Columbus did come to islands off the coast of what became America but it had been discovered long before by the folks who lived here and others who made prior perilous trips across water to reach both coasts.  We know this because of the evidence left behind read by scholarly detectives.  Analysis of sculpture, anchor remains and reports in records brought back to home ports tell us this but we still give homage to a man who was mainly mad and believed, against all common sense, that the world was not flat and a lot bigger than he thought it was. He discovered what he thought was India and wanted badly to get a piece of the great wealth he knew was there although he was frustrated by his backers back home and died broken and impoverished.

Now, Europeans followed him and began the voyages of exploration and discovery opening up the “new” lands for European exploitation.  New discoveries continue to be made in dense tropical rain forests. New species are reported that will soon vanish because of the “advance of civilization”. Cutting down forests to allow humans to exploit the wood, the soil and the minerals beneath allow human populations to overwhelm other populations.  The seas are exploited also and the challenge of the unknown in space has made our impact felt there.

But, face it folks – Columbus wasn’t the first to “discover” America.  In fact it took a Papal decree to divide the land found between the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Aztecs, Mayans and Incan worlds were lost as a consequence.  Since there was no UN or League of Nations or NATO or SEATO, lawlessness ruled the seas and land was conquered and traded without regard to the first arrivals.

There is a great sculpture of an “Indian” hero, Crazy Horse, being carved out of a mountain in South Dakota.  He is not far from the four Presidential faces carved by Gutzon Borglum in the Black Hills. He celebrated them not for discovery but for rather parochial achievements as leaders of a new nation soon to be THE premier power the world had yet to see. But none of this activity and the holiday called Columbus Day can really do justice to the early peoples who crossed a land bridge between Asia and North America and founded great civilizations in Central and South America. 

There is no monument to them or to the Vikings who came, visited and settled Vinland.  Perhaps there was that Irish Monk who made the trip at a different time and to a different place.  What all this says is that Columbus was not the first. Who can say it was not Asians and Africans who made the first contact? I bring this up because, although Columbus’s day has come and gone – the fact remains, he was not the first.