Is Christopher Columbus really the first European to have discovered America?

1492: Christopher Columbus discovers America and a "new world" is revealed to the eyes of "the old".

The formula still resonates like an old memory in the minds of many former schoolchildren.

Yet the reality seems more complex than that. 

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Irish monks and Basque whalers

The American continent had several million inhabitants before 1492.

The ancestors of the Amerindians, true discoverers of America, came from Asia several tens of thousands of years before our era, during the Ice Age.

Siberia and Alaska were then linked by a strip of land, which these peoples crossed to reach America from north to south.

On the European side, several historians evoke the tracks of Irish monks or Basque whalers who, before Christopher Columbus, reported the existence of a land on the other side of the Atlantic.

"The truth is that for a long time before Columbus we knew that there was a land on the other side of the horizon", advances on Europe 1 the writer Dominique Le Brun, author of

.

But according to him, if "it's possible that Basque whalers touched America and came back saying 'There is land on the other side', it stopped there."

The writer adds that "if indeed the Irish monks arrived in America, they left. While Christopher Columbus initiated a movement of colonization."

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Leif Eriksson, first settler from Europe

Christopher Columbus was not the first to attempt to colonize America, however.

Around the year 1000, the Vikings crossed the Atlantic and colonized Greenland.

On the death of Chief Erik the Red, his son, Leif Eriksson, took command of the Scandinavian colony and, with 30 sailors, pushed further west.

The new Viking leader then landed on what he called "the land of flat stones, the land of forests and the land of vines".

This is America.

But the Viking colony fizzled out.

“They tried to settle in Newfoundland and Labrador,” explains Dominique Le Brun.

"But the Amerindians pushed them back."

Leif Eriksson is still remembered in the United States, where he is celebrated every October 9.

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Christopher Columbus, in the wrong until his death

In 1492, Christophe Collomb is therefore the first European to launch a movement for the colonization of America which will eventually succeed.

However, when he died in 1506, the explorer was still convinced that he had reached Asia from the west.

He believed that the oceans only occupied a seventh of the surface of the Earth, whereas we know today that our planet is blue on 70% of its surface.

The colonizer of America will therefore have believed all his life a theory born of an error in his cartographic calculations.

"I gave the Indies to the king and the queen," he wrote in his will.

The colonization of America, a still topical plague

Another aspect of the "discovery" of America by Christopher Columbus is important to mention.

After 1492, conquistadors, colonists and missionaries arrived with in their big suitcases diseases very home to us, such as measles and smallpox, against which the Amerindians were even less well protected than the Europeans.

These diseases have helped decimate these indigenous societies.

Above all, Christophe Collomb and his followers organized forced labor and the massacre of Amerindians.

"The Indians have no weapons and are so fearful that a thousand, they would not dare to fight three of us. They are therefore suitable for being commanded and for us to make them work," he wrote. in his logbook.

Today, "Columbus day", is still a public holiday celebrated in the United States every second Monday in October.

It is however questioned more and more by the descendants of the Amerindians and the activists of the recognition of the genocide of the indigenous peoples.

In the fall of 2020, several statues of Christopher Columbus were debunked by demonstrators, in the midst of the rise of the "Black Live Matter" movement and anti-racist and anti-colonialist debates.