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Inquisition, an unfortunate example of religious fundamentalism.
    Not only do historical facts look different when viewed through different prisms, but new ‘facts’ can suddenly appear. As with tracing the origins of Russia to southern France, the discovery of America has been subject to countless bizarre theories. Irish monks almost certainly reached Iceland before the Vikings, but the story of St Brendan sailing his leather boat right across the Atlantic is pure fiction, as is another fable used later to support British claims to North America: the tale of Prince Madoc.
    At Fort Morgan on Mobile Bay, Alabama, there is a plaque erected by the Virginia Cavalier Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It commemorates the landing on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 of Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, a Welsh prince driven from hishomeland by the advancing Normans. The story goes that Madoc and his people first travelled inland and built a fort at Lookout Mountain, near DeSoto Falls, Alabama, which, it is claimed, has proved to be virtually identical to Madoc’s original home at Dolwyddelan castle in Gwynedd. Over succeeding centuries Madoc’s descendants multiplied but were pushed north by various native tribes. Later European explorers reported numerous stories of bearded white Indians speaking a Welsh-like language, and some claimed to have found them. As late as 1841 George Catlin published a learned treatise, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians , which devoted sixteen of its fifty-eight chapters to the Mandans of the Missouri river, whose physical characteristics and language, Catlin claimed, proved them to be the lost tribe of Madoc. Unfortunately, shortly after Catlin left them smallpox arrived, and the Mandans became extinct.
    The story of the Welsh prince is almost certainly a sixteenth-century invention designed to bolster the territorial claims of the Welsh Tudors who wore the English crown. Such fables about who discovered America are matched by similarly improbable stories about what they found when they got there.
Before Columbus
    When the Europeans arrived there were throughout the Americas a huge variety of peoples and customs. The first Americans crossed over from Siberia and moved south to populate the whole landmass. The question of when this happened has been the subject of much debate. To a layman the question seems fairly academic, but the way answers to this question have changed says much about the ideology of history. Today the debate is grounded in hard scientific fact, but for most of America’s history the debate was conducted in a very different way. Rather as Russian historians were determined to prove that their nation’s greatness owed nothing to non-Slavs like Rurik, American historians and scientists were determined to prove that nothing of any value predated the arrival of the white man.
    Nowadays there are broadly two strands of thought. One is based on differing interpretations of scientific evidence. The other is the large body of American thought usually labelled ‘creationism’, in some manifestations of which God is thought to have woken up one day in the relatively recent past and populated the Americas with natives ready for the white man to come and civilise. Little more than a century ago a third strand was the most widely accepted in educated circles. It called itself scientific, and the science it espoused was the opposite of creationism: evolutionism.
    The guiding principle of the evolutionists was ‘survival of the fittest’, and it became an article of faith with American scientists and historians that given the ‘primitive’ nature of the natives that greeted the arrival of the first European settlers they must have been less evolved than the white man. It was argued, therefore, that they could have been there only a few thousand years; this explained why they had developed