TIL Columbus never set foot in North America; he only explored the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America.

Central America is in North America

As is the Caribbean.
- He never set foot in Northern America.
FWIW I grew up in Central America and we didn't consider it part of North America.
I mean, if a geology teacher said it was, we'd write it down on the test that it was, but no-one thought of it that way.
- Interesting, so North America was just the US and Canada to you?
ALL AMERICA IS FREE AMERICA. IF IT AINT FREE, IT AINT ME. 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🍔🍔🍔

Central America is not a continent. It's a region of North America. This is ridiculous claim.

We're reaching a point where I am questioning the ratio of quantity versus quality in OP's posts. I still appreciate how active they are, and they have a large number of good posts
- You trippin, @Don_Dickle@lemmy.world I appreciate you! (edit: this came out sounding harsher than I meant, and I apologized through DM.)
Just as a data point, when I was a kid, norteamericano meant someone from the US.
Yeah but brown people

As others have pointed out:

That map says that New Zealand is part of the continent of Australia, which it is not. New Zealand is on a submerged continent called Zealandia
- Continent are fairly subjective. Some favor strictly connected lands (joining Eurasia). Others do it by the tectonic plates. Other by culture barriers drawing a line between Europe and Asia.
  For the purposes of the post I simply meant to convey that the NA v SA distinction is widely accepted to be at the thinnest point between them. Which would include Central America w/ NA.
- At least New Zealand's on this map. :)
- wp:Zealandia
  Zealandia (pronounced /ziːˈlændiə/), also known as Te Riu-a-Māui (Māori)[2] or Tasmantis (from Tasman Sea),[3][4] is an almost entirely submerged mass of continental crust in Oceania that subsided after breaking away from Gondwana 83–79 million years ago.[5] It has been described variously as a submerged continent, continental fragment, and microcontinent.[6] The name and concept for Zealandia was proposed by Bruce Luyendyk in 1995,[7] and satellite imagery shows it to be almost the size of Australia.[8] A 2021 study suggests Zealandia is over a billion years old, about twice as old as geologists previously thought.[9][10]

My man read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article and came straight here to post

Buddy said “No! This is like, PRESS CONFERENCE level stuff!” and hit Post

I blame that crack.com article that came out like 15 or 20 years ago or whatever it was. One of the worst and most poorly research articles I've ever read and yet it's spawned a legion of terrible responses.

I’m most fascinated by the route map: it explains why he never set for on the continent. He took the long way. I suppose there was no reason to expect a great circle route but that so engrained that I couldnt picture him getting to the Caribbean without going down the east coast

Especially if you consider Columbus’ voyages together with Eric the Red, a great circle route just seems automatic

Put that together with safe flying rules where you don’t want to go too far from land, depending on your plane, so naturally follow the coast, then cross the ocean where it’s narrower and there are places to land. Why wouldn’t an old sailing ship also want to stay near land?