing more than an elaborate story made to amuse the royal court) but if so then b) the identity of the country Hui-Shen landed in. Some insisted it was not America but Japan, but those who discounted that theory and maintained the monk had made it to America calculated that he might have landed in Mexico, possibly at Acapulco. Chinese researchers, of course, think it's a grand idea; the chance to upstage the Americans with the embarrassing evidence that their country was actually discovered by a communist one! Or at least, visited by them long before they themselves got there. But politics and points-scoring aside, there does seem to be a lot of evidence to support this theory.

And here again we say hello to Henriette Mertz.

Remember her? She was the one to support the journey of the Great Yu a little earlier above. She weighed in on this one too, and began trying to retrace the path of Hui-Shen using information given in his account. And once again she was able to verify, as far as possible, the journey of the Buddhist monk. It's easiest if I just paste this bit. Easier for me, anyway, than trying to explain it in my fumbling way.

She assumed that the Buddhists had begun their journey in the south of China, the place where Hui-Shen returned to tell the story, and that it ended up in southern California, the place they called Fu-Sang. She believed the monks landed on the coast in the vicinity of Los Angeles—Point Hueneme, to be precise. They then went east 350 miles and arrived on the Mogollon Mesa of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, the area Mertz identified as the "Kingdom of Women." She found that some three hundred miles north, as per Hui-Shen's account, lay the noted black canyon in western Colorado called "The Black Canyon of the Gunnison." North of this canyon stands majestic Mount Gunnison and still farther north
is the snowcapped mountain Hui-Shen mentioned, Snowmass.

To the south of the Mogollon Mesa in Mexico are two wellknown smoking mountains, according to Mertz, Popocatepetl, whose name means smoking mountain, and the Volcán de Colima. Mertz thinks Hui-Shen's "smoking mountain" in the Kingdom of Women was Volcán, which is located near the coast. West from the Kingdom, noted Mertz, are innumerable springs, including Warner Hot Springs and Palm Springs. And right in the heart of Los Angeles are the La Brea Tar Pits, which sounds suspiciously like Hui-Shen's sea of varnish. Mertz could not pin down which California lake Hui-Shen called a "sea the color of milk," as many California lakes have dried up over time and all that now remains of them is the salt solution on their bottoms. These beds of salt and borax glisten snow white under the desert sun. Mertz believed that Hui-Shen's Fu-Sang plant was ancient com, which was sometimes pear-shaped and reddish and could be kept for a year without spoilage.

Other researchers have suggested that the Fu-Sang plant might be a reference to the prickly pear or the cactus apple. Still others viewed it as a reference to the century plant, which is known as maguey in Mexico. The sprouts of the century plant do resemble bamboo and are eaten, and cloth and paper are made from its fibers. The plant also resembles a tree, as its tall branching and flowering candelabralike stalk often reaches as much as thirty feet in height. But it does not bear red pearshaped fruit. When it came to the circular living quarters of Hui-Shen's Kingdom of Women, Mertz found an answer for this as well. She thought they resembled the adobe houses found among the Indians of central Arizona. Their burrowlike entrances were just as he had described. She also thought that the dog's heads on their men might be a reference to the kachina ceremonial masks, which were made of wood, feathers, furs, and skin and looked like cows, eagles, snakes, and dogs. They were worn by the men when praying for rain and during other spiritual occasions.

While some have interpreted Hui-Shen's Kingdom of Women with its hairy ladies and precocious children as a reference to Central American monkeys, Mertz saw a reference to a matrilineal people such as the Pueblos of the southwest. Among the matrilineal Hopi, for instance, houses were owned by women, and their clans were related through the females. A child was bom into his mother's clan and was named by his mother's sister. Such a matriarchal system in which the women exercised control over persons or property would certainly have seemed quite odd to the Chinese. Mertz also found a reasonable explanation for Hui-Shen's outrageous notion of snakes as husbands. Hopi men belonged to a Snake Clan and considered themselves one with the snake. The Hopi legend of the Spider Woman tells how the Snake Clan came to be.

One day the son of a chief and the Spider Woman encountered a group of men and women who, after dressing themselves in snakeskins, turned into snakes. The Spider Woman helped the son's chief catch a beautiful young girl who had been turned into a yellow rattler. He eventually married her, but the children she bore him were all snakes. Not happy with this situation, the tribe sent them away to another pueblo. The couple then had more children, but this time their offspring were human. This made the male children blood brothers of the snakes and explains how the Snake Clan came to be. Mertz even came to understand the odd nursing behavior HuiShen had observed. The monk said that the papooses carried on the backs of their mothers were fed by a white substance that came from the hair at the nape of the mother's neck. But Indian women customarily gathered their long hair at the nape of the neck and tied it with white ribbons. What could be more natural, said Mertz, than for a baby strapped to his mother's back to be attracted to this white ribbon? The baby with the ribbon in its mouth would look to a naïve observer from a distance as though the baby was feeding.

Mertz also found a myth held by the Pima Indians of Arizona to explain why Hui-Shen said that children became adults by the age of three or four. The legend of Hâ-âk says that the daughter of a chief gave birth to a strange-looking female creature who grew to maturity in three or four years. But because she ate everything in sight, she was eventually killed. This event was celebrated with a great feast, and the Pima eventually built a shrine in honor of this day five miles north of Sacaton, Arizona. Mertz speculates that HuiShen might even have passed by this shrine and been told of this legend. And the salt plant these people ate, Mertz has identified as Anemonopsis californica, a plant with a large root and a strong medicinal scent that grows in salt-bed depressions in southern California.

So that's all nice and explained then. Glad we had someone like Mertz to suss it all out, because it had me bamboozled. As usual though, there are a large portion of scientists who just simply don't believe her. There's no way to know for sure if she is right, but her unravelling of the rather fantastic account does make a certain amount of sense. Whether she was fitting her theory to the facts or vice versa is hard to say, but then, it seems all the skeptics keep doing this anyway, so why not her?

Further evidence comes in the shape of the wheel, or to be more precise, the unearthing of small toy animals on wheels from sites in Mexico in the 1940s, dated from the third century. So what, say you? So buttons, say I: the wheel was not even known, never mind invented, in South America at this time, so how did these people not only know of it, but construct toys that ran on wheels? The only possible answer is that they had learned of these things from the Chinese who had visited them, or that the artifacts were made by Chinese craftsmen living there.
(https://www.backyardchickens.com/data/attachments/1585/1585446-2781b68a5dbef49b466a9a8c346aea95.jpg)
Which came first? The chicken or... the chicken?

How such a humble thing as the main ingredient in your Sunday dinner could come to have such an important bearing on who was first to discover America is a long and interesting story. And here it is. History teaches us that the Spanish, those well-known conquerors of native civilisations and plunderers of gold and silver (the mythical city isn't named El Dorado by accident) brought chickens to America, that the natives had never seen, heard of and certainly never tasted the flesh of these fowl most common in the West. But as usual, history is telling us if not lies, then at least half-truths.

The evidence (that pesky evidence again!) seems to support the presence of chickens in at least South America (or Mesoamerica, as they call it) long before the Spaniards got there. They already had names for them, not based on the European ones of gallo and gallina but as Takara and karaka, names known to originate in the Hindu language. Even los hombres themselves, arriving in Brazil from about 1519, differentiate between the two types in their accounts. Some of the chickens they encountered there had black skin, feathers more like hair, small pea combs as opposed to the large coxcombs of the European chicken, and were sixteen feet tall. Nah just kidding. They were only fourteen. Sorry. I go a bit funny sometimes.

No, but these chickens, believed to have come from Asia, possibly India or Indonesia, also had no tails, so there's no way they could have been from Europe. Naturally, these events were glossed over in the official history, and everyone led to believe that the servants of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella had graciously introduced the savage natives to the Spanish chicken. The Inca - soon to regret ever bumping into the servants of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, who would very quickly do the Catholic thing and destroy their very race - had an emperor who was called Atahualpa, due to the Inca word for chicken being gualpa (presumably pronounced with a "h" sound) and so every time the cock crowed it would seem like it was calling the emperor's name, and he would be remembered for eternity. Sadly, this did not work out, and nobody remembered him because the servants of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella made pretty damn sure there was nobody left to remember him. Sources do not indicate what happened to the chickens.

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ROME

There is no actual physical evidence of Roman occupation of or habitation in America, but there are shipwrecks. Lying at the bottom of Guanabara Bay off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, the wreckage of at least three vessels believed to be Roman were found in 1982, which immediately set alarm bells ringing over by the Iberian Peninsula, as Spain and Portugal both began to see a growing threat to their claims that their boy was the one to have discovered America. They even warned the Brazilian government that they, the Spanish and Portuguese,  would be obliged to extend immediate Brazilian citizenship to all Italians in that country, just as they did to all Portuguese immigrants. Um, what? How is that a threat? Are they saying that they would make the Romans - all those long-dead sailors Brazilians? How would that help?

In the apparent interest of deterring plunderers, the Brazilians caved and had the entire area covered over with muck and silt, preventing any possible embarrassing discovery that might, sorry, rock the boat. This wasn't the first time the might of Spain and Portugal had combined to ensure the lie about Columbus was maintained. In 1972 permission was refused by the Honduran government for divers to access a shipwreck which might have turned out to have predated the Santa Maria. Let the gravy train roll on boys, let the gravy train roll on. Or in this case I guess, gravy boat.

Always good to have a brainbox on your side, so meet Professor Barry Fell. Not a verb.

Nothing could be done to prevent ancient Roman coins being dug up in a field in Massachusetts, except to mutter that they must have been - say it with me - lost by a careless collector. But our man Barry ain't having that. The fact that there are the images of four consecutive emperors on these coins and that they were all found in the same spot make that theory bollocks, to quote Professor Fell. All right, I'm not quoting him, but I'm sure that's what he'd like to say if he didn't have to observe the professional niceties. Our Barry reckons they came from a Roman merchant ship which would have arrived in America around 375, still a thousand years ahead of Senor Colon. Again though, the evidence keeps piling up and again the skeptics, or those with something to lose, keep denying it.

In Mexico, the terracotta head of a Roman figurine, dated to the third century, was unearthed from a grave in 1933, in Alabama in 1942 it was an oil lamp from Pompeii, first century AD, and again in Virginia four years later, this time a goblet again from the worst possible place to have gone for a holiday in ancient times. Unless your ideal holiday, of course, entailed being covered over with mountains of volcanic ash, in which case, you were sorted. A grave containing the skeletons of what turned out to be nine Jews was discovered in 1889 in Tennessee (though originally dismissed as nothing since the inscription was read upside-down). Yeah. Again let me hand you over to Patrick Huyghe: he explains it so much better than I could.

In 1889, a stone measuring about five inches long and two inches wide and inscribed with eight Hebrew characters was excavated by John Emmert, a field assistant then employed by the Smithsonian Institution. He found the stone along with two brass bracelets and what appeared to be polished wooden earspools under the skull of one of nine skeletons that had been carefully laid out at the bottom of an unrifled burial mound measuring twenty-eight feet in diameter and five feet high. The curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian, in a report on the excavations published five years later, expressed the opinion that the mound was made in historic times by the Indians and that the inscription was in Cherokee syllabic script. Therefore, he concluded, it could not be older than the early nineteenth century. But the curator never realized that he had read the script upside down.

More than a half century later, when scholars turned the inscription right side up, they found the letters "LYHWD" in Hebrew. In 1972, Cyrus Gordon, a Hebrew scholar at Brandéis University, recognized that the letters belonged to the Hebrew style of the Roman period. He noted in particular that the shape of the Hebrew "W" occurred on coins of the Bar Kokhba revolt. The embellishment of letters with a little drilled hole, as atop the L and Y, was typical of Hebrew coins of the Roman period. This enabled Gordon to translate the text as "A comet for the Jews," a standard phrase dating from the revolt of a.d. 125 when Bar Kokhba was associated with prophecy regarding a comet.

Gordon assigned a date of about a.d. 135 to the migration of Jewish refugees to America, partially on the basis of the coin finds in neighboring Kentucky. A recent investigation shows that Gordon's estimate was in the right ballpark. In 1988, a Swiss laboratory, with the cooperation of the Smithsonian, was able to determine the age of a piece of wood from one of the earspools found with the skeletons and the Bat Creek stone. By the use of accelerator mass spectrometry, the date obtained shows the Bat Creek burial to have taken place about 1,605 years ago, give or take 170 years. If this time period is correct, the brass bracelets found with the skeletons could only have come from the Old World.

So there you have it. Proof positive. Well no, not really. Prominent archaeologists dismiss it because, well, it just really doesn't fit in with their theories, and they decided to accuse the guy who excavated the grave as having forged the text. Sure why not? Ohio State University did not agree, and published an article backing up the veracity of the tomb, but of course nobody can prove it for certain and it's all a case of could have been, may have been, is possible that and so on. Other finds were unearthed in Newark and Ohio, but again their authenticity has been disputed. South of the border though, down Mexico way, is a site that nobody disputes.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Comalcalco.jpg/273px-Comalcalco.jpg)
Comalcalco, a Mayan site in the southeastern corner of Mexico, is a site of almost four hundred structures, including a pyramid, made out of bricks whose source is definitely not local, as the site lies about sixty miles from any usable building stone at all. Our man Barry checked out the bricks - or some of them; I guess he was hardly likely to examine tens or hundreds of thousands of the things! - and noted they seem to have a Roman stonemason's mark on them, a sort of CE symbol I guess, Guaranteed Roman, Best in the Empire, sort of thing.
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SCANDINAVIA

While they would probably prefer to stick to the myth of Columbus having been the first to discover America, those with a fixation that only a white man could have been there before anyone else will at least be slightly cheered by the evidence that they may be right. Just, you know, not in the way they think. Evidence shows clearly the presence of a Norwegian known as Woden-lithi, a trader who sailed from Ringerike in Norway about 3,600 years ago to do business in Canada. He was however not an explorer, had no interest in discovering a new land (and anyway for him it would not have been so, as there were people there already and he was going there to trade with them) and once he had sorted his business he fucked off back to Norway and is lost to history, just another businessman taking a trip south to conduct some business. Technically speaking also, I guess you might say even if he had been credited with the discovery, it would not have been of America, as he only went as far as Canada, around the Toronto area.

Petroglyphs, which I assume from my limited (i.e., almost non-existent) knowledge of Latin, are rock carvings, graffiti on stone, show pictures of boats and sea vessels which are not believed to have existed in the American continent at that time. The Native Americans certainly did not have them, the best they could muster being dugout canoes, while these petroglyphs clearly depicted long ships with carved animal figureheads and masts, and graffiti later translated by an expert on Norse languages seems to speak of the visit of a Scandinavian king, so we know that Woden-lithi was no simple tradesman, though he did come to Canada to buy copper for use in bronze manufacture.
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Red, White and Green: Erik the Red and the Flotation of Greenland

Life could be tough for Vikings around the tenth century. Known as vicious marauders who would quite literally kill you as soon as look at you, they worshipped the fierce Norse gods Odin (or Woden), Thor and Loki, and believed the only way to die with honour was in battle yadda yadda but eventually all of this killing, pillaging, plundering and stomping about became tiring, and Vikings began to consider a change of god, the Christian one looking a decent substitute. Which is to say, by the tenth century most Norse had converted to Christianity, given up the plundering, pillaging and fighting (perhaps indulging in the odd rape, but sure you can't expect a man to change overnight can you now?) and settled down to be farmers and traders.

That's all very well and good. As most warrior civilisations have found out down through history, that sort of full-on-us-against-the-world attitude can't last, and as you get older as a people you need to have the odd breather, these becoming longer and more frequent till eventually you say "Ah fuck it! I'm not going plundering today. There's Goldfinger on the telly!" or words to that effect, Basically, all warrior peoples go one of two ways: they settle down and ditch the warrior ways or they warrior themselves right out of existence. So the Norse chose the first option, and life became a lot easier and quite possibly better.

Except for poor Erik the Red, that is.

Erik was born in Norway but his father was exiled to Iceland for manslaughter. Now, in the good old days of the "real" Vikings, this would have engendered likely nothing more than a few grins down the local and a round of beers, clapped shoulders all round and maybe one or two guys might fight it out to the death, just for the hell of it, as Vikings did. In fact, it's not widely known (since I made it up but it could have been true) that a Viking heading down to the Axe and Sword for a quiet twenty pints or so with the lads might growl to his wife "I'll be back at sunrise, unless I get killed, in which case make sure my sons have a father. Cheers love!" A night on the razz in downtown Oslo or Bergen could be a dangerous affair.

But after the Christian God was adopted the kind of harmless fun Vikings had been known to indulge in became illegal, murder even, and thus Thorvald, Erik's dad, was kicked out of Norway for explaining the finer points of his argument with, well, the finer points of a battleaxe maybe. Not wishing to be outdone, Erik too got himself exiled. See, neither Erik nor his old man had accepted Jesus into their lives. In fact, they told the shocked priests  just exactly where Jesus could stick his eternal salvation and brotherhood to all men, and further, went on to say that if he and Erik could find their way into the Kingdom of Heaven, they would be sure to ransack it and carry off as many angels as one man could manage.

In other words, Thorvald remained a staunch supporter of Odin, and when Erik followed in his dad's footsteps his wife, a true Christian now, told him she'd be damned (literally) if she would lie with a pagan, and that if he wanted some he had better make with the holy water and that sign of the cross that was becoming so popular, adding that she was sure Mrs. Sharpaxe at number seven didn't have this trouble with her husband, who converted dutifully when told to, nor even Mrs. Wolfclaw, who she had never liked but at least knew how to keep her man in line. How, she may have wailed, could Erik embarrass and scandalise her so? Clinging to outmoded beliefs, talking about Valhalla as if it existed, when everyone knew that the only real place you went when you died was Heaven? Did he realise that everyone was laughing at him?

Erik may have realised, but did not care, and so when - possibly due to having been forced into celibacy - he took exception to his neighbour killing all his slaves, and addressed his concerns by killing said neighbour, the council of elders shook their heads and said come on now, this isn't the seventh century you know Erik. Perhaps a spell in that undiscovered land to the southwest is just what you need, yeah the one with no name. Off you go, and don't come back for, oh, let's say three years.

And off he went. The land he was exiled to turned out to be pretty much the same as Iceland, but in a move worthy of the greatest spindoctors and PR executives today, and completely ignoring the fact that it was a total lie, Erik named the new land Greenland, and began trying to attract settlers. Many of them, perhaps fed up with the Christian god and his incessant bans on just about everything that was enjoyable, to say nothing of that fucking Latin they had to listen to, joined him. It's not recorded what the first would-be settlers to arrive there had to say on seeing what they had invested in, but it's a fair bet that it would have gone along the basic lines of "Fuck me! Where's all this green then? Don't see much of that. White we got, grey too. No green though. You sure you named this place properly, Erik me old son? Did you maybe mean Greyland?"

As an aside, you have to laugh at the names these guys either gave themselves or were given. Erik's neighbour, to whom he was most un-neighbourly, was known as Eyjolf the Foul, and one of the men who rose against Erik later in the ensuing dispute went by Thorad the Yeller (I'm going to assume that meant he shouted loudly, not that he was a coward). But what did Erik the Red have to do with the exploration of America? Well, nothing actually, but his son sure did.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Leif_Erikson_Discovers_America_Hans_Dahl.jpg/265px-Leif_Erikson_Discovers_America_Hans_Dahl.jpg)
Leif Ericssson

Reacting to the tales of one of his countrymen, Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had discovered what is generally taken to have been north coastal America quite by accident as he tried to find his father, who had emigrated to Greenland (Bjarni obviously wasn't the world's greatest navigator), but who had not bothered to make landfall tehre, being in a hurry and not very interested, Erik's son Leif decided to retrace Bjarni's route to see if he could find this strange country. It wasn't too hard: America lies just over the Davis Strait from Greenland, about two hundred and fifty miles of a journey, a mere popping down to the shops for some tobacco and mead, can I pick you up anything for a Viking. So the tale of his long and arduous journey is in fact a short one, and though he met the natives of this new country, which he called Vinland (not to be confused with Finland, of course) he fell out with them and there were skirmishes, during one of which his brother Thorvald (named, no doubt, for his grandfather) was killed.

Leif's actual intention in setting out to find Vinland was to convert its denizens to Christianity, which might explain why the denizens replied with arrows and violence, not being in any particular rush to drop their own gods, who had served them very well for millennia thank you, and weren't you guys only recently worshipping Odin and Thor and all that lot? What happened to them, huh? You like those guys who only support a football team till they start losing and then change your allegiance? Well, not us. The Great Spirit is our man, and we're sticking with him. Which is exactly what you can do with your god. Stick him, we mean.

Rather darkly amusing, Erik was offered a place in the ship and was all fired up to go, riding his horse towards the vessel and possibly drunkenly yelling "Let's do this thing!" when he rather unfortunately slipped from his horse and landed on his arse maybe. Although he wasn't badly injured (you'd be surprised how many people actually died from such accidents; King Richard II came a cropper when he and his horse parted company suddenly. Imagine that: survive the Crusades, battle the Muslims, fight all sorts of exotic diseases, thirst and hunger, make it home to Merry Old England at last, and break your fool neck falling from your saddle. Not much of an epitaph for a king, is it?) the incident convinced him it was a bad omen and he stayed behind. Really bad judgement on his part, as that winter  plague swept through the town and did for him.

Leif is believed to have arrived in Canada first, around the Labrador area, and sailing west as winter began to set in, and unbeknownst to him, back home his dad was breathing his last and probably considering his imminent death a punishment from Odin for being such a big girl's blouse as to be scared of a little old fall from a horse he came across another landmass which he called Vinland, or wine land. This has been more or less identified as having been Newfoundland. After sensibly spending the winter there, Leif upped sticks once the weather turned warmer and headed home, at such a leisurely pace that he even had time for a bit of castaway rescue on the way, earning him the nickname "Leif the Lucky".

As an aside, there is a possibility that the crew he rescued, captained by one Thorir, may very well also have been to Vinland, or America, and obviously if so then Thorir had made it there before Leif. But as the only real accounts we have of this voyage come from personal family sagas, and they all concern only Leif and his family, Thorir doesn't get a mention. However history may have done him an injustice. Of course, Bjarni was definitely, if we read this correctly, the first, but as he passed by, sort of Mister Burns-like ("Sir, I've arranged for the people of Australia to spell out your name in candles for your birthday. If you can just turn your head - BAH! No time!") without bothering to land, never mind explore, he too is ignored by choniclers, and while he should really be on the top pedestal being awarded the gold medal, as it were, he ends up just a spectator.
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For all his discovery of the continent though, it would be Leif's brother, Thorvald, who would first properly explore it. He headed over there the following year and following his bro's directions ("Two lefts and a right, then straight on; you can't miss it") he arrived in Vinland and explored away, unfortunately falling foul of the local population and losing his life, ending up buried in the new world. This did not sit well with Leif, who wanted him interred in his homeland, not some gods-forsaken wild country only newly discovered, and so he sent his son Thorstein to bring the body home. Unfortunately, though Thorvald had found it a doddle to make his way to Vinland, Thorstein had more trouble, exacerbated by a storm blowing up, and ended up being blown around instead to the other side of Greenland, where he rather inconveniently died.

So that was the end of the Norse adventures in America was it? Not a bit of it. Don't you know these people yet? Adventure flows in their blood, even if it had been thinned by the ideas of men in black dresses who thought everyone should love each other as long as they all worshipped the same god, if not they deserved to burn like evil heretics. Gudrid, Thorstein's widow remarried and prevailed upon her new husband to check out Vinland. Thorfinn Karlsefni, outfitting a major expedition, headed off. Thorfinn wasn't fucking around though: he didn't just intend to explore, or gather what resources he could and hightail it back to Greenland, oh no. He wanted to set up a permanent colony on Vinland, and he brought men, women, livestock and supplies, ready to settle the country in the name of the Norse and Leif Erikson.

Far from, then, Columbus and his men being the first white men to arrive in America, Gudrid's son, Snorri, is said to have been the very first white man born in America, so if anyone owns "white privilege" in America it's the Scandinavians. But here's the thing.

There are two family sagas that recount the adventures of the Norse in America, and the one called The Saga of Erik the Red puts a very different complexion on Thorfinn's expedition. This one says that, far from being a peaceful and mostly uneventful exploration of Vinland, Thorfinn's time there resulted in a terrible war with the natives, which led to the death of Thorvald. This directly contradicts the source The Saga of the Greenlanders, which tells us Leif's brother died in Greenland of a disease. According to Erik the Red, not only was he still alive at the time Thorfinn went back to America, but he fought alongside him. And died there. So it's hard to know which one to take as the right one, if either is. Still, according to the Erik the Red account, the war with the native population sent Thorfinn back to Greenland, deeming it too much trouble to set up a permanent presence in Vinland, and on his return the Norse shrugged and forgot all about America.

In essence then, both accounts tally in at least the result, that the Norse forsook their attempts to colonise America, though the reason given in Erik the Red makes more sense than that in Greenland, as otherwise what was to stop Thorfinn or other Norse returning to Vinland? Only if Thorfinn came back and said "forget it lads, them natives is fucking crazy. The land may be fertile but I will be double fucked if I'm going back to face them headcases again, and nor should you." Thorvald's fate? Well, let's give him an honourable Viking death, falling in battle rather than the rather ignominious one of dying from a nasty disease in his homeland, huh? He'd probably have preferred that, whether or not it's the truth.

The fact that they abandoned the idea of a colony there though did not stop other Norse visiting America, and it's kind of nice in a way to see that even Jesus Christ the Redeemer couldn't quite redeem the Vikings, as told in the story of Freydis, bastard daughter of Erik, and so half-sister to Leif, who had been with Thorfinn on his ill-fated expedition, and had hatched a plot on her return, roping in two brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, to help her out and return to Vinland where she said there were massive profits to be had, which she would share with the brothers. She left out the rather important fact that neither of them would leave Vinland alive, as, slaying them both and all their men and women, she grabbed all the riches and hied her back to Greenland as fast as her men could sail. But her treachery was uncovered, and left such a stain on the idea of Vinland that no self-respecting Norseman would ever go near there again.

The western world was, as per usual, slow, and very sulkily reluctant, to agree or recognise that men from Scandinavia had been to America almost half a millennium before their darling, and even in the eighteenth century the stories told in the two Sagas were dismissed as myth, fairy tales, made-up nonsense. But history usually has the last laugh, and when actual physical evidence of the occupation was unearthed over a non-consecutive period of ten years (1961 to 1968 and then 1973 to 1976; don't ask me why the big gap, maybe funding dried up?) they had no choice. The findings were clear: houses, boatsheds, a smithy, a kiln, cooking houses were all excavated in Newfoundland in a place called L'Anse aux Meadows, along with artifacts such as pins, bits of iron, copper and charcoal, all dated back to the eleventh century.

Accounts from Indian tribes, too, speak of men with blue eyes and yellow hair, who came in long boats with animal heads, and who the Indians worshipped like gods. The story is also told of a Viking ship found buried in the side of a mountain in a desert in California, witnessed only by three people we know of, but buried in an earthquake soon after, all trace of it lost. And then of course there are the inscriptions, records of travels and trade supposedly carved in rocks by the Norse, and found from Rhode Island to Colorado. I hardly need tell you that most if not all of these are pronounced fake or too recent by most researchers to be of any help in establishing evidence of the Norse presence in America, do I? In Mexico though, there's some pretty strong - circumstantial, of course, but still - evidence to suggest the god of the Aztecs, Quetzcoatl, the winged serpent, is based on a Norse traveller who got marooned there and taught the people to turn away from human sacrifice. Yet another theory holds that the legend of the Amazons of South America can be traced back to the presence of Norse women in Paraguay.

Whatever the skeptics want to think, however much they may resist the idea, it is in fact quite impossible, and wilfully ignorant and arrogant to try to deny the Norse explored America in the early eleventh century. Why they did not succeed in establishing a permanent colony is dependent on many factors, not least of which was the hostility of the native population and their being outnumbered, far from home, and with no supply route to maintain a sustained offensive against the Indians. But advancing glaciers which choked the sea with ice, the similar advance of a darker and much more deadly barrier, the Black Death, and a general fight for survival surely took precedence over the need to explore, as Greenland was cut off from the rest of Europe and its population, like that of Europe itself, declined severely.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Irish_clover.jpg/220px-Irish_clover.jpg)
IRISH/CELTS

Despite their almost stubborn and concerted efforts to do so, it's hard for scientists to ignore the evidence when it's staring them in the face. In Maine there's a carving of a dude, sorry druid, who looks very Celtic. In Vermont a burial chamber has been found which is decorated with Celtic script proclaiming it as being dedicated to Bel, the ancient Sun god of the Celts while in - perhaps ironically - Salem (not that one), New Hampshire, a collection of dolmens and megaliths look very Celtic too. Bel pops up again in Colorado, where in a cave called, um, Crack Cave, there's an inscription in Ogham (ancient Celtic alphabet, see my History of Ireland journal for more) which says "Strike on here." Huh? Sorry, sorry: "Strikes here on the day of Bel." Okay, well, still sounds like a call to the Celts to down tools... All right, if you insist. You're no fun anymore. :( Rather like the burial chamber in Newgrange in Ireland, the sun's first rays at the summer solstice (June 21) do indeed strike the inscription first.

A small tool believed to be a bone comb was found at the hilariously-named Snapp's Bridge (wouldn't fancy crossing that!)  in Tennessee, but was later discovered to be a stamping tool for use on pottery, made by, you guessed it, Celts again. Iberian ones this time. No not Siberian: Iberian, the countries now known as Spain and Portugal. Oh, and two skeletons too - or what was left of them - which date from about the third century BC. Inscribed stones believed to have been the work of Basque Celts have been found all over Pennsylvania, while back in Stephen King country, there are Celtic Ogham inscriptions in Maine which say "Ships from Phoenicia; Cargo Platform", and that leads us to the next bunch who got more than a jump on Columbus.
(https://i0.wp.com/saintsbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/st-brendan-the-navigator-in-boat.jpg?resize=631%2C465)
Land of Saints and Sailors: The Voyage of Saint Brendan

Personally, when someone has "saint" before their name, I tend to treat with a certain amount of skepticism the evidence of their existence, but I probably should not. I mean, essentially these are men and women who surely existed, are perhaps credited with miracles which then elevated them to be canonised by the Catholic Church. Saint Patrick certainly seems to have existed, as did Saint George and Saint Bernadette; in fact, most if not all saints probably were real people.

Opinion, however, remains divided as to the actual existence of Saint Brendan, an Irish monk who, in the sixth century, set sail across the Atlantic, something I believe no Irishman had attempted before. Whether he was real or not - the account of his voyage was only compiled three hundred years after his death - there's also doubt as to whether he made the voyage described therein, but there are those who believe he did. Taking those people as our lodestar, we'll cast off with this enigmatic Irish priest and see where he takes us.

From what we know of him, Brendan was born in Tralee in County Kerry in about 484. Rising to the position of abbot, he seems to have perhaps missed his calling, as he was said to have been an expert sailor and very interested in exploration, sailing the coast of Ireland and on to Scotland and Wales, the Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands, and as far as Brittany in France. He seems to have lived to about 90, a good age for the time, especially for someone who engaged in such strenuous and potentially dangerous activities. Unlike the Spanish and even, as discussed above, the Chinese Buddhist missionaries, Brendan did not set out to convert, but as a monk simply to find a place of solitude and grace, a place to be at one with God, a retreat at which he could dedicate his life to pure prayer. Sure we've all felt like that at one time or another, right? Right? Hello? Have it your own way then.

From what we're told in Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot) it seems he was not the first Irish monk to see America, at least according to another one called Barinthus, who came to him (according to the book) and told him he had found a beautiful land in the west, the "Promised Land of the Saints." Brendan decided he'd go and have a look for this mythical place, as it sounded just like the sort of thing for a man ready to settle down and devote his life to God, with no distractions or interruptions. "Promised Land of the Saints?" he almost certainly did not say, "That sounds just the ticket. Go raibh mile mhath agat, mo chara (Thanks pal) - I'll go and take a butchers."

Apparently monks were good at other things than praying and tsking at single mothers, as Brendan and fourteen others of his order constructed the ship that would take him across the ocean, then another three appeared and, not having taken part in the work, cadged a lift so that there were eighteen people eventually in the curragh, or skin-covered low-sitting boat, when it departed. With so much symbolism, mythology and outright fiction included in the narrative, it's hard to plot the course Brendan and his monks followed, but scholars (those who believe he existed as well as those who believe he made the voyage and didn't just cobble the account together from details of other journeys) reckon he made landfall around the Faroe Islands first. In a twist used almost twelve hundred years later in Star Wars, it's related that at one point the boys landed on an island but that when it began to move they realised they were actually on the surface of a whale! No doubt they blessed it and moved on.

But sure isn't it always the same? You can go to the farthest corners of the earth on holidays and who will you meet but your next-door neighbour or office colleague? So it was that when the monks landed on what is believed to be one of the islands in the Azores, Flores, they met a party of Irish monks who were living there, and had a monastery and all sorted out and going for nearly as long as Brendan had been born. Sure throw on the kettle there will ya, like a good lad! I'm gasping, so I am! Christmas being near, nobody wanted to spend it bobbing along on the ocean so they decided to kip down with the lads till the festive, sorry holy season was over, and sure didn't they have a grand time? Well, I don't know that they did, but I assume it was better than constant cries of "Any land yet?" with attendant groans in the negative, and some possibly very unholy comments on why they had ever left Ireland in the first place, and how they could murder a pint of mead.
(https://i0.wp.com/www.unsettlingwonder.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/730px-St._Brendan_celebrating_a_mass.jpg?resize=300%2C246&ssl=1)
565 didn't start too well for our Brendan, with his craft constantly being blown back the way he had come. "I said WEST, damn it I mean darn it I mean if you please brother!" Like some sort of aquatic ping-pong ball the monks' vessel bounced from west to east, east to west, played with by the prevailing winds, called, maddeningly for the boys, the Westerlies. But they blow east... Look, don't ask me, all right? I'm just the author here. I don't know nothing about winds in the Azores, okay? After a bad pint (of water) at São Miguel the lads weren't feeling too clever, but pushed on regardless, fifth time lucky perhaps? No such luck. This time they got trapped, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner-like, in the Sargasso Sea, where they remained becalmed for twenty days. Brendan told the monks to trust in God. It's possible some of the monks advised him where he could shove God, but eventually a wind rose and they were able to sail on... right into the path of an approaching killer whale, whose attentions they only avoided by the rather convenient expedient of another whale appearing and fighting it. I didn't know whales fought. Well these did, if we're to believe the old Navigatio, and I guess Brendan and the lads must have credited the appearance of the second one to God, and the monk or monks who had blasphemed his name possibly looked sheepish.

"Hey! We're going to Barbados!" they almost categorically did not sing, for three reasons. One, they had no idea where they were going, two the song would not be written for another millennium and a half and three, well, they were monks, and in all likelihood only sang for the greater glory of God, or to give Him a headache and remind him they were, yes, still out here, Lord, drifting around like frigging drifting things, pardon our Irish. If you could see your mighty way clear any time soon to finding us some bloody land that would be just great, if it's not too much trouble, yours in adoration but very much approaching exasperation now, Brendan and the monks. PS No we are not a bloody rock band. Rock has not been invented yet.

Anyway, they found Barbados distinctly lacking in scantily-clothed natives and without suspicious clouds of smoke wreathing the place, thought "well this can't be the Promised Land of the Saints, can it?" and moved briskly on, though for centuries afterwards, right up to and after indeed 1492, Barbados was known as "St. Brendan's Isle." Staying a mere three months (some say three days: doesn't time fly when you're on a completely uninhabited island with a bunch of irritable monks?) off they went. On the way they had a pink flamingo - oh no wait: a pink flamingo dropped a branch on their boat. This led them to the Bahamas, where they stayed for a while, snaffling all the cool fruit they could when they left, and quite possibly sporting a most un-monkish (and un-Irish) tan. Finding themselves north of Newfoundland and south of Greenland they came across an iceberg, which would surely have been the first time any Irishman had seen such a thing. They weren't the Titanic though and didn't crash into it, though they did circle it and measure it at 2,100 feet. That's more than five times the size of the one that did for the world's most famous shipwreck.

Some time later (there's no real measurement of time in the Navigatio: they use phrases such as "on a certain day" as well as using "forty days" as a general yardstick for a long time) it seems Satan must have been trying to scupper the voyage. Perhaps they were getting too close to the Promised Land of the Saints? Anyway here's the rather amusing take Saint Brendan had on it, with what Huyghe believes to be the explanation following it.

"Suddenly, from a "rocky" island ahead of them, they heard the banging of hammers of iron and anvils, and assumed the island was "full of workers." One of the "workers" ran down to the shore and hurled a fiery mass at them, which missed, fell into the sea, and began to glow. More fiery masses were hurled after they had passed. "The entire island was burning like a furnace and the sea boiled up... ." From a great distance "a very offensive stench reached their nose." Brendan called the area "the confines of hell."

This vivid description suggests that the traveling monks had witnessed the eruption of a submarine volcano. Given the limited geographic occurrence of this phenomenon, the episode provides a good indication of Brendan's position. Northeast of the summer iceberg region about a thousand miles lies the submarine ridge off the Reykianes Peninsula on the southwestern comer of Iceland. A number of islands are known to have appeared in this region as a result of volcanic eruptions in the course of history.

It's quite interesting how people who had no idea such things even existed, never mind ever saw one before, interpreted these phenomena. To Brendan's credit, he didn't necessarily attribute it to Satan (that was me messing about) though as you can see he did consider the possibility that they had sailed close to Hell.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a6/4d/62/a64d6283febeb3dced81821252fdd88b.gif)
Bad luck continued to dog the voyage, maybe because of those comments as to where God could stick it, and as they approached "The Land of Fire" (Iceland) one of the monks was chosen to go ashore and explore the dark soil around the boiling mountain. I like to think it was the one I've decided grumbled about God. You can just see it can't you?

Saint Brendan: "Right lads, sure this looks terrible interesting altogether. One of us better check it out. What about you, Brother Sean?"
Brother Sean: "What? Just because I took the Lord's name in vain? You want me to go onto that dangerous island?"
Saint Brendan: "God moves in mysterious ways, brother. Now get out there before He mysteriously moves me to plant me foot up your arse."
Brother Sean: "Grumble, grumble AAAAGHHH!"
God: "Got ya ya bastard! Slag ME off, will ya?"

Or perhaps not. Either way, the monks quickly realised, to their cost - but more especially to the cost of the one who went or was sent to investigate - that volcanos are probably best studied, if at all, by those who know what they're doing and have all the proper gear. Perhaps ironic that on a country named as the coldest in the world someone should die from excessive heat, but as they say, God moves etc. With one monk less, Brendan and the lads sailed on till they came to a big rock in the middle of the sea where they met a hermit who told them "Ireland? Ah sure ye can't miss it lads. Straight on for another seven days and ye'll be home." Thereafter they arrived back on the shores of Erin, August 565, having spent years at sea and possibly being able to lay claim to being the true discoverer of America.

Not at all surprisingly, few give this account credence - after all, who wants to admit that a holy man from Ireland discovered America before a dissolute drunk from Italy happened to stumble across it a millennium later? But explorer Tim Severin did at least prove Brendan's voyage was possible, as in 1976 he retraced the route the monks were said to have taken, in an exact replica of the curragh Brendan and his companions sailed.

The voyage of Saint Brendan may be the most famous - if least credited - visit of the Irish to America, but it was not the only one. When Norsemen arrived there in 982 they spoke of a colony called Hvitramannaland, White Man's Land, where monks had established a settlement there prior to the arrival of the Norse.

The other name for this colony was Great Ireland.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Flag_of_Wales.svg/220px-Flag_of_Wales.svg.png)
WALES
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/01madog07.jpg)


Madoc, um, someone: may be our man, may not (read on below)

You Lucky, Lucky Bastard! Madoc becomes yet another to discover America before you-know-who

Somewhat like our friend Abubakari, this prince of Wales also got tired of constant wars and fighting, and decided to take to the seas. Truth to tell, the fact that he was illegitimate and people likely (not) hailed him as "How's it going, your Bastard Highness?" or "Madoc, you old bastard!" may have influenced his decision. Authenticating his story though has proven difficult, to say the least, in part because of there being so many Madocs - six in all - which researchers down the centuries have gotten all mixed up and muddled into one figure. The true Madoc, son of the King of Wales, is said to have been Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, and another factor in his buggering off to find America might have been his exile to Lundy Island. Why he was exiled is uncertain: it couldn't have been because he was illegitimate, as his father the king had at least two dozen children, few if any of them born within wedlock. It's possible, I suppose, that His Majesty  dear old dad may have grumped "Not another fucking bastard! Right you, I've just about had it now. Off to Lundy with ya, and let me hear no more about ye!"

Or not. But anyway on his death there was the usual scramble for power and riches, land and of course the throne, but for whatever reason (maybe because he had no real claim to it) Madoc was not interested. He instead turned to the stories of the Norse sagas and Leif Erikson's discovery of Vinland, which I already wrote about. There had been a Norse settlement on Lundy, to which he was exiled, since the ninth century, and there Madoc may even have met one who is mentioned in the sagas and who had travelled with Leif to that new world. Madoc also more than likely had heard of the bould Saint Brendan's voyage, and possibly thought, I could do that. So in 1170 he did just that, heading off with one of his brothers to seek out Vinland and see what all the fuss was about.

Sadly, it seems his brother's ship sank, but Madoc continued on and it's believed he ended up somewhere in Alabama, around the Gulf of Mexico, rather distant from where Vinland itself was said to be, but never mind, it's a hell of a large continent. Unfortunately no written account of his voyage survives, leading our good friends the eternal skeptics to shake their heads and pour cold water (sorry) on the possibility of the Welsh reaching America, but Madoc's exploits are rendered in story and song, and even in an account read to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 1580. Which reads  "The Lord Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, led a Colonie and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabowts... ." Note: It's pretty cool that they used the phrase terra florida (which I assume means land of flowers or something - oh right, I checked it: bay land. Well anyway) and that there was later a state named after it.

Oddly enough, even the Great Navigator himself seems to have confirmed Madoc's being there first, as he has on his maps marked "these are Welsh waters." Hard to see how that could have been covered up, but I guess it was. More evidence comes in letters held in the library at Chicago, one of which details a conversation between the founder of Tennessee, John Sevier, and a Cherokee chief, who, when asked who had built the fortifications that he had discovered on his land, replied that they "were a people called the Welsh and that they had crossed the Great Water and landed first near the mouth of the Alabama River near Mobile and had driven up to the heads of the waters until they arrived at Highwassee River." These forts - or the ruins of them - lie not only in Tennessee but also Georgia and Alabama.

If he was there, Madoc did not remain to establish his colony, but left others behind to do that while he sailed back to the land of his fathers. It's believed he then organised a second, larger expedition around 1190 and set sail, but that's the last anyone knows of him. Whether he ever made it back to America, perished at sea or ended up somewhere else, that's the last we hear of him. But it wasn't the last the Spanish heard of him, to their chagrin. When they arrived in America they kept coming across evidence that the Welsh had been their first, including natives who could speak the language (how, being Spanish, they knew it was Welsh I don't know, but maybe their links with Ireland due to a shared faith and a common purpose against Henry VIII in the name of their religion had familiarised them with Celtic languages?) and their government began a search - which they hoped, a hope which was realised, would turn up nothing - for evidence that the leek-eaters had been there first. England finally put up her hands and said "It's all right lads. Fuck the Welsh, we hate them anyway. Look, you were there first, so let's just put a pin in it and say it's yours, all right?" That was in 1670, which is significant as it means that the "Welsh question", if you like, had been going around annoying Their Most Catholic and Bloody Frustrated Majesties for nigh on two centuries before it was finally and quietly put to bed, presumably without bothering the Welsh.
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Life though does not really recognise the power of treaties, and the Welsh presence continued to stubbornly persist, with multiple stories of men meeting Indians who spoke Welsh and who seemed to be descended from them. President Thomas Jefferson walked a typical political tightrope when he addressed the possibility: "I neither believe nor disbelieve where I have no evidence," he said. Daniel Boone was more equivocal, claiming he had definitely seen "blue-eyed Indians" who he believed were Welsh. The most likely candidates for this tribe were the Mandans, who "were pale-faced, some grew beards, and the oldest ones had gray hair, which was unknown among Indians. Their homes were made of logs and covered with soil and were arranged in villages that were laid out in streets and squares. They depended largely on agriculture rather than hunting, unlike other Indian tribes. Vérendrye's account was corroborated by subsequent travelers, many of whom took special note of the blue eyes, fair skins, and light-brown hair of the lovely Mandan maidens."

Their close-harmony male singing might have been a giveaway too. Nah, just kidding. But if they had had any coal mines at that time... all right, I'll stop now.

Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Libyans, oh my!

Ancient Lebanese, the Phoenicians were one of the world's first sea explorers (see my journal The Men Who Drew the Map of the World) and settled the port of  Cádiz in the ninth century B.C. They were regarded as the greatest mariners of their time, and the purple cloth they made was highly prized in the ancient world, nowhere more so than wherever royalty sat. No king or queen worth their salt would be seen dead in anything other than purple, so there was a roaring trade in the cloth. So these sailors par excellence were often commissioned by various rulers to undertake voyages of trade for them, and the evidence suggests that one of these may have taken them to North America.

Halfway up a mountain in New Mexico is an inscription in the Phoenician language which, when translated by scholars in the tongue, turns out to be nothing less than the Ten Commandments from the Bible. The writing has been dated to approximately the ninth century BC again. Seems everyone who was anyone was heading to America in the ninth century BC. And not only North America. Here's what it says on a stone found on a plantation in Brazil in 1872: "We are Sidonian Canaanites from the city of the Merchant King. We were cast up on this distant land, a land of mountains. We sacrificed a youth to the celestial gods and goddesses in the nineteenth year of our mighty King Hiram and embarked from Eziongeber into the Red Sea. We voyaged with ten ships and were at sea together for two years around Africa. Then we were separated by the hand of Baal and were no longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three women, into 'Island of Iron.' Am I, the Admiral, a man who would flee? Nay! May the celestial gods and goddesses favor us well!"
(https://www.livius.org/site/assets/files/5685/pharaoh_d26_apm.236x0-is-pid5699.jpg)

(The Pharaoh Necho: he will not be impressed if you try to dip him in cheese.)

This is believed (by some) to refer to an expedition which set out from Egypt around 600 BC in an attempt to scout for the possibility of digging a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, ordered by the Pharaoh Necho (no not Nacho) to circumnavigate Africa to see if it could be done. If one of the ships was blown off course and ended up in the land of football, then it's estimated a date of around 531 BC would fit in. Needless to say, this, like almost every other instance of proof of the presence of civilisation in America before 1492 has been ignored and scorned by most of the scientific community. But the evidence mounts up, m'Lord: in Paraguay there's a cave with a Phoenician inscription describing a sea voyage.

Coins are another way of proving habitation, and in Kansas, Connecticut, Arkansas and Alabama coins have been found which were clearly minted in the ancient empire of Carthage. The Carthaginians were also known to be great explorers (again, see my journal on exploration) with Hanno, known as "the Navigator", one of their most famous icons. He himself is not known to have travelled to America - and in fact, there is no record of a Carthaginian expedition sent there - but as Shakira might possibly not say, coins don't lie, and the ones that have been unearthed have all been dated to the third or fourth century BC. With characteristic stubbornness and a refusal to accept the truth of their own eyes, many scientists have grumbled and insisted that all of these coins must have been - get this - lost by collectors from the modern age.

Yeah. Right. That's always happening to me. Out walking some farmer's field in Arkansas with my valuable third century BC coins and don't a few always slip through that hole in my pocket? Lord give me strength. These are probably the same people who demand to be taken seriously when they proclaim that Jesus was a white man.

Chile is the site of the discovery of writings by ancient Libyans, who claimed Santiago "for the King of Egypt, for his queen, and for their noble son, running a course of 4,000 miles, steep, mighty, mountainous, on high uplifted. August, day 5 regnal year 16." Then there's this, from just down the road in Ecuador: "The elephant that supports the Earth upon the waters and causes it to quake." Um, yeah. Guess that long sea voyage had some unexpected side effects on the mariners. The Libyan alphabet and language seems to have found its way into that of Native Americans, particularly the Zuni Indians of southern California, and another inscription is found deep in the heart of Texas that says "A crew of Shishonq the King took shelter in this place of concealment." A less stoned crew than the ones in Ecuador, it would seem.
(https://us.123rf.com/450wm/cteconsulting/cteconsulting1402/cteconsulting140200058/26512740-an-image-of-a-snake-oil-salesman-con-artist-.jpg?ver=6)
Of course, in matters like this there will always be the hoaxers, the frauds and the outright scammers who, for reasons of their own, want to make it seem as if ancient people visited their state, city or town. I suppose it could help with the tourism anyway, or it could be an effort to make fools out of those who make these claims in other parts of the country. That's why it's always advisable to have a genuine clever clogs on board when investigating these finds, and so we run into our mate Professor Barry Fell again. Still not a verb, nor, this time, a repeat of the event.

Still, last time we spoke of him we knew little about who he was, so apart from some gentle mockery of his surname, there wasn't much I could tell you about him. So let's correct this now. He's a lot more interesting than most academicians you might read about. Bit of a maverick, by all accounts.

Professor Fell is one of the biggest names in the field which has become known as epigraphy, that is, reading and translating, dating and authenticating (or not) ancient inscriptions, be they on cave walls, carved in rock or anywhere else. He has suffered a lot at the hands of the scientific community, many of whom dismiss him as a fraud himself, but in recent times more esteemed figures have begun to take notice of him, and to slowly give credence and respectability to his theories.
(https://prabook.com/web/show-photo.jpg?id=2421692)
He has mixed feelings about artifacts uncovered at a burial site in Davenport, Idaho, which was believed to be a hoax - with someone actually coming forward to take the blame - but which he has reservations (sorry) about. Much of this hinges on the fact that the supposed hoaxer was only nine years old at the time, and even a prodigy would have difficulty faking ancient languages and symbols, to say nothing of how he would have sealed the tablet in the mound and managed to put it all back together without its looking as if it had been disturbed. As well as this, Professor Fell notes there are three different languages on the tablet, and though one of them - Egyptian hieroglyphs - makes no sense, the other two do. However he's prepared to admit when he gets it wrong, which for me makes him the more believable.

One such occasion took place in Nevada, where a rock he had come to examine looked, to him, as if it had a map of America carved on it. After careful examination though he realised this was just a crack in the natural material of the rock, and the words he had thought referred to the Pacific Ocean were just some ancient prayer, local in origin. This wasn't actually a hoax or a fraud, just an good illustration of how sometimes simple things could be taken to have greater meaning than they have, and that not every rock with squiggly lines on it is a discovery or proof of the existence of ancient Americans. Sometimes, I guess, squiggly lines are just squiggly lines.

And yet, despite these few false trails, the evidence that feet other than those of Native Americans trod the soil of that land goes on, from Quebec and New Hampshire to New York and Pennsylvania, and indeed Fell believes that many of the visitors became permanent residents of America, that the likes of the Libyans and the Iberian Celts settled down, ran schools and farmed, becoming quite possibly the second true Americans after the Indians. There is some evidence of this, but like virtually every other hypothesis he suggest and every theory he advances, it has been met with scorn, derision and alternative explanations. And maybe they're right; who is to say? After all, we're dealing here with people who may (or may not) have been here long before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. That's a long time back, and the passage of the ages tends to erase any markers left by these people, if they were here.
(https://i.etsystatic.com/9904589/r/il/7b22ca/3351409458/il_340x270.3351409458_kj18.jpg)
Fell's theories do get a little shall we say, out there, though, when he suggests that those Iberian Celts actually set up banks in America (I bet the First Bank of America would have something to say about that!), conclusions he bases on the discovery of, well, here: I'll let our old mucker Patrick Huyghe explain it in Fell's words, as I'm tired of typing: " He believes the great number of circular designs adorning a series of rock faces at the Castle Garden site near Moneta, Wyoming, represents one such "bank." The common assumption is that these pictographs and petroglyphs are Indian shield designs. But Fell eventually recognized the petroglyphs as simplified renderings of Roman, Celtic, and Italian bronze coins that were in circulation beginning about 20 b.c. "These pictorial presentations of current coin in ancient America," Fell explains, "were evidently intended to familiarize the fur trappers and others doing business with the Iberian banks as to the relative values of coins in terms of one another and in terms of skins.

One inscription at the site turned out to be the bank's shingle. To the left of a central design are Iberic letters spelling the old Gaelic word for "money changer." On the right is an old Gaelic word that Fell translates as "No usury." The central illustration uses Greek letters to form a rebus, or design, of an upturned moneybag dropping its coins onto a plate. And the word that these letters spell means "the first to come here." If you put it all together, says Fell, what you are left with is something on the order of the First National Bank of Iberia in Wyoming."

I have to say, that sounds more than a little difficult to believe, and I'm sure it was manna from Heaven to his detractors, who would have - possibly metaphorically, possibly literally - pointed and jeered at such notions. I'm kind of tempted to do so myself, but what do I know? You do get the idea though that Professor Fell is seen, among the archaeological community, as a sort of Erich Von Daniken (remember Chariots of the Gods?) or that guy who's always appearing on memes and attributing everything to aliens, the most famous (and funny) being "I don't know therefore aliens." He gets vilified, with one eminent scientist lambasting his first book as "rubbish" in the New York Times (I say! Steady on there, old boy!) and others calling him the "Typhoid Mary of popular prehistory." Ouch.

Maybe they're just jealous that he gets it and they don't. Maybe they're unwilling to admit they might have missed what he discovered. Or maybe they just see him for the fraud they believe he is. I have no idea whether he's genuine or not, but there certainly is a lot of hostility directed at him. Huyghe however does note that most if not all of this vitriol comes from within Fell's own country, and that in Europe, particularly in Spain, Wales and Ireland, his theories have been supported and applauded. Well now in fairness, they would do wouldn't they? After all, Fell is making the case for the presence of their people in America long before Columbus, so they're going to be more likely to support that, as they have a vested interest. Well, given that they financed Columbus's voyage, the Spanish might be in two minds about that.

The converse of that though is that the ridicule piled upon Fell by American archaeologists may have its own agenda, may be rooted in the politics and even racism of ensuring that the narrative that has been in place for over five hundred years now remains the only side of the story told, particularly in American schools. The fact that these people refuse to listen to him, laugh at him and do their best to discredit, or if they can't then best ignore his findings, points to a desire to kowtow to the establishment, ensure Columbus continues to be feted as the discoverer of America, and that a white man retains his historical - if inaccurate, possibly erroneous - position in American history.

Nevertheless, you can only ignore reality for so long, and even deeply-opposed Americans are beginning now to see things Fell's way, with one Canadian, respected anthropologist David Kelley, championing his cause.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Polynesian_Migration.svg/220px-Polynesian_Migration.svg.png)
POLYNESIANS

While the Phoenicians may have been regarded as one of the first sea-faring races in human history, the almost universally acknowledged greatest mariners in the world came from the islands of the Pacific, Polynesia. Over four thousand years they crossed the Pacific almost end to end, settling in Hawaii and New Zealand as well as Easter Island and, just possibly, America. They navigated by wind, waves, stars, clouds, birds and, um, pigs. Yeah. Not so much horsepower as pigpower. Sorry. I don't quite understand it, but they apparently used to have pigs on board their ships and used them to smell out land. How? Search me. I assume, pigs being pigs, the porkers would have been trying to catch the scent of food of some sort, or at least something they could eat, even if that turned out to be natives, friendly or not. But why they wouldn't just smell the food on board is beyond me. Who knows?
(https://www.alltech.com/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_thumbnails/public/2021-10/nursery-homepage_web_0.jpg?itok=RfQ1X5nv)
What is clear though is that the kind of skeptic who likes to throw cold water on the theories of visits to America prior to the Big C, the kind of suggestions made by our friend Barry Fell and his ilk, are stymied by the adventures of the Polynesians. Not only is there plenty of evidence of their habitation, at least in South America, but many efforts to reconstruct their voyages (pigless or not I don't know) have been successful, so there's little doubt they were capable of sailing across the Pacific and into the New World. Even die-hard holdouts have to agree to this. Unlike many of the peoples we've discussed previously, the Polynesians seem to have deliberately set out on voyages of colonisation; where the Japanese or Chinese might have been blown off course or fled from persecution, the Africans merely curious and the Norse trading, these lads actually set up and provisioned boats with their livestock and families, ready to head to "a new world" and make their home there. In that, they were perhaps the first true combination of explorers, mariners and colonists in the world.

The presence of the sweet potato in Polynesia, when the tuber is native to South America, points to the transplanting of this vegetable from one to the other, and as the Native Americans are known to have had no ocean-going vessels and, further, no interest in sea exploration if they had, the transfer could only have effected by the Polynesians who, having come to the continent, took the sweet potato back home with them when they left, or sent it on.
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ITALY (Yes yes I know, but apart from him)

It might sound counterintuitive to say Italians discovered America before Columbus - wasn't he, after all, an Italian? Well yes he was, but that doesn't mean that one of his countrymen couldn't have made landfall on the shores of America before him. It wasn't intentional - a lot of the voyages that ended up in the New World were not - and Nicolò Zeno, having set sail in 1390 for England, got blown off course. To add possible insult to injury, Zeno was a Venetian, and Venice had been at war with, and had just defeated Genoa (birthplace of Columbus). A great storm arose and Zeno's galley was pushed towards the Faroe Islands, where the natives were less than friendly. Zeno was saved by an Englishman who was visiting, the Earl of Orkney, Henry Sinclair.

The two got on well and given that Nicolò's brother Carlo had led the fleet that had defeated the Genoans, the earl asked him to be captain of the fleet he was launching against the Shetland Islands (honestly, who would bother? Surely there are more sheep there than humans?) and when victory was won, knighted him. His brother, Antonio, joining him a year later, was promoted to admiral of his fleet on the passing of Nicolò. Some years later, following the tale of a fisherman who said he had returned from America (though he called it Estotiland) Antonio and Sinclair arrived - after having been again caught in a storm; things must have followed the brothers around!) - in Newfoundland, but less than welcome he had to travel on, and came to what has been more or less identified as Nova Scotia. The year was 1398.

Sinclair decided to build a settlement there, but Antonio and most of his men were more eager to get home, so they headed off while he stayed there with a few men. Nothing more is definitely known of him (though some estimates have been made that he returned and may have died in a British invasion of the Orkneys - what was it with the British invading tiny islands nobody cares about? Teach those sheep who's boss, huh? Sorry? The Falklands what?) and Antonio died soon after returning home, all of which, say the ever-present critics, deniers and naysayers, points to the whole thing having been a fabrication, an attempt by jealous Venusians sorry Venetians to get one over on the smug people of Genoa, who were soon afterwards touting that their local boy had done good.

He had, certainly, but not as good as they wished to claim.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Flag_of_Portugal.svg/320px-Flag_of_Portugal.svg.png)
PORTUGAL

So what do you do when you're the king of the country that turned away and refused to bankroll the supposed discoverer of the new world? Well, go and see if any of your subjects beat him to it. And how sweet if you could prove that they had done so a mere twenty years before him! João VAz Corte-Real claimed to have made this journey in 1472, which might sound a little suspicious that it was exactly twenty years before Columbus, but then just about everything about this story smells funny. First of all, there's no corroborating evidence that any expedition was launched by the Portuguese on or around 1472, even though it's supposed to have been financed by two kings, Portugal's own Alfonso V and Denmark's Christian I. A land grant given to Corte-Real later makes no mention of any discovery.
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Despite this, he is hailed - in Portugal alone, tellingly - as the discoverer of America, which the tale (tale indeed, it would seem) says he named Terra Nova de Bacalhau (New land of the codfish - that "cod" could also be telling; we Irish use the term to describe someone who is having you on, ie you're codding me! Or you could say con I guess) and which, if the story is to be given any credence, was Newfoundland. The problem is that this story is told by a notorious liar and exaggerator known, rather appropriately, as Gaspar Frutuso, his being the only account of it. Nevertheless, Portuguese people proudly accept the flimsy tale, and there is a plaque in Lisbon commemorating the "great discoverer of America."

And so it goes on. Both the Poles and the Danes claim nationality for Johannes Scolvus, who is said to have discovered America even closer to the famed date than Corte-Real, in 1476, a mere sixteen years before the Spanish claimed it. This story seems to have a little more in the way of support as historians from Spain, England and Netherlands all seem to agree that Scolvus reached Labrador around this time. The waters however have been muddied (sorry) by attempts to, for some reason, historically place two notorious pirates and the abovementioned Corte-Real in the same ship as Scolvus, and the whole thing has sort of dissolved into hysterical and sarcastic laughter.

Back in the - more or less - real world, the English claims are a bit more feasible, with their Bristol crews searching the oceans for a land off the west coast of Ireland which they named "The Isle of Brasil" (no, not that one) and which first took place in 1480, but due to adverse weather the search had to be abandoned as the ship was driven to the coast of Ireland. A year later they tried again, but there's no proof that ship even left port. Nevertheless, a letter from English merchant John Day to possibly Columbus himself mentions the possibility, even the probability, of the English having discovered America first when he writes in about 1496 that  "It is considered certain that the cape of the said land was found and discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found 'Brasil,' as your Lordship well knows. It was called the Isle of Brasil, and it is assumed and believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found." Unlike our friend Gaspar above, Day is a very credible source and his letter is widely believed to tell the truth, though there aren't enough specific details to allow England a reliable claim to the discovery of America.

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Chapter IV: Oh, Just One More Thing: I Did Discover America!

Uh, no you didn't, Chris. We've proven that conclusively in the previous chapter. In fact, you were a long way down the pecking order. However, to be completely fair, Columbus was the first to, as it were, send out the fifteenth century equivalent of a press release on his "discovery", whereas the likes of Leif Erikson just sort of shrugged and went back home, so in terms of Europe learning about what would quickly become known as, with staggering originality, the New World, it's all on him. Unfortunately, his "discovery" (I'm going to stop putting quote marks around that word now; it should be understood that I don't accept Columbus's arrival in what became America as any sort of discovery, but for the sake of ease I'll just refer to it as such) would also open the way to slavery, destruction of natural resources, murder and the almost genocide of an entire people, so historically that sucks for him. In fairness to the guy though, America was going to be discovered one way or another. You just couldn't expect one of the largest landmasses on Earth to remain hidden, especially as ships began to forge further and further out across the world's oceans.

And you can bet that, had he not discovered it, whoever did is almost certain to have reacted in the same way he did. It's kind of not fair, I think, to place all the blame for the way the Native Americans were treated at Columbus's door. He was, after all, merely a product of his times, and the idea of white supremacy and indeed Christian supremacy (before the advent of Protestantism) was hard-coded into the DNA of Europeans; their "manifest destiny", their "holy mission" or "crusade" to bring the Word of God to the "heathen savages" a thing every single man, woman and child took to be their birthright and even their duty. Not to mention that kings and queens were hungry for new territories, as kings and queens always were back then, and remained so for hundreds of years, and the almost literal interpretation of "finders keepers" seems to have informed the royal, military and trade policy of the European powers. So had some Dutch sailor or some guy from France discovered America, I can't see it having gone any better for the natives.

But history is history, and we recognise the discovery of America by Columbus as all but the starting point for the widespread practice of slavery in Europe, and of course once you reduce another race to the status of slaves, or savages, exterminating them is all the easier. In fact, to some of the twisted minds back then, it could have been seen almost as a sacred duty. The phrase "conform or die" was not born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, nor indeed the word holocaust, but both certainly applied to the exploitation, exploration and conquest of the land which would become known to the world as America, and later the United States of America.
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So there's plenty to blame Columbus for, but a lot to admire him for, too. Remember, to Europeans, what this mariner from Genoa was  trying to do seemed impossible. His own crews believed myths that had come down to them about dragons living in the sea, and huge sea-monsters which could crush ships or swallow them whole (these may in part have been based on sightings of whales or giant squids) and nobody believed there even was land that far west. So Columbus wasn't at the time trying to discover where America was, but that it even existed. He faced ridicule, prejudice and many predictions of either his total failure or his being lost at sea. Few people expected him to come back; fewer expected that he would have actually accomplished his mission. And yet, for all the fame and glory he should have garnered from basically achieving what was seen to be impossible, a fool's errand, his discovery all but ruined his life, as we'll see later.

First, though, I've always wondered why it was that an Italian had to go to the courts of Spain to get his financial backing for the voyage. Did his own king, the Italian - or, I assume, Genoan, since Italy was at this time a series of principalities and kingdoms - not have faith in him? Or was the price tag too high for such a risky venture? Italy of course now claims Columbus as its own and proudly states it was an Italian who discovered America, but so too does Spain, as without the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella Columbus would have been going nowhere. Is it a source of quiet shame in Italy that they turned their back on the man who would turn out to be, apparently, one of the greatest explorers of his age? Have they glossed over this, excused it, explained it? When Italian children ask in school - if they do - why Columbus was bankrolled by the Spanish, what do the teachers say?

To try to get my own answers to this question, I want to look into both how his home country was structured at the time Columbus lived, and how much, if any, influence its king had. It may be that Genoa was ruled by a sort of underking, who might have had little real power, but even if that's so, then whoever was in power - Florence or Milan or whatever city Genoa was part of in terms of monarchy - should have been surely able to raise the capital. More than likely it wasn't a case of being short of cash, I would imagine, and more one of lack of belief that the voyage could be undertaken successfully. I mean, what king would really pass up the chance at, to quote It Bites, a whole new world? Did Genoa - and all of what became Italy - want to be looking on enviously as their man was feted at the Spanish court and, more to the point, the Spanish king and queen took the New World as one of their colonies, with all its resources, land, slaves and trade routes? Does that look good on any king's CV? So who was king? Well, before we get to that, what was the deal with Italy in the fifteenth century?

State of the Union(s): Italy and Spain - two emerging world powers at the time of Columbus

Italy: E Pluribus Unum, or Something

(https://i.postimg.cc/zGF7rv0j/italystates.png)
The map above shows the state of Italy - okay, okay! The states of Italy! - just around the time Columbus would have been setting sail for the New World. It's clear that the country was made up of a lot of small kingdoms and states, of which Genoa was one, but not a large one. Far, far larger than Genoa were states like the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Florence, the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Savoy and of course the Papal States, where Rome was. Then there was the biggest of them all, taking up most of the toe and the lower foot, as it were, the Kingdom of Naples. I count fourteen states in all, some very tiny, some huge. Given the relative size of Genoa to, say, Milan or Florence, it seems abundantly clear to me that this would not have been a rich kingdom, or state, and may in fact not have had its own king at all, being so close to one of the much larger ones, the Republic of Florence. So, did the Florentine king hold power over Columbus's home state, and therefore his future?

Well, no. It seems that Italy at this time was not in fact ruled over by kings or queens, but by princes, who were not royal princes but the scions of wealthy families: powerful bankers, patrons of the arts such as the Medici and the Borgia, influential and rich dynasties that had built up their power through trade and finance. Kings in all but name, really, but Genoa did have its own ruler, and was a power in and of itself. A port city, it had well-established trading links with other countries and was the centre of two of Europe's largest banks. Under the control of the French until about 1409, it was wrested from them and thereafter, with slight gaps, ruled by the powerful Visconti family of Milan, of whom I do not know if Tony is one. Showing how religious and secular power were all but one and the same at this time, the Visconti dynasty began with Archbishop Ottone in 1277, when he wrested control of Milan from the Della Torre family. Originally Lords and then Dukes, the Visconti ruled Milan for over 150 years.

When the rival Della Torres sided with the French Count of Anjou and fought with him against the Sicilian King in 1263, Charles remembered their support, and crowned the new King of Sicily, allowed the Della Torres to rule Milan. The death of  Pope Clement IV in 1268 allowed the Visconti to mount an army and take on the Della Torres, whom they decisively defeated in 1277. Through intermarriage the Viscontis then extended their rule to Bologna and Genoa, but at the time Columbus was floating (sorry) his idea for a voyage to, as he saw it, the west indies, the Viscontis were no more. It wasn't that they had been defeated in battle or executed like their old enemies the Della Torres, oh no: this change of rule came about due to one of those old bugbears that constantly dogged monarchies: the heir to the throne.

It seems the remaining heir to the Duchy of Milan was Bianca Maria Visconti, and married at age twenty-five to Francesco I Sforza, she passed on the title to him. He ruled Milan, then, as the first of the Sforza dynasty, for sixteen years. He was acknowledged both as a skilled military tactician and a man of peace, who with Cosimo de Medici drew up the Treaty of Lodi and established the Italian League, a multi-state agreement which saw peace reign over Italy for forty years. Unfortunately his son, Galeazzo Maria, was a far different proposal. The man was twisted, warped, petty and cruel in a way possibly not seen since the reign of Calligula. The atrocities he committed are related by the Renaissance historian Bernardino Corio: "he tells him capable of torturing even his friends to the point of madness, as he did with Giovanni Veronese, his favorite, to whom he cut off a testicle. The twenty-two-year-old Ambrogio instead, in order to escape his flattery (Galeazzo was in fact bisexual), castrated himself. He had the young Pietro Drego buried alive and out of jealousy he had both hands amputated by Pietrino da Castello, slandering him as a forger, since he had caught him conversing with his mistress. When he surprised a farmer who had caught a hare against the hunting ban, he forced him to swallow it whole with all his skin until he suffocated. Since an astrologer priest had predicted the date of his death, Galeazzo had him walled up alive and wanted to see him starve. He had the habit of raping both men and women, and of appropriating the wives of others, and even worse, once he had finished, he had them raped in turn by his favorites, reason that was the basis of the conspiracy that crushed him in 1476. The lightest punishment of all went instead to his barber, the Travaglino, who, having cut it by mistake, received four lashes. The Corio also describes him as greedy, and imposer of unusual taxes."

When, in 1471, his sister Ippolyta asked a Franciscan friar in Naples - perhaps Giovanni della Marca - to pray for Galeazzo Maria, the friar refused to do so, saying: ""What do you want, madonna, that I pray to God for the Lord your brother, who fears God as much as that wall does?"

Probably not all that surprising then that he died by the assassin's knife. Well, I say assassin's but I should make that plural, as there were three. Well, four, including a servant, and about thirty-odd in the whole conspiracy.  Oddly enough, it wasn't his cruelty and sexual lusts, as such, that had convinced the three nobles to do him in. One had a beef with him about some land, one thought, or knew, that he had deflowered his sister, and another just didn't like his politics. Also of interest is the fact that the slaying took place in church (which you would assume, even at that time, would have been sacrosanct to such devout Catholics) and in ways looks to have mirrored the killing of Julius Caesar, bringing us back to Rome again. Amusingly, one of the assassins got himself caught up in some curtains or something and was arrested and killed, while again oddly, considering how brutal the man had been, there was a mob ready to tear the corpses apart when the rest of the conspirators were arrested and executed. Jeez! You're welcome, lads!

With the - very violent and more to the point sudden - death of Galeazzo Maria, his son, Gian Galeazzo, became the third Duke of Milan, but it seems as he was very young - only seven years old - coming to the throne on the assassination of his father, his uncle stood as regent, and it wasn't long before he took power and indeed may have been responsible for the death of the duke, at the age of 25. So in any real sense, this guy was in charge.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Pala_Sforzesca_-_detail_01.jpg/500px-Pala_Sforzesca_-_detail_01.jpg)

Ludovico Sforza (1452 - 1508)

Although as I say above he is known or suspected of poisoning his nephew the Duke Gian Galeazzo, it appears from the accounts I read that Ludovico was a peaceful and popular ruler. He has the title "Arbiter of Italy", and though I'm not going to be going into the entire history of Italy, nor even the rulers of Milan, he looks to have had his hands full when Columbus was doing the rounds. Now, all of this has been written with the clear understanding that I have not the first clue how these things worked. Maybe you had to go outside your own country to get the financial backing you needed. Maybe your own duke or prince would tell you to fuck off, he had more important things to worry about than your poxy flight of fancy, assuming you could even get an audience with him. In Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome I seem to remember you really couldn't get near the ruler - other than being in the family or court - without the help of a patron, and maybe our Chris had none. So he might never have bothered even setting foot in the duke's palace.

But even had he, it looks like he would have been given short shrift. From what I read, around this time old Ludo had a war to fight, as the Venusians sorry again always getting them mixed up Venetians were attacking him, and had the support of Genoa, so being a Genoese and going to the Duke of Milan to ask for financial backing seems like it would have been a really bad idea. Ludo was also in the throes of planning a wedding (or some say, or thought, avoiding it) so there was a lot to occupy his time, and fighting  wars is not a cheap occupation, so the coffers would not have been available to Columbus, had he requested an audience, which I'm beginning to increasingly think he did not. At any rate, what we can take from this - and it does satisfy at least my curiosity on the subject - is that had Columbus looked to Genoa (or Milan, really) for support he would almost certainly not have got it, and he probably knew that, and so did not try.

(https://i.postimg.cc/J0JJQ7nv/castille.png) (https://i.postimg.cc/4N72rp7R/aragn.png)
Spain: A Union of Equals Under Their Catholic Majesties

No, I am not jumping ahead. I have no intention of telling you here how it came about that the king and queen of Spain ended up being the ones who financed the Columbus voyage, that will come later. All I want to do here is see how things stood in Spain, and how and why he was able to go to the Spanish court and get the help he needed. And as always, for that, we need to go back in time a little and check out the situation in Spain and how it came to be where it was by the time of Columbus. And one thing I find amazing, which I certainly did not know, is that for over 700, nearly in fact 800 years, Spain and Portugal - known then as the Iberian Peninsula, or Hispania - were under Muslim control, part of what was called the Umayyad Caliphate, which at its height stretched from Syria in the Middle East to Egypt in North Africa, and covered over four million square miles, making it one of the largest empires in history. Interestingly, and perhaps at odds with current Islamic countries, both Christians and Jews were not only allowed practice their own religion in the Caliphate, but could also hold government positions.

Without getting too much though into the history, in 718 or 722 the Christian States began to invade, ostensibly to take back land they had lost to the Muslims, in what became known as the Reconquista, or reconquest, a period of wars that would last for over six centuries, and which would culminate, in one of those little quirks of history, in the very year Columbus would discover (yes, yes!) America, as Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille took the last remaining kingdom in the Caliphate, Granada. In truth though the Caliphate had been smashed two hundred years earlier, with the major battles of Cordoba (1256) and Seville (1248) bringing all but Granada under the control of the Catholic monarchs. Bad news for the Jews, incidentally, who, having lived in relative peace under the Caliphate were expelled under the Alhambra Decree in 1492 unless they converted, and Muslims were equally treated, though the latter were then expelled anyway a century later. This draconian law was not revoked until the nineteenth century, and symbolically so another century later, in 1968.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/506-Castile_1210.png)
As can be seen from the map above, Spain in the Middle Ages was made up mostly of two major kingdoms, these being primarily Aragon and Castille, with Leon, Navarra and Galacia, and as Castille in time absorbed Leon, Cordoba, Navarra and Seville, as well as  the other smaller  kingdoms they became known as the Crown of Castille. When Ferdinand married Isabella their union signified the joining of the two main kingdoms into one, which became espana, modern Spain. Rather than being known as king and queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella were given by the Pope the title of "The Catholic Monarchs" in 1494, though they had married in 1469.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Michel_Sittow_004.jpg/440px-Michel_Sittow_004.jpg)
King Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452 - 1516)

Although born a prince of the blood, the second son of King John of Castille, Ferdinand was not the heir to the throne until the mysterious death - some say poisoning at the hands of his stepmother - of his elder brother Charles. A child prodigy, he was nevertheless respectful of the lower classes, ensuring he would, when he took the Crown of Castille, be loved by them, and when his mother died in only his sixteenth year he conducted the arrangements for her funeral (his father being away at battle) and then joined King John, a seasoned campaigner by seventeen. It's easy to take written accounts of the man as fawning, exaggerated or even politically motivated, but certain attributes seem to be common to all the ones I've read: smiling eyes, kindness, gentle handling of the poor, pious, moderate, humble, thoughtful - these are all mentioned in about seven different sketches of him by various authors, so there must be some truth in them. Few if any have a bad word to say about him.

His marriage in 1460 to Isabella of Castille was not smiled upon: her half-brother, Henry IV of Castille, had wished Ferdinand to marry instead the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, Mary, and was so angry at the match that he disinherited Isabella in favour of his daughter Joanna. Once Henry died, Isabella turned the tables on her niece and took the throne of Castille for herself. Seems Ferdinand was a bit miffed at this, possibly (though I'm just guessing here) because he expected to be crowned king, and was only referred to as Isabella's "legitimate husband" (there's damning with faint praise if ever I heard it). So he returned hotfoot to Segovia, where his wife had set up court, and they had a right old ding-dong, thrashing it out just in time to face a challenge from Joanna's hubby, Alfonso V, king of Portugal, who wanted the throne for his wife and himself. Isabella thus claimed Portugal as hers, and war were declared.

Ferdinand of course brought Aragon in on her side, but her own people were divided, some of them rooting for the woman they believed to be the true heir to the throne, Queen Joanna of Portugal. France got involved - not surprisingly, on the side of Portugal, as Ferdinand had been in the middle of battling their forces when the news of Isabella's coronation had reached  him - while various other Spanish states, such as Navarre, Granada and Galicia, had enough troubles of their own with civil wars and said "you're all right, mate: you just continue on without us." The war raged on for four years, but in the end Ferdinand and Isabella were victorious, and in 1481, with the death of his father and his ascension to the throne of Aragon, Ferdinand merged his kingdom with that of Isabella, and Castille and Aragon became the foundation of what is today modern Spain.

So with the final annexation of Granada in 1492, it would seem Ferdinand and Isabella were powerful enough, jointly as rulers of the new Spain, to have considered gaining new territory, which may be (we will see) why they were prepared to back Columbus. Even so, you would imagine after such a costly war with the French and Portuguese, that they might not have been so quick to pony up the readies. However, I have read in passing that there was some form of financial trickery/compulsion used which ended up leaving Ferdinand's accountant personally responsible for shouldering much of the burden of the loan the Crown gave to Columbus. If so, then it was a pretty clever masterstroke.

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Queen Isabella I of Castile (1451 - 1504)

The other half of the power double in Spain was of course Queen Isabella, monarch of Castile, but as already mentioned she was only third in line to the throne, her half-brother Henry being the heir when their father, John II, died, and she and her brother Alfonso being basically kicked to the curb, left to all but starve in a castle until summoned to court by the King of Portugal, who made sure they were looked after and educated. Alfonso died in 1458, leaving Isabella next in line to the throne. With a civil war going on in Castile, Henry tried to marry his sister off to various princes and nobles in order to secure alliances, but none succeeded. One such suitor, Charles of Berry, actually died on the way to meet his proposed new bride, who had prayed to God not to let the marriage take place. Guess God was quicker in those days!

In the end, the marriage between her and the man she had been originally betrothed to, and who would become King of Aragon, took place with quite a dash of romance. Isabella, fearing she would be prevented by her brother marrying Ferdinand, legged it from the palace while he met her disguised as a servant. The two eloped, basically, and were married in 1469. Ah, bless. They would soon become the two most powerful forces in the country, their twin kingdoms uniting to create modern Spain. Isabella was crowned Queen of Castile on the death of her brother five years later, but was immediately challenged by King Afonso V of Portugal, who believed Henry's daughter, Joanna, was the rightful heir, and they went back and forth till eventually Castile were able to claim the victory, and Isabella's reign was ratified.

She proved to be a more than competent ruler. In a time when England had yet to see its first (official) queen, and most of Europe was ruled by men, she grasped the political and economic realities with the acumen of any  man, and better than most. She re-established justice and law and order throughout Castile, sorted out the finances and grew to be a well-liked monarch

Okay, well that's the background researched. Time to return to the man about whom this whole article is being written.

Oh, you were wondering when we'd get back to him, were you? Well, had to set the scene, and now that we've done that, back we go.

And I mean back.

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Christopher Columbus (1451 - 1506)

Though little is really known of Columbus's birth or even his early life, most seem to agree that he came from Genoa, one of the states of what would become Italy, and his father, Domenico, looks to have married into money, as he was a mere wool weaver who also ran a cheese shop on the side, whereas his wife, Susanna Fontanarossa (sounds like an Italian sports car!) was the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer in Corsica. Christopher was the first son of Domenico and Susanna, and three more would arrive along with the last, a daughter. One of his brothers, Bartolomeo, would go on to be a map-maker, and Christopher himself would study at the University of Pavia, though at age fourteen he would leave - whether this means he dropped out, graduated or was expelled we have no idea due to the scarcity, almost non-existence of records of his early life, but there is no mention made later of any disgrace, so it may reasonably be assumed, I would think, that he either completed his studies or that the call of the sea proved too strong for him to remain in education. What exactly contributed to his interest in the life of a mariner I have no clue; there was no history of either naval service or exploration or even trade on his father's side, and his mother came from a line of realtors, so it's doubtful there was any wanderlust in the Fontanarossas either.

It could of course have been the simple desire to see beyond his own country that drew Columbus to the sea. In a time where the only way to see other lands was to take passage on a ship, it's possible he just decided he wanted to see more of the world. Perhaps his studies (geography and navigation were among the subjects he took at the university, perhaps underlining how common it might be for young men to become sailors) gave him the spur; perhaps learning about other countries, and also how to handle and navigate a ship, might have instilled in him a desire to put that knowledge into practice and make a name for himself. And, of course, he was brought up in a port town. Watching all those ships sailing in from strange places, a bit like Marco Polo two centuries before him, must have stirred the blood and stiffened the sinew, or something. It's probably likely - almost certain, one would assume, at that age - that he started as a cabin boy on some ship and, literally, learned the ropes, until he was able to captain his own ship. And then of course there were always wars, and wars need ships and ships need captains. Columbus was involved in the war between Genoa and Venice from 1461- 1463, and commanded a fleet of galleys near Cyprus.

"In 1477," he says, in one of his letters, "in the month of February, I sailed more than a hundred leagues beyond Tile." By this he means Thule, or Iceland. "Of this island the southern part is seventy-three degrees from the equator, not sixty-three degrees, as some geographers pretend."

But here he was wrong. The Southern part of Iceland is in the
latitude of sixty-three and a half degrees.

"The English, chiefly those of Bristol, carry their merchandise, to this island, which is as large as England. When I was there the sea was not frozen, but the tides there are so strong that they rise and fall twenty-six cubits."

It could also have had to do with the attack on Constantinople, which changed Europe fundamentally.
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The Fall of Constantinople (1453)

Constantinople was one of the great cities and centres of power of the medieval world. The hub of the mighty Byzantine Empire, and named after the first Roman emperor to legalise christianity, Constantine the Great, the city had stood for over a thousand years, and despite two attacks and sieges by Arabs, in 674 and 717, and Christian Crusaders in 1204, it was still standing by Columbus's time. However, successive attacks by Latins, Bulgarians, Serbs and Ottoman Turks had reduced and weakened the city, and the arrival of the Black Death in 1346 did not help matters, wiping out nearly half of the city's population, and leaving it ripe, once Europe had recovered from the Plague, for conquest. By 1450, the once-great city had shrunk to a few walled villages, the Byzantine Empire was on its last legs, and Constantinople was really nothing more than a shaky house of cards, just waiting for one push to bring it all down.

The ones to provide that push were the Turks of the Ottoman Empire.

Their new young ruler, Mehmed II, knew the history of his people and he wanted Constantinople back. He of course knew too how weak the ancient centre of the Byzantine Empire had become, and was eager to prove himself. He built a second fortress on the Bosphorus Strait, to complement the one built there decades ago by his great-grandfather, and effectively blocking off any potential aid which might come from Greece, where the brothers of Constantine XI, now ruling in what was left of Constantinople, held sway. Constantine turned to western Europe for help, but apart from there being bad feeling between him and the Pope, most of the European powers had just ended major wars, such as the Hundred Years War between France and England and the Reconquista, which had taken up most of Spain's military and financial resources, so in effect Constantinople met the threat of the Turks without allies.

And they needed them. A force of about 7,000 defended the city, with the Turks mustering up to ten times that many, according to various estimates. Even the lower estimate though reckons their strength to have been 50,000, so at least seven to one. Plus they had cannon, about 70 of them, while the garrison had only a few old outdated and pretty low-powered pieces of artillery. The Ottomans had massive cannon which, though slow to reload - three hours - and unreliable were nevertheless devastating, and no doubt struck fear into the defenders when they saw them being hauled towards the city.

In the end, the Siege of Constantinople lasted 53 days, the city finally falling on May 29 1453, as the power of the Ottoman Empire was turned against Christendom. I suppose in twenty-first century terms the Fall of Constantinople might be equated, in terms of shock and disbelief, to the attack on the Twin Towers. It was a black day for Christianity, and though they hoped one day the city would be recovered it never was, as Istanbul, as it became known, is now the capital of Turkey, a Muslim nation.

What has all this to do with Christopher Columbus, I hear you ask? Well to be honest, I don't know, but I imagine it must have had some effect upon his desire to explore and also to find new territories for the Spanish Crown in the face of the growing Muslim threat from the east. At any rate, we pick up the story of Columbus as he reaches his thirties, and marries Philippa de Perestrello, the daughter of another mariner, an ex-Portuguese governor,  in 1477. It was from Lisbon that he began trying to solicit interest in his plan to reach Japan (known in Marco Polo's famous travel book as Cipango) which he believed to be the closest point to Europe, and as he was in Portugal it only made sense to hit up the Portuguese King, John II, who had already authorised the voyage of Bartholomew Diaz to Africa, where the navigator had discovered the Cape of Good Hope.

At this time, it was still believed the only way to get to the East Indies was to sail east, down along the African coast, while Columbus's idea was that if you sailed west, and the world was round, as most believed it was (though it had yet to be conclusively proven beyond doubt shut up Flat Earthers nobody cares) then the Indies could be reached that way, which would be a much shorter and quicker route. Mostly though, what he was offering was trade advantages. Spices, silks, carpets, drugs were all imported from India, and very popular. If they could be transported faster and more conveniently by his proposed route, the monarch who cornered that enterprise would stand to become rich as, well, a king, but a very rich king. Perhaps several. Not to mention the prestige that would accrue to him.

However now we come to the crux of the matter. Columbus explained his vision to King Alphonso V, but he rather inconveniently died in 1481 and passed the throne to his son, John II, who nodded and smiled as Columbus explained his plan, then went and gave it to another mariner to try out, before he shelled out the readies. Sadly for this sailor, and the king, but not for Columbus, the big girl's blouse got scared of an iddy-biddy massive storm and fucked off back home. John hadn't let on about his "test run", but when the fleet came back into Lisbon harbour trailing a brown streak in the sea, he knew which was the wind blew (well he would, wouldn't he, being a sailor and all?) and told John exactly where he could stuff it, and in high dudgeon (no point being in low dudgeon; might as well not be in any dudgeon at all if you're not going to be in high) he sodded off to Spain, where history was about to be made, leaving John II of Portugal most likely slapping his forehead and muttering "Fuck."

So, although he hadn't actually asked the Duke of Milan for help, being an Italian that was technically Italy and now Portugal down.

Third time's the charm.

Spanish Gold: Their Catholic Majesties Bankroll the Voyage

It seems pretty incredible to me that at this point Columbus is believed to have been about fifty years of age. Remember, this was the fifteenth century, when human life expectancy was much lower than it is today. Columbus would have been considered well past middle age and perhaps heading into old age, and for a man of such "advanced years" to undertake a grand enterprise like this must have added to the doubts of those who believed it pure folly. He also had a son by now, Diego, and with the passing of his wife had taken a mistress in Castile, Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, who would give him a second son, Fernando. Columbus first gained the attention and interest of two dukes, the Duke of Medina Celi and the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with the former so enthused that he was ready to provide a small fleet for the Genoan, but had second thoughts at the last minute, believing the project required royal backing.
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And so he introduced Columbus to Ferdinand and Isabella, and the proposal was made. Since Constantinople had fallen, the usual access route to the Indies, the famous Silk Road, had been closed, making travel east even more difficult and more dangerous. Columbus told the two Spanish monarchs (it's not recorded if Isabella was present when he had his first audience with her husband, but she was brought in later) that it was his hope to convert the "Indians" to Christianity, and that the proceeds of trade which would result from the discovery, and conquest of the New World would enable Ferdinand and Isabella to mount a campaign to take back Jerusalem from the Muslims. For two such deeply Catholic monarchs - so much so that they had, as mentioned, been titled as such by the Pope - such an opportunity was not to be missed.

The monarchs convened a council, this perhaps showing how both were prepared to listen to others and let them make the arguments and ask the questions about which they themselves knew little or nothing; Ferdinand has already been noted as having been a pious and humble man, and while Isabella certainly had a firebrand streak, both monarchs knew that there were those in Spain who were better placed to make a judgement on this man's proposal. Much was discussed, including religious scripture, the actual distance to the West Indies - which it turned out Columbus had very much underestimated - and of course the cost and its potential return to the Crown. In the end, no decision was reached, but Columbus was kept at the Spanish court, mostly, presumably, to prevent him offering the idea to other kings. He did receive an invitation to return to Portugal and again make his proposal to King John, though it doesn't say whether or not he accepted, and I think not; he sent Bartholomew to England to talk to King Henry VII, but a run-in with pirates delayed his brother's arrival on England's shores by a year, only arriving in 1491.

In January of the next year, which would be forever remembered in history - incorrectly - as the year America was discovered - Columbus tired of waiting around for an answer that seemed no closer in coming, and headed off to see if the King of France might be interested. On the way towards the seaport of Palos, he and his son stopped at the convent of St. Mary of Ribada, where the abbot, Juan Perez de Marchena, begged him to try once more with the Spanish monarchs before petitioning the French one. He had in fact been Isabella's confessor, and so was well in with her, and when he convinced Columbus to send a messenger, the queen received him favourably and told him Columbus should return to the court for an audience.

He arrived with, it would seem, the stars aligning for him, as Spain had finally taken back Granada and thus pushed the last Muslims out of their land, destroying the last remnants of the Umayyad Caliphate, so one obstacle which had been presented to him previously was removed. However he ran into problems with the new Archbishop of Granada, who thought it scandalous that Columbus should demand one-tenth of all the revenues from the voyage. Isabella's confessor, Luis de St. Angel, could see how things were going and at this impasse realised Columbus was again frogbound, and anxious that Spain not lose the glory of supporting this voyage he interceded. Isabella listened to his counsel and agreed. Thunderbirds were, so to speak, go.

What I find a little odd about this is that Ferdinand was the original of the two monarchs Columbus approached, and Isabella was apparently not there, but then she seems to have completely taken over the negotiations, her husband not even at court when she made her decision. I mean, sure, later he would have looked back and said "Good call, babe", but would he not have been a little ticked off to have had such a huge decision made by his wife without consulting him? Guess he was busy somewhere, though it doesn't say where.

The problem was, though, there was no cash. Spain had, as I've said already once or twice, just come out of a costly war to take back its lands from the Muslims, and the cupboard was bare. Isabella apparently pledged her own jewels as collateral, making the voyage really more under her patronage than that of Ferdinand, and also giving her a larger role in the administration of the New World, which would be considered really more Castilian than Spanish. The funds were actually advanced though by the confessor, St. Angel, from  the ecclesiastical revenues.

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First Voyage

Columbus had of course no problem securing crew for the three caravels (old sailing ships) he had been granted for the voyage. Every able-bodied man was ready and eager to face the unknown, sail into uncharted seas and brave the monsters of the deep, spend years away from their families in search of a land which might not even exist, and if it did, might very well be hostile. The prospect of dying at sea filled the sailors with... well, you know where I'm going with this, don't you? There was in fact fierce resistance to and reluctance for the voyage, and it was only through the efforts of his main supporters and friends, the Pinzon brothers, respected sailors and merchants who announced they would personally travel on the voyage, that doubts were removed.

The three ships are known to history as having been the Santa Maria, Columbus's flagship and the largest of the three, the Nina and the Pinta. It seems the Santa Maria was originally called Gallego, but Columbus had its name changed (thought that was something superstitious sailors avoided, believing it was bad luck?) and the entire crew of 120 men set sail on the morning of August 3, Columbus marking the beginning of the great voyage in his log:

"Friday, August 3, 1492. Set sail from the bar of Saltes at 8 o'clock, and proceeded with a strong breeze till sunset sixty miles, or fifteen leagues south, afterward southwest and south by west, which is in the direction of the Canaries."

As an aside, this really was the answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question, as it seems that is the equivalent in today's money as to how much the Crown shelled out for the enterprise. First port of call was to be the Canaries, and as it happened they had to pull in here anyway as the rudder of the Nina broke, believed to be sabotage by its owners, from whom it was taken by the Crown as a fine, or possibly the sailors themselves, afraid of the voyage. Either way, it was repaired and the small fleet set out again on September 6 for a six-week voyage west. On September 16 they arrived in what would become known as the Sargasso Sea, where large clumps of green seaweed floated, Now that they were out in the unknown, Columbus worried about mutiny if his crew were to discover how far from home they actually were, and so he fudged the figures, writing one distance travelled in the log, another, the true one in his personal journal. So he would write in his journal, "Travelled fifty-five leagues, wrote only forty-eight." A dangerous game to play, if his crew should discover he was lying to them.
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He may have been made Admiral of the Oceans by Isabella, but while he had travelled widely Columbus's blunders were many. He notes that they must be near land on September 20, as he spots a whale and considers they always stay near the coast, which is of course about as far from the truth as you can get. Two days later the trade winds, which had continued to push them west, changed, overtaken by a headwind which helped slow them down, his crew fearing perhaps they would sail off the edge of the world, or at least never see home again, having been blown so far from Spain. However, proving that it was not only the Admiral who could make a knob of himself, Martin Pinzon, in charge of the Pinta, shouted out on September 25 that he had spotted land, and headed towards it, only to find it was in fact a bank of fog.

Nevertheless, increasing flocks of seabirds showed them they were in fact coming closer to land, though Columbus believed this to be the coast of Asia, or the islands around it, when in fact it was the Bahamas. On October 10 the event which has been called in history the mutiny on board Columbus's ship took place, but according to his own journal it was never anything close. Sure, the men were scared and fed-up, not having sighted land despite their captain's constant assurances, but he doesn't seem to have had any real fear that there would be any sort of mutiny. He writes:

"The seamen complained of the length of the voyage. They did not wish to go any farther. The Admiral did his best to renew their courage, and reminded them of the profits which would come to them. He added, boldly, that no
complaints would change his purpose, that he had set out to go to the Indies, and that with the Lord's assistance he should keep on until he came there."

The very next day, they sighted land. Again, from his journal:


"Oct. 11, course to west and southwest. Heavier sea than they had known, pardelas and a green branch near the caravel of the Admiral. From the Pinta they see a branch of a tree, a stake and a smaller stake, which they draw in, and which appears to have been cut with iron, and a piece of cane. Besides these, there is a land shrub and a little bit of board. The crew of the Nina saw other signs of land and a branch covered with thorns and flowers. With these tokens every-one breathes again and is delighted. They sail twenty-seven leagues on this course.
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The Admiral orders that they shall resume a westerly course at sunset. They make twelve miles each hour; up till two hours after midnight they made ninety miles. The Pinta, the best sailer of the three, was ahead. She makes signals, already agreed upon, that she has discovered land. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see this land. For the Admiral being on the castle of the poop of the ship at ten at night really saw a light, but it was so shut in by darkness that he did not like to say that it was a sign of land. Still he called up Pedro Gutierrez, the king's chamberlain, and said to him that there seemed to be a light, and asked him to look. He did so and saw it. He said the same to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, who had been sent by the king and queen as inspector in the fleet, but he saw nothing, being indeed in a place where he could see nothing.

After the Admiral spoke of it, the light was seen once or twice. It was like a wax candle, raised and lowered, which would appear to few to be a sign of land. But the Admiral was certain that it was a sign of land. Therefore when they said the 'Salve,' which all the sailors are used to say and sing in their fashion, the Admiral ordered them to look out well from the forecastle, and he would give at once a silk jacket to the man who first saw land, besides the other rewards which the sovereigns had ordered, which were 10,000 maravedis, to be paid as an annuity forever to the man who saw it first. At two hours after midnight land appeared, from which they were about two leagues off.
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It was in fact an island, and it wasn't long before they caught sight of people, natives, the first to encounter Europeans, or at least, Europeans who were about to enslave, annihilate or forcibly convert them. Although land was sighted on October 11, they did not reach it till the next day, therefore the actual discovery day is taken as being October 12, 1492. After Columbus, the two Pinzons and a landing party (sorry) had taken possession of the new land - which he called San Salvador, and by which name it is still known today - for Ferdinand and Isabella, the rest of the story is best described by the Admiral himself.

"So that they may feel great friendship for us, and because I knew that they were a people who would be better delivered and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force, I gave to someof them red caps and glass bells which they put round their necks, and many other things of little value, in which they took much pleasure, and they remained so friendly to us that it was wonderful. Afterwards they came swimming to the ship's boats where we were. And they brought us parrots and cotton-thread in skeins, and javelins and many other things. And they bartered them with us for other things, which we gave them, such as little glass beads and little bells. In short, they took everything, and gave of what they had with good will. But it seemed to me that they were a people very destitute of everything.

They all went as naked as their mothers bore them, and the women as well, although I only saw one who was really young. And all the men I saw were young, for I saw none more than thirty years of age; very well made, with very handsome persons, and very good faces; their hair thick like the hairs of horses' tails, and cut short. They bring their hair above their eyebrows, except a little behind, which they wear long, and never cut. Some of them paint themselves blackish (and they are of the color of the inhabitants of the Canaries, neither black nor white), and some paint themselves white, and some red, and some with whatever they can get. And some of them paint their faces, and some all their bodies, and some only the eyes, and some only the nose.

They do not bear arms nor do they know them, for I showed them swords and they took them by the edge, and they cut themselves through ignorance. They have no iron at all; their javelins are rods without iron, and some of them have a fish's tooth at the end, and some of them other things. They are all of good stature, and good graceful appearance, well made. I saw some who had scars of wounds in their bodies, and I made signs to them (to ask) what that was, and they showed me how people came there from other islands which lay around, and tried to take them captive and they defended themselves. And I believed, and I (still) believe, that they came there from the mainland to take them for captives.

They would be good servants, and of good disposition, for I see that they repeat very quickly everything which is said to them. And I believe that they could easily be made Christians, for it seems to me that they have no belief. I, if it please our Lord, will take six of them to your Highnesses at the time of my departure, so that they may learn to talk. No wild creature of any sort have I seen, except parrots, in this island."

All these are the words of the Admiral, says Las Casas. The journal of the next day is in these words:

Saturday, October 13. "As soon as the day broke, many of these men came to the beach, all young, as I have said, and all of good stature, a very handsome race. Their hair is not woolly, but straight and coarse, like horse hair, and all with much wider foreheads and heads than any other people I have seen up to this time. And their eyes are very fine and not small, and they are not black at all, but of the color of the Canary Islanders. And nothing else could be expected, since it is on one line of latitude with the Island of Ferro, in the Canaries.

They came to the ship with almadias,(*) which are made of the trunk of a tree, like a long boat, and all of one piece—and made in a very wonderful manner in the fashion of the country—and large enough for some of them to hold forty or forty-five men. And others are smaller, down to such as hold one man alone. They row with a shovel like a baker's, and it goes wonderfully well. And if it overturns, immediately they all go to swimming and they right it, and bale it with calabashes which they carry.

(*) Arabic word for raft or float; here it means canoes.

They brought skeins of spun cotton, and parrots, and javelins, and other little things which it would be wearisome to write down, and they gave everything for whatever was given to them. And I strove attentively to learn whether there were gold. And I saw that some of them had a little piece of gold hung in a hole which they have in their noses. And by signs I was able to understand that going to the south, or going round the island to the southward, there was a king there who had great vessels of it, and had very much of it. I tried to persuade them to go there; and afterward I saw that they did not understand about going.

I determined to wait till the next afternoon, and then to start for the southwest, for many of them told me that there was land to the south and southwest and northwest, and that those from the northwest came often to fight with them, and so to go on to the southwest to seek gold and precious stones.

This island is very large and very flat and with very green trees, and many waters, and a very large lake in the midst, without any mountain. And all of it is green, so that it is a pleasure to see it. And these people are so gentle, and desirous to have our articles and thinking that nothing can be given them unless they give something and do not keep it back. They take what they can, and at once jump (into the water) and swim (away). But all that they have they give for whatever is given them. For they barter even for pieces of porringus, and of broken glass cups, so that I saw sixteen skeins of cotton given for three Portuguese centis, that is a blanca of Castile, and there was more than twenty-five pounds of spun cotton in them. This I shall forbid, and not let anyone take (it); but I shall have it all taken for your Highnesses, if there is any quantity of it.

It grows here in this island, but for a short time I could not believe it at all. And there is found here also the gold which they wear hanging to their noses; but so as not to lose time I mean to go to see whether I can reach the island of Cipango. Now as it was night they all went ashore with their almadias."


Sunday, October 14. "At daybreak I had the ship's boat and the boats of the caravels made ready, and I sailed along the island, toward the north-northeast, to see the other port, * * * * what there was (there), and also to see the towns, and I soon saw two or three, and the people, who all were coming to the shore, calling us and giving thanks to God. Some brought us water, others things to eat. Others, when they saw that I did not care to go ashore, threw themselves into the sea and came swimming, and we understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven. And an old man came into the boat, and others called all (the rest) men and women, with a loud voice: 'Come and see the men who have come from heaven; bring them food and drink.'

"There came many of them and many women, each one with something, giving thanks to God, casting themselves on the ground, and raising their heads toward heaven. And afterwards they called us with shouts to come ashore. But I feared (to do so), for I saw a great reef of rocks which encircles all that island. And in it there is bottom and harbor for as many ships as there are in all Christendom, and its entrance very narrow. It is true that there are some shallows inside this ring, but the sea is no rougher than in a well.

And I was moved to see all this, this morning, so that I might be able to give an account of it all to your Highnesses, and also (to find out) where I might make a fortress. And I saw a piece of land formed like an island, although it is not one, in which there were six houses, which could be cut off in two days so as to become an island; although I do not see that it is necessary, as this people is very ignorant of arms, as your Highnesses will see from seven whom I had taken, to carry them off to learn our speech and to bring them back again. But your Highnesses, when you direct, can take them all to Castile, or keep them captives in this same island, for with fifty men you can keep them all subjected, and make them do whatever you like.

And close to the said islet are groves of trees, the most beautiful I have seen, and as green and full of leaves as those of Castile in the months of April and May, and much water. I looked at all that harbor and then I returned to the ship and set sail, and I saw so many islands that I could not decide to which I should go first. And those men whom I had taken said to me by signs that there were so very many that they were without number, and they repeated by name more than a hundred. At last I set sail for the largest one, and there I determined to go. And so I am doing, and it will be five leagues from the island of San Salvador, and farther from some of the rest, nearer to others. They all are very flat, without mountains and very fertile, and all inhabited. And they make war upon each other although they are very simple, and (they are) very beautifully formed."

It's rather amusing that he seems to have wanted to protect these people, but would end up being the agency of their doom. Of course, one of the first things Columbus wanted to do, once they had landed and spoken with the natives (presumably after a fashion, since it's certain neither could speak the other's language) was to find gold. After all, Ferdinand and Isabella would be delighted with the new territories, but first and foremost they would want gold. And as he had noticed the "savages" wearing gold, Columbus knew it was available. He didn't manage to find any though, and continued his exploration of the islands, making friends, it would seem, with just about all the natives, who were entranced by these strange foreign men, and may very well have taken them to be gods.