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| "Islands and ice, mostly," says Bill Rankin of his map Actual European Discoveries. (Click the link below for a larger version to see detail.) |
The term for the longest time has been discovery. Older histories
(and the general public still) used “Columbus’s discoveries” or “Columbus discovered America” and the like. But this has been pointed out to be
Eurocentric. Columbus ran across
places that other people had already discovered! They were discovered by the indigenes who lived there! So scholars, like Brian Harley, used
terms such as the “Columbian encounter.”
The word encounter, indeed,
has become the popular term used in academe these days, though it has its
detractors. “Encounter” is here to
stay alongside “discovery.” As Marvin
Lunenfeld writes in the introduction to 1492—Discovery,
Invasion, Encounter: “The neutral word encounter
has recently come into general scholarly use.
Encounter seems friendly
enough, evoking the idea of social gatherings….
If all that happened in 1492 was that Columbus ‘encountered’ the
Amerindians, the historian would successfully escape the ethnocentric
connotations of a discovery and the violent implications of an invasion.”
Dr. Bill Rankin, Assistant
Professor of History of Science at Yale University, has constructed a map titled Actual European Discoveries for his website
Radical
Cartography that shows just what little Europeans actually discovered in the sense of no other humans were there to
greet them. As Rankin notes (a tad sarcastically,
he admits): “Every Columbus Day, we’re reminded of the difference between
discovery and “discovery”—and rightly so. But let's not sell Europe short; after all,
European explorers found plenty of diminutive islands that no human had ever
seen before, along with extravagant amounts of ice and snow.”
If the Society for the History of Discoveries was holding
its fourth annual meeting this year
instead of its fifty-fourth, would it
be named the “Society for the History of Encounters”?
- Actual European Discoveries by Bill Rankin at Radical Cartography
- A large .png file of the map
