About the
Romans reaching
North or South America. Any sailor can tell you that the Atlantic ocean is mostly treacherous, unforgiving, changeable and threatining .
However, given the amount of time (as we often like to say about how long
roman coins were minted) there were times when with great
good luck and a storm at the beginning of the voyage to throw the
shop off course, that a
roman crew and ship could have reached the western hemisphere.
With
good weather,
good winds, and a calm sea it takes about 15-20 days sailing-with sails. Most
roman ships were somewhere in route of course destroyed and sunk.
But a few statistically, would have reached
North or South America in the 700 years plus time of the republic/empire.
So finding a
roman era coin in the middens or similar of
North or South American civilizations is not impossible. The bottom line is -it didn't make any difference.
Those wanting to prove that the
romans were first are probably right-and wrong. Probably even more ancient civilizations made it here via off-course vessels.
They just didn't make any difference.
Say for supposition you made it...wow...a new world...all.. mmm...28 or fewer of you.
You show the natives how to make ...swords...is there a blacksmith among you? You are off-course sailors remember.
A group of stranded
roman sailors would have been, almost without provisions, starving, and needless to say isolated.
Think they are going to do like the missionaries and teach the natives, who are more or less well fed, armed, and possessed of a
fine religion of their own about
Jupiter and
Venus? No better way to piss-off new friends and saviours than to start expounding your religion at the expense of theirs.
The wheeled cart-a
fine idea-if you have roads which inland cultures did which-were not on the coasts and the natives did not have for the most
part.
They would have been a curiosity and a wonder-briefly. The strange
men who came from the easten sea and
had no knowledege of the language of the People.
Then they would have been killed or assimilated. As DNA and genetic research progresses, we may find evidence (and may already have) of european ancestry in native
North and South Amerindians.
The truth is, like that guy that wrote that the
Chinese traveled all over the westen hemisphere in 1421 in huge
ships,
history shows that it made no impact.