![]() And it was this same North Atlantic world that drove European, and especially English, interest in westward exploration. ![]() I start with this little aside, not to mock the early explorers of Canada’s Atlantic coast, but to draw in our earlier visit with the Norse-because the links between the voyages of Leif Erikson and those we’ll cover below are more direct than the 500 years of distance between them would suggest.Īlthough the Norse retreated from Newfoundland in the 11th century, they would remain a presence in the North Atlantic and the Canadian arctic for several centuries. The English managed to top that by claiming to have discovered Greenland again a few decades later. In the case of Greenland, the Portuguese bragged about discovering it around 50 years after the Norse left. ![]() Not only were these lands already populated, but they had already been visited by Europeans several hundred years earlier. That criticism is especially true of the voyages to the eastern coast of Canada in the 1490s and 1500s. The lands they encountered may have been new to them, but they certainly weren’t new to their indigenous residents. ![]() The European “voyages of discovery” in the late 15th and 16th centuries have long been derided as poorly named. ![]() What follows is the fourth instalment of The Nations of Canada, a serialized project adapted from transcripts of Greg Koabel’s ongoing podcast of the same name, which began airing in 2020. ![]()
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