The Legendary Land

The Legendary Land

The Tainos welcomed Christopher Columbus to the island of Guanahani in 1492. Like most other Europeans of the time, Columbus knew little about Asia and Africa. He knew nothing about the Americas. Columbus thought he had sailed to Asia. He never knew that he had reached an unknown land.

STORIES OF AN UNKNOWN LAND

For a very long time, people had told stories about an unknown land in the Ocean between Europe and Asia. The Irish said that the Catholic monk named Brendan had sailed to this land and the AD 500s. The Chinese told a story about Huishen, a Buddhist monk. He was said to have sailed to this unknown land at about the same time.

No one knows if the stories are true. Sailors from many different places, blown off course by stormy winds, may have landed on the coast of North or South America for hundreds of years. So many stories were told that it became hard to know what was fact and what was not. 

Only one early landing has been proved true. It was made by a people known as the Vikings. The Vikings lived in a place that is today the countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. From these lands the Vikings sailed West and built settlements in Iceland and Greenland. 

The earliest stories about Vikings visiting an unknown land are found in Viking sagas. A saga is an adventure story that tells about the brave Deeds of people long ago. A story called The Greenlander’s Saga told of the travels of the Vikings from settlements in Greenland to the Americas. Archeologists have since found evidence proving that much of the Greenlander’s Saga is true

Multiple Choice

Who were the first known Europeans to have landed in the America's?

• Tainos People

• Christopher Columbus

• Amerigo Vespucci

• Vikings

THE GREENLANDERS' SAGA

About the year AD 1000, a viking named Leif Eriksson hired a crew and set sail from Greenland, heading west. He was looking for a land he had heard about since he was a boy. It was a land not mountainous, well timbered, and with small knolls upon it. A knolll is a small, round hill.

The land Eriksson reached was part of what is now Canada. Moving south along the coast, Eriksson soon found a place to spend the winter. The sailors went ashore and built houses of mud and grass. They called the settlement Vinland, or Vine land, for the many grape vines that grew there.

Eriksson and his crew returned to Greenland in the spring. During the next several years, the Vikings sailed many times to Vinland. They used it as a base for fishing and hunting.

Leif’s brother Thorvald led one trip back to Vinland. When the Vikings arrived, they saw what looked like three knolls on the beach. They walked up to them and, instead, found nine people sleeping under boats. The Vikings attacked. They killed all but one person, who escaped. Later during that same trip, many boats filled with people came to Vinland and attacked the Vikings. Thorvald was wounded and later died.

After this encounter, or meeting, the Vikings soon ended their trips to North America. The stories of their Adventures, however, were kept alive over the years in The Greenlanders’ Saga.

Multiple Choice

What and where is Vinland?

• It is in the Caribbean where Christopher Columbus found the Tainos people.

• It is a settle in Canada for Leif Eriksson and his crew.

• It is a place in Mexico that has a lot of grapes.

EUROPEANS AND EXPLORATION

500 years passed before Europeans returned to the Americas. During these years most Europeans did not want to go into the unknown places. They believe the world outside the place they lived was very dangerous. They thought horrible sea monsters waited beneath the ocean, ready to swallow ships whole. They thought the sun was so hot in some places that it made the seafood boil.

Another problem was that the Europeans Square sailed ships were slow and could sail only with the wind. This would have made a long ocean trip very hard. Even worse, there were not many Maps. Those that could be found were so different from one another that no one knew which were correct.

In any case few European rulers were willing to spend their time or money on sailing trips past their borders. Until the 1400 Europe had no strong central governments. Instead, it was made up of many small kingdoms and Villages. Each was ruled by a noble. These Nobles spent too much time fighting each other to care about exploration, or searching the unknown.

Multiple Choice

What kept Europeans from searching the unknown land.

• They were afraid of being swallowed up by giant sea monsters.

• Lack of money

• Ships were slow

• all the above

THE UNKNOWN WORLD

In 1492, the year the Tainos greeted Christopher Columbus, a group of people in Germany paid Martin Behaim an amount equal to $75 to make a new kind of map. The map was in the shape of a ball. It was the first globe ever made in Europe. Behaim called it his “Earth apple”. He made it from pieces of leather stitched together.

Behaim’s globe showed why he and other European cartographers, or makers of maps, thought the Earth was like. Behaim wanted his Globe to show the Earth as it really was, but he did not know enough to make it so. Behaim’s globes show the Earth much smaller than it really was. This made it seem as if sailing west from Europe to Asia would be easy. The globe made the trip look as if it would be only about three thousand miles long. Today's globes show that the trip is about 10000 miles long. More important, North and South America blocks away. Behaim had no idea that these two continents were there. He did not know about Australia or Antarctica, either. And this globe showed Africa too small and the wrong shape.

Behaim knew a lot more than other Europeans of his time. Some Europeans had heard about the riches in Asia. But few knew about China's cities, highways, and art. Most Europeans had never heard of the great African empires, such as Mali and Songhai. They had no idea that the African City of Timbuktu was the center of learning, where people study subjects from mathematics to medicine. And most Europeans knew nothing of the Chinooks, Hopis, Mandan, Iroquois, Cherokees, or other Indian cultures of North and South America. They didn't even know that two other continents lay across the Atlantic Ocean. Even the Atlantic Ocean, which the Europeans called the ocean sea or the green sea of Darkness, was largely unknown.

Multiple Select

What was wrong with Martin Behaim's globe? Check all that apply.

• It was too large.

• It was too small.

• It didn't show North America

• It didn't show South America.

• It showed Africa too big.