According to Wikipedia it caused 100k deaths in 2015. So either the introduction of penicillin made the disease more fatal than before, or there is something fundamentally incorrect in the statement above.
There are some pretty big gaps in the island chains out there in the Atlantic, so it seems less likely that someone from the western hemisphere brought it to the Azores or Cape Verde before Columbus sailed across.
Umm... How tf did the Indians have someone who already spoke English? Jamestown isn't exactly a short walk, even if it has been a dozen years.
Yeah because fisherman had already been trading with them. But that's 1620, not 1491. It's reasonable to think fisherman had been leveraging this information a century after it was known.
It's often mockingly said that they landed when they ran out of beer, which is true, but not because of frustrated frat bro reasons - they ran out of drinking water, more generally. And small beer was more nutritious than intoxicating.
But if it means someone else got to the Americas first, that’s a cultural bomb that would immortalize your name for documenting. So it’s worth looking at it from one side or the other to determine if the second question is worth the payoff times the probability of being true.