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It seems that the people on this forum only know about things from the last 300 years and (almost) nothing about perphaps the most important centuries in history the 15th, 16th and 17th.
Babe Ruth and Good Deal Maker what are your reasons to vote for Cabot and Vespucci?
Davy,
I wanna first say that I consider all these guys (in the poll) to be distant 2nds to Columbus.. That said, I chose Caboto ('Cabot') because of his role in opening up global expansion for the English.. who would go on to be the supreme colonizers. And I plead ignorance on some of the names in your list.., but Cabot being a trailblazer for England was big. Peace
Giovanni Caboto, (Cabot), because his documentations and discoveries
in Canada paved the way for Hudson, many years later. Cabot started
only a few years after Columbus and was truly exploring the unknown.
On the basis of groundbreaking and relevance, Cabot belongs first or
in the top tier. Ironically, it was the French who settled Canada (discovered
by Cabot, under British hire), while the British settled America (East Coast
mapped by Verrazanno) - it's really a complicated subject.
Missing from your list, yet terribly important was Jacques Cartier, who
found the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, mapped its boundaries
and laid claim to the whole region for France, who virtually immediately
was able to settle lots of people there.
Maybe not the most important, but I like Adriaen Block for a few reasons.
He explored the northeast coast of what is now the USA between New Jersey and Massachussetts, discovering many important waterways and inlets which would become the most important ship-building and shipping ports in colonial and US history.
The map of his fourth expedition in 1614 was the first appearance of the place name, New Netherlands, and showed many of the features of the Mid-Atlantic and southern New England coastline for the first time including Long Island, Cape Cod, and numerous other islands, rivers, lakes, etc. He named Block Island, and possibly Rhode Island.
Most importantly, in 1612, he, along with Hans Christensen, set up a brewery in the wilderness that is now known as the southern tip of Manhattan, NYC.
Block's 1614 map
Last edited by ABQConvict; 10-22-2016 at 11:30 AM..
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