20 places we “discovered” where people were already living

When Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he did not arrive in a deserted “New World.” He encountered the Taíno peoples in a region that was already home to numerous communities spread across several islands, including Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. 

Captain James Cook first landed at Waimea on the island of Kaua‘i on January 20, 1778, and this date is often considered the moment when the islands entered history. However, the indigenous Hawaiians had already established complex political and agricultural systems there long before Cook set foot on shore and began recording his observations in writing. 

The first recorded European landing in Australia dates back to 1606, when Willem Janszoon reached the Cape York Peninsula aboard the Duyfken. The Aboriginal peoples, however, had already been living on the continent for at least 45,000 to 50,000 years, which makes talk of “discovery” particularly hollow.

Abel Tasman sighted New Zealand in December 1642 and encountered the Māori on the South Island, before setting sail again without further exploring the territory. James Cook circumnavigated the islands in 1769–1770, but neither man discovered any uncharted territory. They encountered Māori communities that were already well established there.

When Jacques Cartier reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, he did not discover an uninhabited land. He encountered Indigenous peoples, notably the Wendat and the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who were already living, trading, and governing themselves in this region long before the French laid claim to it. 

Erik the Red explored Greenland around 982 and founded a Viking colony there in 986, an event often portrayed as a heroic discovery of the North. But Greenland had already experienced waves of indigenous migration for thousands of years, and the Inuit presence in the region dates back well before the Viking version of the story.

Iceland is one of the few places that was truly uninhabited on a permanent basis before the Viking colonization; this claim must therefore be qualified. Even there, however, the standard account of the discovery generally begins with Ingólfr Arnarson in 874 and overlooks how later chronicles transformed this colonization into a well-crafted founding myth that flatters those who were the first to leave written records. 

Ferdinand Magellan arrived in Cebu in March 1521 and was killed in Mactan on April 27, 1521, after encountering local resistance. Spain did not discover a deserted archipelago. It was an armed European expedition entering a region where thriving communities, leaders, and trade networks already existed throughout Asia. 

Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498 and met the Zamorin, the ruler of one of the most important commercial centers in southern India. This encounter itself speaks volumes, if one takes the time to consider it. Vasco da Gama did not “discover” India. He arrived in a place that was already part of trade networks that had been operating for centuries. 

The first Portuguese merchants arrived in Japan in 1543, and Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima in 1549. At that time, Japan already had a well-established political order, was experiencing constant armed conflicts between daimyos, and possessed a developed literary and artistic culture that did not need contact with Europe to flourish. 

Europeans loved to talk about China’s “opening up,” but Marco Polo was already traveling there around 1274, and it is better to view this as an encounter rather than a discovery. China had its dynasties, its bureaucracy, its cities, its philosophy, and immense internal complexity, while Europe still viewed Asia as a rumor connected by trade routes. 

The Portuguese explorer António de Saldanha dropped anchor in Table Bay in 1503 and encountered Khoi people there. The Dutch colony founded later by Jan van Riebeeck in 1652 attracts much more attention, but both of these events represent arrivals in a place that was already inhabited—where people engaged in herding and hunting—and that was already known. 

Vitus Bering reached Alaska in 1741, although the indigenous peoples of Siberia had already reported the existence of lands to the east before his voyage. Long before the Russians settled there, Alaska was the homeland of the Tlingit, Haida, Unangax, Inuit, Yupiit, and Athabascans, among many others. 

In 1542, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo was the first European to sight what is now California and landed in San Diego that same year. The Encyclopædia Britannica states that there were approximately 130,000 Native Americans in the region at the time, a fact that clearly reminds us that Spain did not discover an uninhabited coast. 

Magellan’s expedition reached the Strait of Magellan in 1520, and European accounts soon portrayed Patagonia as a spectacular frontier at the end of the world. But Indigenous peoples, particularly the Tehuelche communities, were already living on the plains of Patagonia, from the Strait of Magellan to the Negro River.

In 1541, Francisco de Orellana became the first European to travel down the Amazon River; from that point on, the region took root in the European imagination as a place of wilderness, danger, and fantasy. This perception could only take hold by obscuring the hundreds of indigenous cultures that already inhabited the Amazon and shaped the forest long before outsiders began to mythologize it. 

Cook’s voyage in the Pacific, between 1768 and 1771, is still regarded today as a model of exploration, but one of the most revealing facts of this entire story is that the Tahitian navigator Tupaia sailed alongside him in 1769–1770. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands were already extraordinary navigators, traveling from island to island with a skill and knowledge of the environment on which the Europeans depended, even as they claimed credit for these discoveries themselves. 

The Arctic is constantly described as a deserted region, because outsiders confuse harsh conditions with the absence of human life. In reality, the Inuit and other circumpolar peoples have long lived, traveled, hunted, and accumulated knowledge there, while Viking colonization of Greenland dates back to 986, and contact between the Vikings and the peoples of Thule appears to have occurred later, around the 13th century. 

The arrival of Portuguese traders on the coast of Guinea in the 15th century marked a new phase in European involvement in the region, not the beginning of African history. The region already had its own states, its own trading systems, and its own political realities; that is why the term “European activity” is far more accurate than “discovery.”

Africa as a whole is perhaps the most absurd example of a “language of discovery” that has endured. European powers arrived in successive waves, from the first Portuguese coastal expeditions in the 15th century to the rush for official control in the late 19th century, but they were entering a continent already populated by kingdoms, cities, trade routes, and peoples who did not need Europe to be recognized.