if they already knew the region then it wasn't unknown... it doesn't show anything there are no historical records...each discovery could be the result of ships blown off coarse by storms and currents a very common occurrence...
The Vikings believed if they sailed long enough they would reach land. There was no edge of the Earth, there was a body of water surrounded by land. Remember, their era was in the Little Warm Up when wine grapes were superior in Britain than France, and Nova Scotia may have indeed had wild grapes. Via nitrogen isotope analysis of bones, the early Greenland Vikings ate a land based protein source. Their sheep and cattle. Greenland was not a propaganda ploy. It could support grazing animals. It lacked forests so the search for land with lumbar quality trees took them to North America. No biggie. Logic. Viking Logic Moi No
Seems like China had some colonizing plans for South and Central Americas since it seemed the first American settlers were afterall Mongoloid with some Caucasian additions, but now it surfaced the first Americans were neither Asian, white or black, but ancestral to the modern native Australians or the Mungo man, and closely descended from man when he first left Africa.
True...but they could have traveled along the lower South Pacific Island chains and made it to South America and then headed back West. AboveAlpha
the Sagas were prose written 2-3 centuries after the event, they were not contemporary historical documents...as with all heroic folklore there are a lot of embelishments, certian events happened but the why and how of it are not to accepted as factual...
The meaning of VINLAND is a modern misconception, it does not refer to grape vines....the scandanavian term refers to pastures, which does describe the viking sites found in both Greenland and Newfoundland...finding pasture lands would've been significant for farmers more so than grapes... - - - Updated - - - pure fantasy...
well they did indeed do that but again the distances involved were at times considerably more than 100-200 miles...they may have made it to the americas but what little evidence there is hasn't been accepted as fact as yet by archeologists...
Before reliable methods of determining Longitude came about this is largely what sailors did on every voyage. They could easily tell how far North or South they were by measuring the angle of the North Star, but the methods they had for determining how far East or West they had come or were to go were crude at best. Do you remember ever seeing pictures of very old maps where they are covered with groups of straight lines all radiating from various points. Those are portolans and the radiants are rhumb lines. If you started from the exact beginning of the radiant and kept compass bearing dead straight along the rhumb line you got to your destination, eventually, and assuming a cross current had not put you hundreds or thousands of miles off course, Given the methods they had it amazes me they were able to get anywhere at all. Sailing was far from the exact science we have today. The building techniques of the ancients were certainly not unsophisticated, Study the dome of the Pantheon one time. Nevertheless it is true they used no technique requiring engineering and there is no evidence they used the technique. Recent studies of the famous aqueduct at Lyon, however, have found that, allowing for wind, it has a safety factor no greater than modern, It is not, in other words, overbuilt, it is built as best any modern engineered structure would be.today. It may be simply coincidence or it may not. . I will agree. The process of discovery begins with random sightins and continues through chance landings to final settlement. The first settlers on most Polynesian islands were probably following stories that had been told for centuries. Columbus' voyages are said to be partially inspired by tales from Basque fishermen and bodies that had been washed up wearing no clothes found in Europe. On his first voyage he was shadowed part of the way by a Portugeuse squadron and it is thought the Portugeuse had been voyaging to Brazil regularly for decades by this time. In the Age of Exploration, however, things were different than they had been before and ever were again. The price of Spices meant that for what could have been a short voyage a man without status or education might become richer than a King, Many men would play Russian Roulette if the payoff was wealth beyond imagining. Columbus thought the world was 15,000 miles around and Asia thus only 3,000 miles distant as Ptolemy said, Had he known the actual distance was 12,000 miles and thought there was nothing in between he almost surely would have never come.. The There are also actual settlements ruins at L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. They are pretty firmly accepted by most archaeologists, though it is not known which Vikings built them You can see mountains on Baffin Island in North America from the West Coast of Greenland. One of the better indicators of European and North American medieval contact was the presence of White Hawks (not albinos) in the flocks of medieval nobles. They were a prized rarity but certainly not unheard of. In the wild at present, they live only on Baffin Island, in North America and it seems this situation has not changed for a very long time..
I was referring to a tribal group, men and women, old and young setting out into the ocean to no known destination, not sailors / adventurers. As for white hawks of Baffin island, as google didnt give any information, I contacted the League of Nations and elicited only this enigmatic response: "We can find no reference to the existence of the "white hawks of Baffin Island", no more that we can for the so called "South African Gold Fields", also so much lately in the news." Always collusion, it seems. This situation has in fact, not changed for a very long time.
Yea, kind of like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, and Abraham Lincoln freeing all the slaves, right?
and from the stories past down through the centuries sailing was a somewhat frightening experience for even experienced sailors, Columbus faced a mutiny from his crew... there is debate whether or not Columbus heard of the americas from Basque fisherman and whether he should be credited or the Basques... there are historical church records of the Basque voyages whether Columbus knew of them or not will likely never be known... other than the unknown long voyage Columbus was confident he could reach the spice lands by sailing west, he new the earth was round and there was an already established overland and sea trade route to the east to the spices...going west he hoped to cut out the middlemen the arabs traders and get directly to the spices... and a relatively short distance to the north american mainland, easily reached following the coastlines...vikings in Greenland were trading with the local Inuit who also lived further south on the continent in Labrador, it doesn't take a big leap of logic to assume the Inuit told them of the lands further south...and that's where they ran into problems with north americas other indigenous people who were less friendly...
Does that mean the sagas are not true? No, it does not. You are forgetting that at that time most individuals were illiterate. And the Sagas were part of an ancient oral tradition, that was actually rather sophisticated. You seem to be confusing a saga with a fairy tale.
the white hawks could be another mistranslation like "vinland" or mistaken identity, a white hawk may have been a reference to the Snowy Owl... I've never heard the story before but it's possible...
no some of the sagas were absolute fiction...some were based on legendary figures who were elaborately romanticized and embellished...some were based on actual events that had been sensationalized, no different than what Hollywood does with historical events taking a small incident and building a totally fictitious story around it, great entertainment but less than truthful...
it doesn't necessarily dispel the story of white hawks even if they get a lot of the facts wrong...I don't know of any other white birds of prey in the north... - - - Updated - - - ahh okay...
If people can swim the atlantic ocean in 70 days it doesnt take a great leap of faith to imagine someone sailing to the carribean islands from west afrika. There is a current that would take a simple boat there in half the time.
60-year-old Jennifer Figge is getting ready to set sail on her fourth continuous stage swim across the Atlantic Ocean. She will soon take off from Brava in the Cape Verde Islands off of Dakar. Brava is about 400 miles (640 km) off the coast of Senegal in western Africa. She will head to Antigua in the Caribbean Sea, although her final destination is weather dependent. where she will start her adventure towards the Caribbean Sea. Figge will be escorted by Captain Tamas Hamor and First Mate Sara Hajdu, a pair of experienced cross-Atlantic sailors from Hungary. In her previous three stage swims across the Atlantic, she has departed from Cape Verde and landed on shores of Trinidad. "We follow the North Equatorial Current between 10-15 degrees N. of the equator," explains Figge. "This is what I love about the sport. You cannot control an ocean; you simply embrace it for all that it holds. We take a six-hour plus block of time, each day and get the most we can out of it. The hours are really determined by the action of the day, and since my diagnosis of Atrial Fibrillation, the EKG." http://dailynews.openwaterswimming.com/2013/01/stage-swimming-across-atlantic-ocean.html
its not a hawk, and they dont have to go to the new world for them this is getting to be like G Washingtons hatchet! Every thing true and original except the facts!