Who Discovered America ?

24th June 1497: John Cabot reached North America.

The first map to use the name America is known as the Waldseemuller Map, it was published in the April of 1507 by German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller in his Universalis Cosmographia. ​

The image below is the first map to show America as a continent, this too was created by a German cartographer known as Sebastian Munster. His work, Cosmographia was published in the mid sixteenth century and taken from book five of his works.
This proves that America was known to us in the time of Henry VIII. 

So who actually discovered America?

Well, it was not Christopher Columbus in 1498 according to a number of historians. These scholars claim there are a number of others who may have discovered the country many years before. In 2008, Gavin Menzies, a British historian, claimed it was one Chinese Admiral named Zheng in the first part of the fifteenth century. Menzies claims it was Zhengs map of 1418, seen here, that Columbus used when he plotted his journey to the new continent decades after Zheng.

 Over forty years ago in 1966, English scholar, Alwyn Ruddock, discovered a letter, dated 1498 written to Columbus by an English merchant who was named John Day. In it, Day said that it was ‘considered certain’ that the North American mainland had been ‘found and discovered in the past’ by seamen from the port of Bristol. Italian explorer John Cabot had visited Bristol the previous year, 1497, and left from there to eventually find Newfoundland. It was probably Cabot that Day was suggesting to Columbus who had 'seen' America. Ruddock also owned more papers suggesting that America had been reached as early as 1470. There is no way to confirm these facts as Ruddock, for some unknown reason, ordered all of these papers to be destroyed at her death. 

Cabot indeed may have been in Bristol as the letters suggested as he had found an English investor to fund his journey, he had also received a patent from Henry VII. Another group of people in the running for the discovery, are the Scandinavians. When Columbus finally arrived in America the were already people living there, these were the descendants of the Vikings who had landed there between 970 to as late as 1066, Columbus would not have known that so we can see why he is credited. 

By far the most interesting candidate is one Abu Raihan al-Biruni, who is being put forward as 'discovering' America without leaving his desk. Biruni was an Islamic scholar born in 973. He studied cartography, mathematics, astronomy, geography and geometry. He had worked out the latitude and longitude of his own town and began to collect similar co-ordinates for other places. Biruni used ancient Greek sources to compile data on hundreds of other places in world and then began adding calculations on other locations from all points of the compass. 

If this is fact, then it can be said that he, in theory, discovered America a short time before the Vikings actually set foot in the country.

If any of these contenders for the title of the discovery of America are proven to be fact then Christopher Columbus can still be credited with being the first to initiate regular contact between the peoples of America and Europe.