You are playing a little fast and loose with the facts here Warbird.



That would make them YOUR ancestors as well Warbird unless you are Maori. But lets not forget that the Greecks had already calculated the circumference of the earth quite accurately, subsequent European peoples developped a navigational system based on this knowlegde. The knowlegde that the earth was round was only suppressed in midevil times and the early renaissance. Suppressing is the right word here as the Church never succeeded at eradicating this knowlegde, although it did manage to have it made a closely guarded guild secret of maritime navigators.




Anglo-Saxons have a big mouth and claim far more then they actually achieved. The first explorers were the Portugese followed closely by the Spanish. Then came the Dutch (who discovered large swaths of south east asia and Oceania. Hence the names like Tasmania (Van Diemens land), Arnhem land in Australia and even the name New Zealand itself (after first being called Staten Landt and then Nieuw Zeeland).

For more read this short article : http://history-nz.org/discovery1.html

The Brits and French joined the party later often still using many Dutch maps.

I can't name a single land that was discovered by the English. And if they did then it will be nothing more then an atol or small island (Cook, polynesia). The only exception here being the eastern seaboard of the United states, but its existance had already been established by Spanish navigators who largely ignored it from then onward because they didn't see any commericial benefits to do so. Even then large parts of North America were French and Dutch "discoveries". hence the names New Orleans, Louisiana, Illinois and Staten Island (remember Staten Landt), Brooklyn (Breukelen), Harlem (Haarlem) and a score of Dutch town names in North West America. Florida was Spanish as were large portions of Califorina, Texas and the states in between.

What the Brits (Anglo-Saxons) were good at was to shoot their way into possesing new land (colonies), most of it discovered earlier by others. They were largely helped by local wars on the European mainland, especially the Napoleanic wars if I remember correctly. These weakened the other naval powers while leaving England largely unaffected.




This is new to me. This was very heavily disapproved off by the church, same as with selling your children. It may have happened but it was certainly no widespread culturally accepted phenomenon. It was actively punished.





The crusaders did massacre whole cities without a worry but I seriously doubt if they referred to cannibalism unless when faced with imminent starvation, which happened during the first crusade. It was never a BBQ kind of feasting of "doing their best" as you put it. This would have been surprising and most crusaders were extremely pious people, although they did reguard pagan peoples as sufficiently heretic to slaughter them by the thousants.




So you tell me.