“An entry in a late sixteenth-century register has revealed that a ship known as “William” of Aberdeen made a voyage to “the new fund land” (Newfoundland) in 1596. It is the earliest documented reference to a Scottish ship sailing to North America.“
- “Historian discovers earliest evidence of a Scottish ship sailing to North America“, Medievalists.net (Dec. 2018).
This one catches my eye because it reminds me that somewhere in my files I’ve started to gather some notes for an article about genealogical claims to ancestry in Newfoundland before the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620.
I don’t credit the idea, but my thought is that it would be an interesting footnote to the standard genealogical advice — no British in America before 1607 Jamestown and 1620 Massachusetts.
I’ll leave the debates about Prince Henry Sinclair, the Newport Tower, and the Westford Knight for another day.