Did Christopher Columbus Discover America?

In 1492 Columbus and his three ships reached an island in the Bahamas. Since he believed he was approaching India, he called the Islands he found "The Indies" and their inhabitants Indians. He then found Cuba and what (thanks to his error) are now called the West Indies. In later voyages he reached the mouth of the Orinoco River, in what is now called northern Venezuela, but still didn't realise that he was on the edge of a new continent.

By the time Columbus died in 1506, others had already started exploring the new continent, especially Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed down the eastern coast of South America in 1502, and after whom the continent was later named.

Of course, people had already been living in the Americas for hundreds, if not thousands of years before Columbus and his successors went there, so "discover" isn't exactly the road. However, they were certainly the first Europeans in that part of the world, unless you count the Nordic settlers who tried and failed to establish a colony in Greenland in the Middle Ages.

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Christopher Columbus didn't discover America - it was there all the time.

Joking apart, he was not the first European to reach North America. There is plenty of archaeological and other evidence to support the idea that it was the Vikings that were the first Europeans to set foot on the continent of North America. The mythical Vineland of the Norse sagas is now accepted to mean North America.

However, there is another theory that it was a Welsh saint that first made landfall more by accident than design. This explains why early settlers bumped into Native Americans who could speak Welsh!

Paleontologists, meanwhile, assert that the original Americans came from the East, crossing a land bridge that once existed in what is now the Bering Strait. This places the original 'discoverers' of the North American continent several tens of thousands of years before Christopher Columbus.

Incidentally, Columbus is generally thought to have been working from a map that was brought to Genoa from the Middle East. So the short answer is that Christopher Columbus didn't discover America, but no-one is 100 per cent sure who actually did so.

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