Was St. Bendan, an Irish Monk the first to 'discover' America?
Here's a few portions of the article that grabbed my attention. Is there any truth or this?
Definitive proof of Norse habitation of Newfoundland, near Labrador, can be found at L’Anse aux Meadows, a Viking settlement dating to around 1000 C.E. The Vikings are the earliest group to leave behind tangible evidence of their presence. So were the Vikings the first? Not quite. Another group may have been the first Europeans to arrive in the New World: the Irish.
Barry Fell, a Harvard marine biologist, discovered some petroglyphs -- writings carved into rock -- in West Virginia in 1983. Fell concluded that the writing was Ogam script, an Irish alphabet used between the sixth and eighth centuries. Even more startlingly, Fell found that the message in the rock described the Christian nativity. But shortly after Fell released his findings, many in the academic community attacked his interpretation of the petroglyphs. Many scholars question his methods and refuse to accept his findings as fact.
The Irish were known to the Norse (Vikings) as a seafaring group that had traveled far further than the Vikings had. In their sagas -- accounts of their people's exploits -- the Vikings speak of finding Irish missions when they arrived in Iceland in the 10th century.
The Navigatio reads like a fantastic account, laden with Biblical references -- one passage recounts how Brendan held Communion on the back of a whale. In the mind of most historians, this story puts the document in the realm of folklore. Even for those researchers who put stock into the Navigatio's underlying historical accuracy, many of the directions don't point to North America as the destination where Brendan ultimately landed.
As far as I am aware, the theory that Irish monks were the first Europeans to discover America has absolutely zero currency amongst credible historians.
It is important to understand Barry Fell was not a historian or archaeologist. He had no training in terms of how to analyse and interpret evidence, either physical, artistic or written.
He was also responsible for books such as America B. C. - Ancient Settlers in the New World and Bronze Age America, which claims Nordics travelled to and intermarried with North American Natives, and that people of Europe and the middle-east had been visiting NA for over thousand years or more before Columbus. I'm sure academics such as Charles Mann would surely have written about such findings if they were accurate.
This article provides some insight surrounding the whole issue:
http://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/2002/02-01/archaeology.htm
This article contains a review of one of his books and points out all the errors:
Supposed evidence of European contact has been "found" all over North America - The West Virginia petroglyphs you referenced, Norse rune stones in the Great Lakes region, runes in Puget Sound, carved rocks linked to the Roanoke colony, a Roman era Jewish synagogue in Tennessee, a lost tribe of Welshmen in America, etc.
None of them have been authenticated as real.
There probably was an Irish cleric named St. Brendan. The historical Brendan probably traveled from Ireland to Scotland and the Faroe Islands. No one really paid attention to the writing about Brendan (Live and Navigatio) until Europe started to look westward, and new islands started to appear on Atlantic ocean on European maps, notably the Isle of Brazil and St. Brendan's Island - these islands moved around on all the maps and were part of an "imagined geography" of the medieval era.
In reading the Navigatio you can see the moral and allegorical lessons right off the bat. Brendan and his brethren were protected from sea monsters by praying and having faith; they were saved from savage iron forgers and the mouth of hell by having faith; one of the monks sinned and was dragged off by demons; they encountered a hermit named Paul the Spiritual, directed by the dead St. Patrick to an island, and lived without corporal food; finding the land of the Paradise of Delights (which took them 40 days and 40 nights to find - just like Noah and Jesus had their search for 40 days and nights etc).
Everything about the story screams of a medieval allegory and none of the "evidence" in the story sounds remotely like America.
The story of St. Brendan and Madoc (Madog ab Owain Gwynedd) grew in popularity in England during the mid sixteenth century and were considered "real" because it gave a legal justification for England to claim portions of the New World based on the theory of the right of discovery. Madoc probably wasn't even a real Welsh prince and was a creation of John Dee.
You have to consider when the stories of the Irish and the Welsh coming to America "emerged" at a time with the Spanish, Portuguese, and French had their hands all over America and some English intellectuals wanted in on the game - so they created myths or embellished existing literature to justify land claims by the right of discovery.
You should look at St. Brendan's discovery of America in the same light as Atlantis - it did not happen and was there were literary devices to teach moral lessons. The first European culture encountered by Native Americans was probably the Norse in Greenland and Newfoundland. That contact was limited, isolated, and temporary. It wasn't the Irish and the Welsh etc. The first contact that had a lasting impact was the Spanish in the Caribbean.
Are you familiar with Tim Severin? He faithfully created a replica of St. Brendan's coragulac and retraced Brendan's voyage across the Atlantic in 1976. While we have no conclusive proof that Brendan definitely made the voyage, Severin proved that such a voyage was possible. (There's a 1978 documentary The Brendan Voyage and Severin wrote a book about his journey.
Of course The Navigatio was embellished; for instance, the fanciful story about about serving Easter Mass on the back of a whale :) but such exaggerations are par for the course in early oral history.