And the 17th Century French Went to the Moon

At Hakai Rebecca Boyle outlines the case that ancient Greeks made regular crossing between Europe and Canada:

The story of the European settlement of North America usually features a few main characters: red-headed Norsemen who sailed across an icy sea to set up temporary outposts, Spanish conquistadors, white-collared English separatists, French trappers, and Dutch colonists. Now a team of Greek scholars proposes another—and much earlier—wave of European migration: the Hellenistic Greeks, in triremes powered by sail and oar in the first century CE, nearly a millennium before the Vikings.

These ancient Greeks regularly visited what is now Newfoundland, the study’s authors say. They set up colonies that lasted centuries, and they mined gold. They made recurrent trips every 30 years. Some travelers would return home after only a brief stay, but for others the voyages were one way—they came to know the North Atlantic, not the warm Aegean, as their home waters.

Literary depictions without concrete evidence prove exactly nothing. Concrete evidence could include artifacts, corroborative testimony, or even genetic evidence. Without those the notion that ancient Greeks made regular visits to Canada is nothing but airy fantasy. The same argument could be used to prove that 17th century Frenchmen sailed to the moon.

Here’s another argument against: travelling to North America with sail power is one thing. Getting there by muscle power is something else again. Could they transport enough food to make the journey? Most of what they encountered along the way they wouldn’t even have recognized as food. There are many accounts of early European explorers starving to death in the New World even while surrounded by plenty because they didn’t recognize what they were looking at as food.