The European Discovery of America

If you read this book about the early cross-Atlantic explorers and substitute today’s technology entrepreneurs, the metaphors fit cleanly.

They sold exuberant, sometimes-fulfilled, and often-failed stories to profit-seeking backers, took inordinate risks, and results were often winner-take-all.

As Mark Twain, another famous explorer, once said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

The classic account of the voyages from Leif Erikson and the Vikings onwards, and including Columbus, Cabot (father and son), Vespucci, and Francis Drake. By an American admiral who spent his retirement retracing many of the voyages himself. He was a great admirer of Columbus, which has to be taken with a pinch of sea salt these days – but is still a stirring read.

Even before the New World was discovered, people dreamt of a legendary place west of the Atlantic. In his beautiful book, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, Samuel Eliot Morison tells the story of the many adventurers from Western Europe, starting with Saint Brendan and ending with Sir Walter Raleigh, who risked everything to find this place. Morison did this not just by studying every primary source he could find on these men, but by sailing his own boat or flying in a small airplane over the same routes they took. To this day, I can’t hear… show more.