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Magellan’s crew of 266 completed a circumnavigation in 1522.
    Columbus believed a course due west along latitude twenty-eight degrees north would take him to Marco Polo’s fabled Cipangu (Japan). Knowing that no one was crazy enough to sponsor a voyage of more than 3,000 miles, Columbus based his guess of the distance on ancient Greek theories, some highly speculative maps drawn after Marco Polo’s return, and some figure fudging of his own. He arrived at the convenient estimate of 2,400 miles.
    In fact, the distance Columbus was planning to cover was 10,600 miles by air!
    Did Columbus’s men bring syphilis back to Europe?
     
    One of the most persistent legends surrounding Columbus probably didn’t get into your high school history book. It is an idea that got its start in Europe when the return of Columbus and his men coincided with a massive outbreak of syphilis in Europe. Syphilis in epidemic proportions first appeared during a war being fought in Naples in 1494. The army of the French king, Charles VIII, withdrew from Naples, and the disease was soon spreading throughout Europe. Later, Portuguese sailors during the Age of Discovery carried the malady to Africa, India, and Asia, where it apparently had not been seen before. By around 1539, according to William H. McNeill, “Contemporaries thought it was a new disease against which Eurasian populations had no established immunities. The timing of the first outbreak of syphilis in Europe and the place where it occurred certainly seems to fit what one would expect of the disease had it been imported from America by Columbus’s returning sailors. This theory . . . became almost universally accepted . . . until very recently.”
    Over the centuries, this “urban legend” acquired a sort of mystique as an unintended form of “revenge” unwittingly exacted by the Indians for what Columbus and the arrival of Europeans had done to them. One of the earliest documented signs of syphilis in humans dates to about 2,000 years ago, in remains found in North America.
    In fact, other culprits have been blamed for the scourge of syphilis. The word itself was coined in 1530 by Girolamo Fracastoro, an Italian physician and poet. He published a poem called “ Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus ,” which translates as “Syphilis, or the French Disease.” In the poem, a shepherd named Syphilus is supposed to have been the first victim of the disease, which in the fifteenth century was far more deadly and virulent than the form of syphilis commonly known today. Of course, this was also a long time before the advent of antibiotics. The original source of the name Syphilus is uncertain but may have come from the poetry of Ovid. In other words, the Italians blamed the French for syphilis. And in Spain, the disease was blamed on the Jews, who had been forced out of Spain, also in that memorable year of 1492.
    According to McNeill, many modern researchers reject the so-called Columbian Exchange version of syphilis. There is simply too much evidence of pre-Columbian syphilis in the Old World. For example, pre-Columbian skeletons recently unearthed in England show distinctive signs of syphilis. So while a definitive answer to the origin of the scourge of Venus remains a mystery, the American Indian as the original source of Europe’s plague of syphilis seems far less likely than he once did.
    So if Columbus didn’t really discover America, who did?
     
    Like the argument about syphilis, the debate over who reached the Americas before Columbus goes back almost as far as Columbus’s voyage. Enough books have been written on the subject of earlier “discoverers” to fill a small library. There is plenty of evidence to bolster the claims made on behalf of a number of voyagers who may have reached the Americas, either by accident or design, well before Columbus reached the Bahamas.
    Among these, the one best supported by archaeological evidence is the credit given to Norse sailors, led by