Doug wrote "I certainly think that Iceland was probably being visited from Bristol at the relevant time...."

My memory recalls reading somewhere?? of Portugese sailors exploiting seas near Greenland pre-1492 hunting for norwhale horns. ??

The Americas could be conceived of as Asia (and actually was), and Native Americans as Asiatics (originally were). A Euro-centric generalization is what really changed in the face of more detailed facts.

Why are these articles/discussions so uni-directional--to the Americas? Of course, it might not matter much how many Native Americans landed in the "Old World" if local geography lacked understanding of the larger world. "They came from the sea" might be about the best they could do, especially given they still can't identify a whole continent they lost, somewhere in the Sea of Generalizations perhaps. ;-)