Happy Leif Erikson Day

For John, BLUF:  Yes, there really is a Leif Erikson Day, here in the United States.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Anglosphere: Celebrating Wrong Italian? (Columbus vs. Cabot)

From Free Republic, by Tancred, 10/13/2002, 1:02:58 PM.

Here is the lede plus three:

A few years ago I chanced to be in Buenos Aires on Columbus Day. It is a major holiday there, during which no business is transacted. I spent the day wandering about town enjoying the celebrations. One plaza held a Columbus Day festival in which passersby could enjoy demonstrations and samples of music, dance, crafts and foods of all the various Latin American nations, and of many of the source-nations of Argentina's immigration.

The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New World and the creation, through a conflicted encounter, of a new culture. It is, to coin a phrase, the creation of the Hispanosphere that is commemorated.

Traditionally, the role played by the United States in this narrative is not one of a joint participant, but rather an antagonist. In the narrative of Hispanosphere nationalists, Latin America is Shakespeare's Ariel, the graceful and sensitive artistic spirit. The United States, or "Gringolandia" as it is sometimes called, is Caliban, the powerful but ugly monster that dominates tragic Ariel.

Columbus Day in the United States carries an entirely different set of connotations. During the 19th century, Columbus was reinvented by Washington Irving and his successors as a sort of Yankee visionary entrepreneur before his time. His specific roots in time, space, and culture as a Genoese in the service of Spanish monarchs was downplayed; what was celebrated was his seeming prescience and capacity for self-reinvention.

Why do I say Leif Erikson Day?  Supposedly he led the first European Expedition to the Western Hemisphere.  On the other hand, there are myths of Irish sailors coming to the New World.  There is also evidence of early exploration from Europe, as presented in Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture, by Archaeologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley.  They argue that Solutrean groups from southern France and the Iberian Peninsula crossed the North Atlantic and into North America during the Last Glacial Maximum.  That was a long time ago.

But, Joohn Cabot should be celebrated also.  I think he got short shrift when I was in school.  A round of applause for John.

To mention this is not to take away from Indigenous Peoples' Day.  We should not avoiod the reality and history of those who were on the land before Admiral Columbus arrived.

However, first contact was inevitable, if it had not happened thousands of years earlier.  For example, the Chinese could have been first, with bigger boats but they chose to sail toward Africa, then shut it down in 1433, and then close their shipyards.  If Admiral Zheng He had elected to sail East, rather than West, then we could have blamed him.  Id the Polynesians could find and settle Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific OOcean, why could China not find what is now Mexico.

Instead of whinging about the past, we should celebrate what we have.  Change was always inevitable.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff