In this groundbreaking and provocative work, historian Dr. Santiago Montes dismantles centuries of received wisdom about the so-called "discovery" of the Americas. Moving beyond the schoolbook narrative of Columbus’s 1492 voyage, A Shadow History of the Discovery of the New World reveals a rich, tangled web of pre-Columbian encounters that have long been obscured or deliberately erased.
Montes traces the voyages of the Norse and Basque sailors who charted Atlantic waters generations before Columbus set sail, but his most startling revelation centers on Johannes Van de Graeff, a little-known 15th-century Dutch mariner whose detailed logbooks—only recently unearthed—map coastlines that official history insists were unknown to Europeans.
Yet Montes’s challenge does not stop at who arrived first. Drawing on suppressed archives, overlooked indigenous testimony, and new archaeological finds, he argues that the aftermath of European arrival unfolded in ways that deviate radically from the dominant narrative. Alliances, exchanges, and even forms of mutual governance between early arrivals and native societies, he suggests, were later rewritten or erased to fit the myth of conquest.
A work of meticulous scholarship and daring imagination, A Shadow History of the Discovery of the New World invites us to reconsider not only the past we have been taught, but the forces that shape the stories we believe.
A Shadow History of The Discovery of the New World
Dr. Santiago Montes