Essay:Who discovered The United Stated of America? In a Brazilian perspective, not Columbus

Disclaimer: I'm not adding sources to this essay because everything I'm saying here can be easily verified on Google. I'm just doing the original synthesis here.

Who discovered The United Stated of America?
That's easy, right? Every single school kid knows that! Christopher Columbus, it's a national holiday! Well, Columbus indeed discovered the Americas (sorry, ), but I'm not convinced that he actually discovered America. Wait, what? Are you really challenging the most well-known fact in the Continent? Actually, no. Just presenting a new logic, and I don't think it's incorrect to say that Columbus discovered the US.

Unlike most Americans (continental) in Brazil we don't consider Christopher Columbus to be the discoverer of our country. Our schools teach that Brazil was discovered in April 21, 1500 by the Portuguese explorer, even though there's a controversy if he was actually the first European to land in Brazil. Columbus had never been here, so we don’t care a lot about him.

So, here's the problem. Columbus had never been to US either. Between 1492 and 1504 he visited the Americans four times, traveling primarily to the Caribbean, never visiting the coast of the United States. The huge landmass between Canada and Mexico was unknown to him and everyone else in Europe. If we adopt the Brazilian perspective (ie. The country is discovered when someone actually ‘’’finds’’’ its territory, screw the rest of the continent) it’s more correct to say that discovered America, landing in Florida in 1513.

So, who discovered The United States? It really depends, but have in mind that most Americans consider someone who had never been there to be somehow the founder of their nation.

This essay may become outdated soon
Once in a while we see this discussion about Puerto Rico becoming the 51th State, a place that Columbus did visit. If Puerto Rico becomes a state, I think it will be correct by all means to say that Columbus actually discovered US, even in the Brazilian perspective.

An alternative chronology
Not going to post every country in the Americas for obvious reasons, but here to illustrate my point further, here is the discovery of some countries according to this perspective:
 * 1492 – Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti and Dominican Republic by Christopher Columbus.
 * 1493 – Puerto Rico, also by Columbus.
 * 1497 – Canada, by.
 * 1500 – Brazil, by Pedro Álvares Cabral.
 * 1502 – Mexico, by.
 * 1513 – United States, by Ponce de León.