LL-L 'History' 2006.07.26 (10) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 28 July 2006 * Volume 10
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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'History' 2006.07.25 (09) [E]

    From: Sandy Fleming
    Subject: LL-L 'Resources' 2006.07.22 (04) [E]

    It's generally considered that there's no real evidence that American
    Indians ever had encounters with Welsh people before Columbus, and that
    the Welsh Bible phenomenon arises because native Americans sometimes
    liked to get hold of a Bible to prove that they were "British". This
    Bible could just as easily have been obtained from Welsh settlers as
    from English, and the native Americans had no idea that there was any
    difference.

    It seems most likely that reports of "Welsh Indians" these centuries
    were fabricated or at least encouraged while flying in the face of
    reason in order to give the British a prior claim to the Americas over
    the Spanish. Is it possible that the Spanish retaliated by fabricating
    stories of Basque Indians?

    Sandy Fleming
    http://scotstext.org/

    ----------

    From: R. F. Hahn
    Subject: History

    Sandy,

    I can't vouch for the veracity of the claim, and I do think that it could be a
    tall tale, but I do know that Basque immigration to the Americas goes back a long
    way. I once had a neighbor with a Basque last name, and when I asked him about
    it, he said that his Basque ancestry in North America goes way back. I asked if
    he meant the 1800s, and all he said was, "Way earlier than that."

    I have read and heard that Basques went across the Atlantic in part as whalers on
    ships under different flags.
    Regards,
    Reinhard/Ron

There is quite a lot of evidence of pre-Columbian, non-Scandinavian contact with
North America; Bristol pirates attacked the Norse Greenland settlements in the
14th Century, and apparently "wintered in the land to the southwest".  There are
indications that TransAtlantic Chris himself spent time in Bristol, and possibly
also had Basque contacts.
A 1970s book by Robert Enterline called "Vikings in North America" (or something
like that) gives a lot of detail.
 
Much further afield, early British settlers in Western Australia were apparently
surprised by the lack of impression made by cattle on Aborigines there (records
from earlier settlement in the east refer to local people being amazed by big
European mammals).  They even had a word for such beasts - "ku"!  It is suggested
that an early Dutch attempt to settle somewhere round modern Perth failed as a
European colony, but the people got absorbed into the local way of life.

Incidences of blond hair and blue eyes are also sometimes given as evidence, but
that occurs in Australian Aborigines across the continent.
 
Paul Finlow-Bates

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: History

Paul, folks,

And not to be forgotten Galician and Portuguese fishermen and other sorts of
seafarers that have a long tradition of contacts with Northern Europe, especially
Ireland and Iceland, in part in search of cod and whales, but also signing on as
sailors, apparently often accompanied by Asturians, Cantabrians and Basques.  And
the farther back you go the more Celtic Galicians and Portuguese were in culture
and language.  Who knows how far afield those guys went? 

The more I learn about such things the more I come to believe that history of
discoveries consists of to parts: "official" and "unofficial."  This is no more
obvious than in the case of China.  In fact, "discovery" is a misnomer there,
since contacts, both direct and indirect, never really stopped since antiquity,
and in early Chinese historiography there are indications of West Asians and
Europeans having lived in China at least as early as during the Tang dynasty
(618-907 CE).

As Heather alluded, DNA research may have quite a few surprises in store for us,
some of them perhaps being of the unpleasant sort for some people.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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