Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/28/in-the-1500s-four-spanish-col.html
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I think the people who lived in North America had already explored it pretty well.
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Well, there goes the neighborhood…
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Cabeza de Vaca it’s said had a face only his mother could love.
One of de Vaca’s companions was a Moor named Esteban, who had been enslaved in Morocco. Esteban was effectively the first African to set foot in North America. R. A. Lafferty wrote a novel about this journey which is still unpublished.
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I would clarify, first documented African. The more we find out about pre-European arrival in the Americas there is more consensus (and arguably some proof) that humans from Asia and Africa had, intentionally or by accident, made it across the seas at various times.
Really fascinating stuff, all around.
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Oblig:
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I read a book that compiled two works about his life, Naufrágios and Comentários, years ago. I was impressed by his ability to survive disasters and his taste for hiking. The guy really liked to walk. He trekked from Florida to Mexico. Some years later he walked the jungle paths between the Island of Santa Catarina (in modern Brazil) to Asunción, Paraguay. Then he went after a local version of the Eldorado legend, lost somewhere in Peru.
No. There is no credible evidence that there was contact between Europe, or Africa, or China, or Polynesia and the Americas after the arrival of native Americans and before c. AD 1000. Please don’t fall into the hole of pseudo-science.
These are a completely different thing: a reassessment of when the first humans, the ancestors of today’s native people of the Americas, arrived in the first place.
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There’s another novel that has been published.
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