It's wearisome to read of, or hear, people referring to Speke, Champlain, da Gama, and so forth as the "European discoverers" of some locale or another. Both words within quotes indeed apply to them, but to use the two in conjunction implies that the high status of these men has resulted only from some sort of bias versus non-Whites. Pay attention now, because I'll explain this just once: Merely knowing that something exists does not make you its "discoverer." To discover something, geographically speaking, means to bring to it the attention of the learned. Neither American Indians nor Vikings qualify as discoverers of America, for instance, since neither added the fact of its existence to the body of geographical knowledge. The term "New World" presupposes cognizance of an old world, but the only geographical familiarity that the Indians had was with their own surroundings. As for the Northmen, they did know of lands on both the western and the eastern shores of the Atlantic Ocean; having merely a Barbarian level of civilization, however, and thus lacking true intelligentsia, they had no one to record the information but skalds, who did so not in scientific form but in that of the sagas. They never communicated this knowledge to the one estate of Western civilization among which literacy was the rule rather than the exception, namely, the clergy.
This sense of "discover" applies as well to sciences other than geography; for instance, Antoine Lavoisier obviously was not the one person ever to experience the presence of oxygen, without which mankind could not survive, but it was he who described this substance as an element. The word even applies to the entertainment industry; we might speak of someone as having discovered the Beatles, not because the quartet from Liverpool didn't know of their own existence, but because it was that person whose efforts made their name widely-recognized. By extension, I can say that when someone on television makes an asinine statement such as "This place is named for Verrazano, but I think the Native [sic] Americans may have known about it first," that person is not discovering, but merely displaying, the fact of his smug ignorance.
