By Hamish MacPherson
Back in the Day
According to myth, a Scottish nobleman, Henry St Clair or Sinclair, the First Earl of Orkney, sailed to Greenland and then North America IT was in this week of the year 1398 that a Scotsman discovered the American continent. Now all you fans of Christopher Columbus need not panic because I am certainly not going to claim that the Americas were discovered by the Scots nearly a hundred years before the Italian-born explorer navigated his way across the Atlantic to claim he had found a route to the East Indies. There is little doubt, however, that other Asians and Europeans had discovered North America thousands of years before Columbus. For the people we now correctly call native Americans were descended from the Asiatic people who walked across the land bridge that existed between what is now Siberia and Alaska no later than 15,000 years ago.