An SIS, In The News item on the 6th of February headed “Greeks in Canada” says that a Plutarch text suggests that he had knowledge of a continent across the Atlantic, but concludes with the words “there is no reason why the Greeks, or the Phoenicians come to that, may have stumbled on the Americas.” However, there is, I believe, clear evidence that someone did, because Plato in his book, Timaeus, says that the Egyptians had told Solon that travellers beyond the Pillars of Hercules could visit islands from which they could reach “the opposite continent that surrounds what can truly be called the ocean”. Plutarch would, of course, have read Plato and this could well be the origin of his story, in his text about the Man in the Moon, of a sailor's visit to a trans-Atlantic continent.
Pre-Columbus knowledge about the Americas from a source other than the Vikings is confirmed by a long inscription on the Piri Re’is map (see Hapgood’s Voyages of the Ancient Sea Kings) that says that Columbus had “a book that states that the Western Sea had an end, that on the side the Sun sets there are coasts and islands and many different kinds of mines”. Furthermore, Hapgood on page 33 of my copy of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings says “we see evidence that the people that originated the maps possessed a more advanced science than that of the Greeks” and, on page 49, referring to the location of Atlantic islands says that “we seem forced to ascribe the origins of this part of the map to a pre-Hellenic people.”
This pre-Hellenic people were, I believe, the Phoenicians who certainly knew that the world was a globe, knew how to measure latitude and understood trigonometry. If they knew the location of Atlantic islands they must have visited them. However, the Piri Re’is map shows the islands of the Azores as both larger and more numerous than now, which suggests to me that when discovered by the Phoenicians the Azores were quite a bit closer to the North Pole than they are now; sea levels near the equator are raised by the equatorial bulge. If the pole was as much closer as this suggests the relatively short passage from Africa to Brazil could have been made in both favourable trade winds and favourable ocean currents. Intrepid seamen could, after making this relatively easy trans-Atlantic passage, have explored the east coast of North America and returned to Europe with favourable winds and current via the Azores. Furthermore, if they had also explored the American coast to the south they could have found an ice free Antarctic Peninsular which could explain this otherwise unexplained ancient geographical knowledge. It would also explain the finding of cocaine and nicotine in some Egyptian mummies.
As I showed in my SIS 2007 conference presentation, see SIS Review 2008, and explained in my recent SIS Review 2017:3 paper, An Inverted Earth, a Warlow style "tilt" driven by electromagnetic forces generated between planets can change the location of the Poles and the Equator.