In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction: Some Primary Questions and Answers The questions of who were the ¤rst occupants of the New World, where they came from, and when are more than 500 years old, since they began to be asked from the time the Western Hemisphere was being encountered by European explorers.1 I am going to discuss the background of this topic in the time period from a.d. 1500–1800. Some basic parameters can be set for this discussion of the answers that have been given to this oft-spoken query of “Whence?” The question was ¤rst posed following Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World. He surely was not the ¤rst European to visit the Western Hemisphere ; the Norse had done that 500 years earlier. Nor was he traveling into what was completely terra incognita, or fearful of falling off the edge of a “®at” world. Some pre-1492 European knowledge of the distant continent may well have existed among the Icelanders, for example . The concern of a non-round earth was certainly an old wives’ tale by the end of the thirteenth century. Classical scholars had centuries before recognized the world as a sphere and had constructed “globes” and also estimated quite accurately the earth’s circumference (Whit-¤eld 1998:54–59). However, for a proper understanding of the worldview in the 1490s we must go back as far as the thirteenth century and the travels of Marco Polo, whose impact on later cartography was immense. Polo’s long trip and visit to China from 1271 to 1295 and his later description of that region were hardly hidden from medieval scholars. More than 100 versions of Polo’s manuscript description of his travels are extant today. While it is true that Polo himself did not construct a map based 2 “From Whence Came Those Aboriginal Inhabitants of America?” a.d. 1500–1800 Stephen Williams on his lengthy stay in the East, his narrative is clear enough that more recent scholars have been able to trace his travels quite accurately (Yule 1921). Much earlier Portuguese cartographers, some of the best of their time, were able to add East Asia, India, and the location of the Spice Islands to their “Portolan” charts using Polo’s data (e.g., Laurentian/ Medicean Portolano 1351 and Catalan Atlas 1375; see Whit¤eld 1998: 31–41). Actually, Columbus was very likely not even ignorant in general terms of the oceanic distance to the New World (his Cathay) but probably underestimated it due to Ptolemy’s incorrect ¤gures. Following Columbus’s ¤rst voyage, in 1492, not to mention his other three trips to the “West” Indies, as they would soon be called, the most amazing thing is the rapidity with which further discovery of the new hemisphere took place between 1492 and 1550. One of the best sources from the period were the “Decades,” as his chapters were called, by Peter Martyr, whose book De Orbe Novo (1511–1530), written in Spain, was the ¤rst “history” of these exciting events (Anghiera 1912). Martyr’s successive “Decades” provided up-todate information in a manner that almost equals today’s websites. Exploration , trade, and mapmaking went hand in hand, and the delineation of the New World in a cartographic manner was done amazingly quickly and with considerable accuracy (Whit¤eld 1998:53–89). As Samuel E. Morison (1974:3–161) and Whit¤eld (1998) have clearly set forth, the raison d’être for Columbus’s voyages was obvious: the search for a shorter path to the Spice Islands. Ever since Marco Polo’s descriptions of Cathay, and with the rise of the Muslim Empire blocking the European/Asian overland trade (the ancient Silk Route), other paths to the Orient were sought. Some were rather irrational (at least to our eyes), but they were still tried over and over again. For the English it was via the Northwest Passage across the top of North America by Martin Forbisher (1576–1578) and many others. Other Europeans tried the Northeast Passage, going over the top of Europe and into Russia that way. None was really successful until the twentieth century, a bit late! (See chapter 1 for more details on these attempts.) Another aspect of possible Old World contacts with the New that has not received much attention until recently is the fact of long-term occupation of western Greenland by Icelandic/Norse settlers many centuries prior to 1492. Of course, there was also the now-proven but short-lived settlement of...

Share