ABSTRACT
The most celebrated event in the history of such speculation concerns Abubakari II, a Muslim African king of the Mali empire from 1305 to 1307. This story is documented in histories of Mali written in the fourteenth century AD by Arab Muslim historians Al-Umari and Al-Qalqashandi. Abubakari is said to have dispatched 200 canoes down the Senegal River to explore the Atlantic Ocean. Only one returned, with tales of the others being swept away in a “river” (current) within the ocean. Abubakari thereupon equipped another 2,000 canoes, half filled with provisions, and personally led this new expedition into the ocean. He never returned but could conceivably have reached the New World, as his hapless successors did 700 years later. West African canoes were as large as those in the Caribbean, with early sixteenth-century Europeans reporting as many as 120 in a single canoe.
