The vikings island-hopped to Labrador when, 11th century? The point is, they made no lasting record, as L'Anse aux Meadows was not discovered until after 1960, right? So you have you have missing gaps in history and could it have been possible for the vikings to have gone a little farther south and maybe imparted their technology to the local natives?
The vikings will be of no help. They didn't have good relations with the natives, and they never really entered the interior of North America, sticking to the coast. The natives traded with them a little, but were too suspicious. You'd need a huge colonization wave, etc., to bring new tech and make the natives potentially interested, but that in and of itself brings further complications, as the power balance is tipped more in favour of the Scandinavians. They weren't technologically that ahead of the natives, despite metallurgy, boat tech, etc., so they'd also find it hard to establish permanent colonies. They'd need the backing of an existing Scandinavian monarchy or a huge "we came here to stay" wave of fleeing settlers or something. All in all, this is the least likely and least convenient way to get any boat tech introduced, and it's at the expense of the natives.
You might find this interesting:
en.wikipedia.org
I know about these, and notwithstanding Heyerdahl's questionable use of them in experimental archaeology (putting the cart before the horse with his pet theories), they are very interesting expressions of surviving native navigation on the Pacific coastlines of the New World.
The thing I wander about the most are sails... Did the South Americans use sails at all before the Europeans came ? Building the rafts I can understand easily, but whether they had the knowledge-base to try and equip them with sails, that seems more contentious to me. They had cloth, they could have figured it out, but... I don't know. I'd really like to read some archaeological journals that say "Why, yes ! Based on the latest finds, it is indisputable that Peruvian Amerindians used cloth sails or mat sails on their sea-going rafts !". Unfortunately, I don't know of such sources. I want to dig deeper in this regard.
Even if sails were figured out by pre-Columbian Amerindians in South America, it seems that sails in North America, on either oceanic coastline, are something that just never occured in known history.
The Arawaks and later the Caribs have enough of sailing technology to settle the Antilles and the Caraibes islands.
That they did. Nevertheless, one wonders whether canoes as in OTL was the absolute best they could do. I've wondered about sails, slightly larger canoes, maybe even multi-hulled ones. I think there were one or two timelines with more technologically advanced Caribbean natives, but I'm not sure.
The North American tribes had also technology to settle Canadian north eastern islands
That they did. A rare case of east coast sailing, though not that super-common.
and go to Groenland. But they don't settle in Iceland...
I think you are overgeneralizing a bit. Inuit were largelly apart from the rest of the New World, and were outliers in several ways. I don't necessarily consider their efforts as Amerindian, as they were an almost entirely separate civilization.
Coastal sailing seems to not be important in Amerindians societies but river and lake sailing were enough developed.
You know, one interesting prospect could be more active trade-sailing on the Great Lakes and similar. There's potential there... They're the closest to an inland sea, where you'd need some nearly seamanship-level skills if you were sailing on a larger boat, filled with goods.
Create conditions for native trade in the region, and some native polities and towns built on that foundation, and you can get a humbler "Native American Hanseatic League", for lack of a better term.
Maybe even with eventual "lake pirates" seeking plunder on trade boats, arggghhh.
But sailing over an ocean required skills that the Europeans only developed in the middle of the XV century, before this date, they also feared the immensity of the Ocean. Great nations of sailors, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, didn't attempt to sauled over the Atlantic.
Obviously.
I think the Atlantic coastline of North America and South America are the least motivating areas to establish a native sea-going tradition. The Caribbean's a bit more open to that, and you can at least do some island hopping, but that's about it.
Now I'm imagining a scenario where a few North American natives brave the Atlantic coastline, bad weather blows them off course and they arrive at Bermuda. Imagine them staying there as castaways and establishing some sort of tiny settlement. Lack of fresh water would be an issue, they'd have to rely a lot on rain water, but other than that, it would be an interesting scenario. Obviously, most natives wouldn't bother to go in a boat on the Atlantic, so the scenario is rather moot anyway. To the natives, the Atlantic was, for all intents and purposes, one of the edges of the entire world. Huge, inhospitable, impassable.
It would have to be South American. Even Central American is a big stretch. North American is, IMHO, completely ludicrous.
may I introduce you to the incredible timeline
Land of Sweetness a Pre Columbian Timeline by Every Grass in Java which is exactly what you are looking for for the pod is their sailing in caribbean
Depends on how that timeline got the Caribs, Arawaks, etc. to invent sails. Or they don't and just navigate the seas without sails like in OTL ?
Considering the lack of immunity to old world diseases, wouldn't these hypothetical explorers just die on the journey home?
Where did I say I want them to do an overseas voyage ? I don't. I was just wondering whether we could get more native seagoing trade in the Americas. Something in the vein of Europe's pre-Age of Sail endeavours, when most ships didn't bother to or couldn't go on the wider ocean, and largelly stuck to the coast and local seas. A taller order with the American Atlantic coast, I'll grant you, but I'd be interested if it would be at all possible, at least in some regions.
The first question is: Why would they try to sail to the atlantic ocean? They have to be a motivation, and this is really hard. Native American nations have the whole american continent to explore and the political relations were different compared to the european ones.
Yes. indeed. One of the biggest stumbling blocks.
Maybe Polynesian Native American contact is maintained and institutionalizes thus leads to adoption of naval technology.
While there is some evidence for it, I'm still iffy about the whole "Polynesians arrive and a tech exchange immediately happens" trope. History is messier and inventions take a bit longer to spread or put down roots, especially if borrowed from a different culture and not necessarily of immediate use.
South Americans doing expeditions with sailing tech borrowed from Polynesians would be certainly cool, though. Also probably the most likely foreign import of more advanced naval techniques. Tech imports through the Pacific Northwest are less likely, or only on a smaller scale.
Not being a Nature subscriber, I can’t access the original article, but from what I can gather from the abstract things are more interesting than that. Most significantly, their find is that Native American-Polynesian admixture was occurring well before the Polynesians arrived on Rapa Nui, and it looks as if the contact (at least initially) came from the Americas and not Polynesia. That is, boats from South America got taken out by the current to Polynesia.
It’s not necessarily indicative of Polynesians reaching South America, but it does raise a lot of interesting possibilities.
Yes. Though it makes you wonder how those South Americans got back home, after the currents took them westward.
