Fact check · first aired 1991
Every episode transcribed and checked against what we know today about the history of the Americas. Each point shows the episode, the moment it is said, and the exact line from the English dub (or the original French, where no English upload exists).
Watch the episodes on the official Hello Maestro YouTube channel.
These are the major errors: things a viewer could come away believing that are meaningfully wrong. We also found 171 minor slips (a date, a name or a number slightly off, or a likely dubbing error) which are hidden unless you ask for them.
Outdated: matched what was known at the time, but newer research changed the picture. Common belief then: specialists already knew better, but textbooks and popular books of the day still said it. Wrong in its day: a careful writer could have got it right from ordinary references; often a slip in a number, a name or the dubbing. Plain simplifications for children are not counted; they are listed under each episode. How this was made.
Episode 14 (Samuel de Champlain) could not be found online and is not covered.
A band of Ice Age hunters in Siberia follows the game herds east, generation after generation, across the land bridge that joined Siberia and Alaska when sea levels were low. The episode ends with them waiting thousands of years for a wall of ice to melt before they can move south into the new continent. It gives no dates, but it follows the standard 1991 model: one overland crossing, then a trip south through an opening in the ice sheets.
"A period of cold back then transformed the sea into ice and snow,"
TodayThe Bering land bridge was not frozen sea. The sea level fell because huge amounts of water were locked up in ice sheets on land. That exposed the shallow seabed as dry land, mostly a cold, dry grassland (the "mammoth steppe") that was largely free of glaciers. Animals and people could live there.
Why it was believedPopular books pictured an "Ice Age" as ice everywhere, and they mixed up the land bridge with walking across sea ice. Geologists (e.g. Hopkins, The Bering Land Bridge, 1967) had described Beringia as an unglaciated steppe long before 1991.
"the deep cold had frozen it into ice and snow,"
TodaySame point: the "earth bridge" the show mentions next was exposed seabed, a dry grassland, not a sheet of frozen sea.
Why it was believedThe same Ice Age imagery as above.
"And with the guts, we can make bow strings,"
TodayIce Age hunters in Beringia and the first Americans hunted with thrusting spears and spear-throwers (atlatls). The bow reached the American Arctic only with the Arctic Small Tool tradition, about 4,500–5,000 years ago, and most of North America adopted it about 2,000–1,500 years ago. This was in standard archaeology textbooks by 1991.
"Thousands and thousands of years"
TodayThe episode follows the 1991 standard model: people crossed Beringia and then waited for the "wall of ice" to open into an ice-free corridor down the Canadian interior (the "Clovis-first" scenario, about 13,000 years ago). Later evidence changed this in three ways. Sites older than the corridor are now accepted: Monte Verde in Chile (about 14,500 years, accepted in 1997) and the White Sands footprints in New Mexico (about 21,000–23,000 years, published 2021, confirmed 2023). Studies of plant and animal remains show the corridor could not support travellers until about 12,600 years ago (Pedersen et al., Nature, 2016). Most researchers now favour a route down the Pacific coast, often in boats. Genetic studies since 2007 (the "Beringian standstill") suggest the ancestral population lived in Beringia for several thousand years before spreading south.
"the great barrier that blocked their way"
TodayThe ice sheets did block the interior route for a long time. But as noted above, the first people south of the ice probably went around it along the coast rather than waiting for the interior to melt. The episode's single-path story is the pre-1997 version.
As the Ice Age glaciers melt, the descendants of the Siberian migrants spread across North America. One band adopts the spear-thrower and the Clovis spearhead. A greedy group splits off to hunt for its own sake, and the great Ice Age animals disappear. Later the survivors turn to plants, invent the bow and build a respectful bison-hunting culture. A closing narration jumps to the 19th-century slaughter of the bison.
No major errors in this episode. 3 minor slips hidden.
"across siberia people arrive here in what we call montana"
TodayThe episode has people arriving overland east of the Rockies (Montana), which means a trip down the ice-free corridor between the ice sheets. Studies of plant and animal remains show the corridor could not support travellers until about 12,600 years ago (Pedersen et al., Nature, 2016). Older sites south of the ice are now accepted: Monte Verde in Chile (about 14,500 years, accepted 1997), Buttermilk Creek in Texas (about 15,500 years, 2011) and the White Sands footprints in New Mexico (about 21,000–23,000 years, 2021, confirmed 2023). Most researchers now think the first people came down the Pacific coast. To the episode's credit, its date of about 15,000 years ago (see the mishearing note below) is earlier than the Clovis-first dates usual in 1991 and fits the modern picture better.
"as the white hunters deliberately exterminated them to deprive the Indians"
TodayThe killing was real and catastrophic, and some army officers and politicians welcomed it as a way to force Plains nations onto reservations. But Flores (1991) and Isenberg (2000) showed that the main driver was the commercial hide trade, which boomed after a new tanning process (1871) made bison leather valuable for industrial belting. Other factors were drought, competition from horses and cattle, cattle diseases, and Native hunting for the robe trade, which had been thinning herds since the 1840s. The slaughter was not mainly a planned policy, and the Sheridan "let them kill" speech often quoted for it is poorly sourced.
"In 60 million buffalo, but by the end of the 19th century, only a few hundred were still alive."
TodayThe 60 million figure comes from Ernest Thompson Seton (1909). Studies of how many animals the grasslands could feed (Dan Flores, 1991; Andrew Isenberg, 2000) put the Great Plains at about 25–30 million, fewer in droughts. The low point is about right: William Hornaday's 1889 count found about 1,000 bison in all, only a few hundred of them wild in the United States.
The episode follows the peoples of the Arctic: early Paleo-Eskimo groups and then the Thule, the whale-hunting ancestors of today's Inuit, who spread from Alaska to Greenland and replaced the Dorset culture. It then shows Thorfinn Karlsefni's Norse expedition to Newfoundland, a friendly meeting with the locals that turns sour over a stolen sword, and the Norse withdrawal. It ends by saying that later traders and trappers brought alcohol, violence and disease, which devastated the Inuit.
"Did they come by land bridges? 10 or 12,000"
TodayAbout 10,000–12,000 years ago (the Clovis era) was the standard date in 1991 for the first people to reach the Americas. Monte Verde, Chile (about 14,500 years, accepted in 1997) and the White Sands footprints, New Mexico (about 21,000–23,000 years, 2021/2023) push the first arrival back to at least 15,000 years ago and probably earlier. By 10,000–12,000 years ago the land bridge was already flooding (about 11,000 years ago).
"agreed that these were the very first migrants to have populated the American continent."
TodayThe opposite is true. The ancestors of the Eskimo-Aleut peoples (Paleo-Eskimos, about 5,000 years ago, and later the Thule) were the last major migration from Asia, thousands of years after the first Americans. This was standard by 1991 (e.g. Greenberg, Turner & Zegura's three-wave model, 1986). The French original may have said "the last" and been mistranslated.
"invented the harpoon with a detachable tip and waterproof jackets"
TodayToggling harpoons with detachable heads are thousands of years older than the Thule. They were used in the Pre-Dorset and Old Bering Sea cultures and in the Maritime Archaic. The Thule's real innovations were open-water whaling from umiaks with harpoon lines and floats, and wider use of dog sleds.
"They will thus cover the 12,000 kilometers that separate Beringia from Greenland,"
TodayFrom Bering Strait to northwest Greenland is about 3,300 km in a straight line, and to east Greenland about 4,700 km. Coastal routes are longer, but 12,000 km is far too high. This may be a translation or transcription slip.
"along with their more elementary civilization, absorbed by our ingenious, our courageous"
TodayThe Dorset (heard as "Durets") did disappear around 1300–1500 as the Thule spread. But they were not simply "more elementary". They were skilled sea-mammal hunters and produced some of the finest carvings of the prehistoric Arctic. Ancient-DNA work (Raghavan et al., Science, 2014) found almost no Dorset ancestry in the Inuit, so "replaced" fits better than "absorbed".
Why it was believedThe idea of technologically "superior" Thule pushing aside a "simpler" people was the usual way of telling the story.
"At the same time, somewhere in northern Europe, other men were also feeling"
TodayThe episode has the Thule expansion happen at the same time as the Norse voyages of about 1000 AD. In 1991 the Thule migration east was usually dated to about 1000 AD. Better radiocarbon dating (e.g. Friesen & Arnold, American Antiquity, 2008) puts the rapid spread from Alaska to Greenland at about 1200–1300 AD, two or three centuries after Leif Erikson and Karlsefni.
"40 years later, two ships arrive inside of Newfoundland."
TodayErik the Red settled Greenland in about 985/986. His son Leif Erikson reached Vinland in about 1000, and Thorfinn Karlsefni ("Torfinn Carl") led his expedition in about 1009–1010, roughly 25 years later. Eiríks saga gives Karlsefni three ships and Grœnlendinga saga gives him one, never two. (By coincidence, tree-ring dating at L'Anse aux Meadows shows Norse activity in 1021 AD: Kuitems et al., Nature, 2021.)
"Straight ahead, guys, there is land, and we are the first to set foot"
TodayIn both sagas Leif Erikson (and in Grœnlendinga saga his brother Thorvald) had already landed in Vinland before Karlsefni. Karlsefni's expedition used Leif's camp. Leif is missing from the episode.
"their country and the Eskimos remain the soul masters of the far north."
TodayThe people Karlsefni met in Vinland (the sagas call them Skrælings) were almost certainly not Inuit. Around 1000 AD the Thule had not yet left Alaska, and the Dorset had already left Newfoundland. The locals were probably ancestors of the Beothuk or Innu (the "Little Passage" culture), forest Algonquian-speaking peoples. In Greenland, Norse and Inuit did meet later, and the Norse Greenland colonies lasted until about 1450. ("soul masters" is a mishearing of "sole masters".)
Why it was believedOlder popular histories used "Skrælings" and "Eskimos" as if they were the same people, and Norse contact with Inuit in Greenland was carried over to Vinland.
As peoples spread across North America, the episode follows a family in the Great Basin between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. They gather pine nuts and roots, fish, hunt rabbits with nets alongside rival neighbours, and dig winter pit houses. It then moves to the Pacific Northwest Coast, describing it as a land of plenty with time for art, a shaman healer and marriage customs. It ends with a competitive potlatch between two chiefs and says the potlatch was later outlawed.
"to have two wives or two husbands if one had the means and he had them"
TodayHigh-ranking men on the Northwest Coast, the Haida ("Aida's") among them, sometimes had more than one wife. Marriages between polyandrous households (one wife, several husbands) are not documented as a Haida custom, and there was no rule limiting marriages to "no more than two". The scene invents these details.
"as wealth accumulated these men"
TodayThe episode presents the potlatch as boastful excess that grew out of wealth. Its main purposes were to confirm rank, names, inheritance and rights to territory, and to share out wealth. The extreme "rivalry" potlatches, where property was destroyed (like the blanket-burning in the episode), were mostly a late-19th-century Kwakwaka'wakw development. Epidemics left many noble titles vacant, and the fur and wage trade brought in a flood of goods (Helen Codere, Fighting with Property, 1950).
Why it was believedRuth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) made the Kwakiutl "megalomaniac" potlatch famous. Popular accounts treated that late, contact-era form as timeless.
"faced with all these excesses in the 20th century patelch was"
TodayCanada banned the potlatch in an amendment to the Indian Act passed in 1884 (in force from 1 January 1885). The ban was strengthened in 1895 and 1918 and only dropped in 1951. Missionaries and Indian agents pushed for it as part of a policy of forced assimilation, not because of "excesses". It led to arrests and confiscation of ceremonial goods, for example after Dan Cranmer's 1921 potlatch. ("patelch" = potlatch.)
The episode covers the farming cultures of the American Southwest: the Hohokam with their irrigation and ball courts, and the Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans) at Mesa Verde and Pueblo Bonito, who build a solar observatory and later scatter in a great drought. It then follows the recurring characters east to the Mississippian mound builders and Cahokia's huge Monks Mound, where a chief settles a dispute over field boundaries. It ends with European germs and guns destroying these societies.
"And that was how they discovered irrigation."
TodayThe episode credits the Hohokam (from about 150 BC) with inventing irrigation. Excavations in the Tucson Basin since the late 1990s and 2000s, notably Las Capas, found irrigation canals dating to about 1200 BC. Maize farming in the Southwest goes back to about 2100 BC. Irrigation began in the "Early Agricultural Period", centuries before the Hohokam culture. The Hohokam did build the largest canal systems in pre-Columbian North America (hundreds of kilometres along the Salt and Gila rivers).
"The name means old people."
TodayThe name "Anasazi" is a Navajo word, often rendered "ancient enemies" or "ancestors of the enemies" rather than simply "old people". Since the 1990s archaeologists and the Pueblo nations have generally preferred "Ancestral Puebloans". They were the ancestors not only of the Hopi but of all the Pueblo peoples, including Zuni, Acoma and the Rio Grande Pueblos.
"the descent to Mesa Verde and they need ropes."
TodayMesa Verde is a whole mesa (now a national park) with hundreds of cliff dwellings, not one building. Its best-known sites, such as Cliff Palace, Balcony House and Spruce Tree House, have been visited by ordinary tourists for over a century, using stairs and ladders. The inhabitants used carved hand-and-toe-hold trails. Most of the population lived on the mesa top, and the cliff dwellings were built only in the last century of occupation (about 1190–1280).
"the one that is most remarkable has to be Pueblo Bonito, east of New Mexico."
TodayPueblo Bonito is in Chaco Canyon, in northwestern New Mexico. It was built in stages from about 850 to 1150 AD.
"Just before the year 1200, we see the unfortunate fate of the Anasazi."
TodayChaco's decline came after a drought in the 1130s–1150s. The final abandonment of the Four Corners region (Mesa Verde included) came about 1280–1300, during the "Great Drought" of 1276–1299 identified from tree rings by A. E. Douglass (1929). The unfinished "temple" fits Mesa Verde's Sun Temple, built in the mid-to-late 1200s. Drought was one factor among several, along with violence, conflict and social change.
"Mexican influence is seen clearly here in the crops that they grow,"
TodayMaize and beans did come from Mexico. But squash, sunflower and other crops were domesticated independently in eastern North America (the "Eastern Agricultural Complex"; Bruce Smith, Science, 1989). Mound building there is much older than Mississippian times: Poverty Point dates to about 1700 BC, and Watson Brake in Louisiana to about 3500 BC (Science, 1997). Most archaeologists now see Mississippian art and iconography, including the feathered-serpent-like figures, as a local development, not proof of direct Mexican influence. No Mesoamerican trade goods have been securely identified at Cahokia.
Why it was believedMid-20th-century "diffusionist" archaeology often explained complex societies in the Eastern Woodlands as offshoots of Mesoamerica.
"To the east of the spot where the city of St. Louis will one day be built, Ahokia, an area about 500 acres."
TodayCahokia ("Ahokia") is east of St Louis, across the Mississippi in Illinois. But the settlement covered about 6 square miles (about 1,600 ha, roughly 4,000 acres). Only its central palisaded precinct was smaller (about 200 acres).
"There are at least 20 inside the city limits and a countless number of them outside."
TodayCahokia had about 120 mounds within the site, about 70 of which survive in the state historic site.
"In three centuries, with the coming of Europeans, this magnificent civilization would disappear."
TodayCahokia itself was largely empty by about 1350–1400, more than a century before any European arrived. Much of the central Mississippi and lower Ohio valleys was also abandoned (Stephen Williams' "Vacant Quarter", 1990). Other Mississippian chiefdoms, such as Coosa and the Natchez, were still thriving when de Soto arrived and collapsed afterwards. The episode's own chronology also fails: the characters leave the Southwest about 1200–1300 and arrive at a Cahokia that was already past its peak (about 1050–1150).
"In a very short time, these people were turned into a dying race."
TodayEpidemics, warfare and slave raiding did cause catastrophic losses in the Southeast after de Soto (1539–43). But the descendants of the Mississippian chiefdoms (Muscogee/Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Natchez and others) re-formed into new nations and survive today. The Native population of the US has grown steadily since about 1900. "Dying race" repeats the 19th-century "vanishing Indian" idea.
Why it was believedThe "vanishing Indian" was a long-standing theme of popular history and art.
The episode is set in 1486, at the start of Ahuitzotl's reign. It shows the Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, Tlacopan) forcing a town to pay tribute, then follows Mexica schoolchildren as a priest teaches them about sacrifice to the sun, warrior training, the founding legend of Tenochtitlan and the laws of daily life. It ends with the legend of Quetzalcoatl's promised return and the arrival of Cortés.
"Now, they have the same monuments, the same pyramids, same lifestyle as their cousins farther north."
TodayThe mound-building peoples of the Mississippi valley (episode 05) built earthen platform mounds. They lived in chiefdoms, and their greatest centre, Cahokia, was largely abandoned by about 1350. The Aztecs built stone pyramid-temples and lived in large cities under a tribute empire with writing and markets. A Mesoamerican influence on the Mississippians is possible but unproven. The two were not "the same".
"Fate awaits anyone who's caught using peyotl."
TodayNo known Aztec law punished peyote use. Peyote came mainly from the northern deserts and was linked to the Chichimecs. Hallucinogenic mushrooms (teonanacatl) and similar plants were taken openly at feasts by merchants and nobles, as Sahagún describes. The surviving laws punish drunkenness, not ritual drugs.
"Homosexuality? It depends on the sex of the couple. For women, it is death. For men, well, nobody's perfect."
TodayThe colonial sources on Aztec and Texcocan law (Motolinía, Las Casas, Ixtlilxochitl's account of Nezahualcoyotl's laws) all say sex between men was punished by death, and some describe especially cruel deaths. They say the same for women. These sources were written by Spaniards and Christianised Nahuas and may exaggerate, but none of them says men were tolerated. The joke reverses what the sources say.
"In sacrifices, he took only the blood of serpents and birds, hence his name."
TodayThe name Quetzalcoatl means "quetzal(-feathered) serpent", the plumed serpent, a deity shown that way since Teotihuacan (about 200 AD). It does not come from what he was offered. The legend of the Toltec priest-king Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl does say he offered snakes, birds and butterflies instead of humans (Anales de Cuauhtitlan). But Quetzalcoatl as a god did receive human sacrifice, for example at Cholula, so "enemy of all violence" is also a legend.
"But one day soon, he will return. Believe it, all the oracles tell us this."
TodayThe story that the Aztecs expected Quetzalcoatl to return from the east, and then took Cortés for him, is now widely seen as a post-conquest invention. It does not appear in Cortés's letters. It took shape decades later in Franciscan and Nahua writings that tried to explain the defeat after the fact. Susan Gillespie (The Aztec Kings, 1989) first argued this. Camilla Townsend ("Burying the White Gods", American Historical Review, 2003) and Matthew Restall (Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, 2003) made it the mainstream view. Around 1991 most narrative histories still told the story.
"Taken for the god Quetzalcoatl came Cortes, the conquistador."
TodayThis rests on the same post-conquest legend (see above). Moctezuma's gifts and his caution toward Cortés are now read as normal Mesoamerican diplomacy toward a powerful unknown force, not as religious paralysis (Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, 2018).
The episode (in French) follows two lives side by side from 1466. Isabella of Castile marries Ferdinand of Aragon against her brother Henry IV's wishes and becomes queen in 1474. Columbus becomes a sailor, settles in Portugal and the Madeira islands, and comes to believe Asia can be reached by sailing west. After Portugal turns him down, he spends years petitioning the Spanish monarchs through commissions and the war against Granada, until Luis de Santángel's intervention wins him the 1492 contract. The transcript ends at the signing.
"En même année, une princesse de 16 ans, Isabelle, tirée de son couvent, débarque à la cour d'Espagne à Madrid où règne son frère Henri IV de Castille." [The same year, a 16-year-old princess, Isabella, taken from her convent, arrives at the court of Spain in Madrid, where her brother Henry IV of Castile reigns.]
TodayIsabella was born on 22 April 1451, so in 1466 she turned 15, the same age as Columbus. She had not been raised in a convent. She grew up with her mother at the castle of Arévalo, and Henry IV brought her to his travelling court in about 1461–62, when she was ten. Henry was king of Castile; there was no "court of Spain" yet.
"Il arrive que le hasard fasse bien les choses, alors que Vilhena se rendait à la cérémonie du mariage." [Sometimes chance works out well: as Villena was on his way to the wedding ceremony.]
TodayThe man who died on his way to marry Isabella (spring 1466) was Pedro Girón, Master of Calatrava, the brother of Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena. Villena himself lived until October 1474, as the episode later says ("Vilena va mourir" [Villena will die]). Girón probably died of an illness, though poison was rumoured. The narration names the wrong man, unless this is a mishearing.
"Frère Pérez, informez-vous bien et revenez tout me dire sur ces princes." [Brother Pérez, find out all you can and come back and tell me everything about these princes.]
TodayThe anecdote is real, but the envoy was her chaplain Alonso de Coca. He reported that Charles of France was feeble, with thin legs and watery eyes, and that Ferdinand was handsome and spirited. Fray Juan Pérez was the La Rábida friar who later helped Columbus; the episode seems to have merged the two.
"Je vais aller au Flandre. Malheureusement, une tempête nous a déportés vers l'ouest." [I was going to Flanders. Unfortunately, a storm drove us west.]
TodayThis is the legend of the "unknown pilot" (named here as Alonso de Huelva, i.e. Alonso Sánchez de Huelva). He was supposedly blown across the Atlantic and told Columbus of the lands before dying. The story first appears decades after 1492 (Oviedo, 1535, who called it a rumour; Garcilaso de la Vega, 1609). It was used to belittle Columbus's claims and has no contemporary evidence. The episode presents it as fact.
"Fais-ce comme une femme ce royaume que tu n'as pas à se défendre comme un homme." [(Weep) like a woman for this kingdom you could not defend like a man.]
TodayThe rebuke from Boabdil's mother as he looked back at Granada (the "Moor's Last Sigh") is a legend. It first appears in Antonio de Guevara's writings in the 1530s, about 40 years later. The episode presents it as a real scene.
"Comment pouvez-vous laisser l'obscurantisme, les manigances, avoir raison de mon ami Colom" [How can you let obscurantism and scheming get the better of my friend Columbus]
TodayThe experts who turned Columbus down in Portugal (1484–85) and Spain (1490) were not obscurantists. They were right that his distances were far too small. Columbus put Japan about 2,400 nautical miles (roughly 4,000–4,500 km) west of the Canaries, as in the episode's "pas plus de 4000 km" [no more than 4,000 km]. The real distance is about 19,000 km by that route, and his ships would have run out of supplies if America had not been in the way. The episode shows only his side of the argument.
Why it was believedWashington Irving's Life of Columbus (1828) cast the commissions as ignorant clerics opposing a visionary, and that picture lasted in schoolbooks. Specialists (e.g. Morison, 1942; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 1991) had shown that the dispute was about distance.
The episode follows Columbus's four voyages, from 1492 to 1504. It covers fitting out the ships at Palos with the Pinzón brothers, the near-mutiny and the landfall in the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the wreck of the Santa María and the La Navidad garrison. It then shows the larger second voyage, the collapse of order at La Isabela, Bobadilla sending Columbus home in chains, and the hard fourth voyage. It ends with Columbus dying in misery, still believing he had reached Asia.
"14th of March, 1493, 224 days after his departure, Christopher Columbus returned to Palos, and he had discovered an immense continent."
TodayOn the first voyage Columbus reached only Caribbean islands (the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola), and he believed they were part of Asia. He first touched the South American mainland in 1498. The islands were home to hundreds of thousands of Taíno and other peoples, and Norse Greenlanders had reached Newfoundland around 1000 (L'Anse aux Meadows, dated to 1021 by tree rings in 2021). The episode itself shows that he thought he was near Cipango, so this line contradicts its own story.
Why it was believed"Columbus discovered America" was the standard schoolbook formula, especially around the 1992 quincentenary.
"14th of March, 1493, 224 days after his departure, Christopher Columbus returned to Palos,"
TodayColumbus reached Palos on 15 March 1493. The show's own count, 224 days from the departure on 3 August 1492, also lands on 15 March. He had stopped in the Azores and at Lisbon on the way.
"He brought back no gold, but rather, he brought back maize, corn, maniak, tobacco, and Indians."
TodayHe brought back some gold: nuggets, gold masks and ornaments, which were shown to the monarchs in Barcelona. He also brought parrots and about ten Taíno, who had been taken by force (six or seven survived to be presented at court). Maize and tobacco were described on the first voyage, but it is not clear that he brought back seeds or manioc in 1493.
"Gentlemen, would any of you be able to make this egg that I hold stand up on end?"
TodayThe "egg of Columbus" is a legend. It was first printed by Girolamo Benzoni in 1565, long after Columbus died, and Vasari (1550) had already told the same story about the architect Brunelleschi. The episode presents it as a real event.
"Why not take them as slaves?"
TodayThe episode gives the slaving idea to someone else and shows Isabella freeing the captives, so Columbus seems to be a well-meaning victim of unruly settlers. In fact Columbus himself shipped about 500 Taíno to Spain for sale in 1495. He also set up the gold-tribute system on Hispaniola (1495–96), which was enforced with great brutality. Isabella did order enslaved Indians to be returned home in 1500, but disease, forced labour and war had already devastated the Taíno. Spanish counts found about 60,000 on Hispaniola in 1508 and about 26,000 in 1514, out of a pre-contact population variously estimated from a few hundred thousand to over a million. "The gentle natives had had enough" also softens what happened at La Navidad: the Taíno killed the whole garrison of 39 after its men seized women and gold.
Why it was believedThe heroic Columbus of Washington Irving (1828) and Samuel Eliot Morison (1942) dominated popular history. The critical view, based on Las Casas, was well known to historians (e.g. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, 1990) but had only just started to reach the public around 1992.
"The 24th of August, 1500, Bodabia arrived in Hispaniola."
TodayFrancisco de Bobadilla ("Bodabia" is a mishearing) reached Santo Domingo on 23 August 1500. This is an error of one day.
"He returned and retired to a Franciscan monastery and began a period of penance."
TodayAfter coming back in chains (1500), Columbus lived mainly at the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas in Seville. There he compiled his Book of Privileges and Book of Prophecies and lobbied for another voyage. He was linked to the Franciscans (he wore their habit after 1496 and was buried in it), so this is a near miss.
"Two years after his return, Queen Isabella died two more years, and Columbus died too."
TodayColumbus returned from his fourth voyage on 7 November 1504, and Isabella died on 26 November 1504, less than three weeks later. Columbus died on 20 May 1506, about 18 months after that. "Two years" may be a mishearing of "two weeks".
"He paralyzed, miserable, and abandoned by everybody."
TodayColumbus was ill (probably reactive arthritis, then called gout, and an eye inflammation), but he was not paralysed. He was not poor or forgotten either. He kept a share of the revenue from the Indies, lived in Valladolid with his sons and servants, and went on petitioning the Crown. His son Diego later became governor of the Indies. What he lost was his power as viceroy, not his wealth.
Why it was believed"Died in poverty and neglect" is a 19th-century romantic theme (Irving, Lamartine) that schoolbooks repeated.
The episode opens with a quick run through Magellan's voyage (1519–1522), then moves to Cuba in 1518, where Governor Velázquez hands Hernán Cortés an expedition that Cortés takes off without permission. It follows Cortés along the Gulf coast: he picks up Aguilar and Malinche (Doña Marina), wins over the Totonacs of Cempoala, scuttles his ships, fights and then allies with Tlaxcala, sacks Cholula and reaches the Valley of Mexico. It is told largely through Bernal Díaz, and it rightly shows that the Aztec empire was riven by subject peoples who sided with the Spaniards, but it repeats the "white god" legend.
"September 10th, 1519, we set our course, heading for, uh..."
TodayThe fleet left Seville on 10 August 1519 and put to sea from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519.
"2nd of November, the fleet came in sight of the northeastern coast of Brazil."
TodayThe fleet reached Cabo de Santo Agostinho (near Recife) on 29 November 1519 and entered the bay of Rio de Janeiro on 13 December. Whisper may have garbled the date.
"Just as the prediction had predicted the great white god, Quetzalcoatl."
TodayThe story that Moctezuma and the Aztecs expected a returning pale, bearded Quetzalcoatl and took Cortés for him is now widely seen as a post-conquest invention. It does not appear in Cortés's letters. It took shape decades later in Franciscan and Nahua writings that tried to explain the defeat after the fact. Susan Gillespie (The Aztec Kings, 1989) first argued this. Camilla Townsend ("Burying the White Gods", American Historical Review, 2003) and Matthew Restall (Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, 2003) made it the mainstream view. Around 1991 most narrative histories still told the story; Hugh Thomas's Conquest (1993) is one example. No pre-conquest image shows Quetzalcoatl as white.
"You're a cultured man. You will tell the story of our adventures."
TodayNobody commissioned Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write the expedition's history. He was an ordinary soldier who wrote his Historia verdadera decades later (finished around 1568), partly to answer Cortés's official chronicler, López de Gómara. He called himself an "idiota sin letras" (an unlearned man). Cortés wrote his own account in his letters to Charles V.
"Yes, but I'm afraid I'm the only survivor."
TodayGerónimo de Aguilar was one of two survivors of the 1511 shipwreck who were still alive in 1519. The other, Gonzalo Guerrero, had married into Maya society and refused to rejoin the Spaniards. Bernal Díaz tells this story in detail.
"he was facing a great empire waiting for a god"
TodayThis rests on the same post-conquest legend (see above). Moctezuma's gifts and his hesitation are better read as normal Mesoamerican diplomacy toward a powerful, unknown force (Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, 2018). They were not religious paralysis.
"sandoval you will stay here with a hundred men"
TodayWhen Cortés marched inland in August 1519, he left Juan de Escalante in command at Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, with roughly 150 men. Gonzalo de Sandoval replaced him only after Escalante was killed later that year.
"With an audacity unparalleled in history, Captain Cortez burnt his boats behind him."
TodayCortés had his ships stripped of their gear and run aground or scuttled (holed and sunk) at Villa Rica in 1519. He did not burn them. Bernal Díaz and Cortés's own letter both say this, and the show's own dialogue just before says "all our ships be sunk".
Why it was believed"Burning his boats" became a proverb. Later chroniclers such as Cervantes de Salazar told it that way, and popular histories repeated it.
"He says you may well be white god."
TodayThe "white god" idea comes from the same post-conquest legend. The Tlaxcalans allied with Cortés for practical reasons: they had lost the battles, and they wanted to use the Spaniards against their Aztec enemies. Spanish and Tlaxcalan sources describe it this way, and so do Ross Hassig (Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, 1994) and Restall (2003).
"The city of Cholula was on their route with its 400 temples and pyramids higher than those in Egypt."
TodayThe "400 temples" matches Cortés's report of about 430 towers. But the Great Pyramid of Cholula (Tlachihualtepetl) is about 55–66 m high, against about 146 m for the Great Pyramid of Giza. Cholula's is the largest pyramid in the world by volume, not by height.
"Everything seemed peaceful, but Cortez had been warned they were plotting a massacre and ordered the attack."
TodayThe claim of a Cholulan plot comes only from the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalan allies, who were enemies of Cholula. Many historians doubt it or think the Tlaxcalans stirred it up. The "attack" was a massacre of thousands of mostly unarmed Cholulans gathered in the temple courtyard (estimates run from about 3,000 to 6,000) in October 1519. The episode gives the Spanish justification and leaves out who died.
Why it was believedFor centuries histories relied on Cortés's and Bernal Díaz's accounts, which presented the massacre as a pre-emptive strike.
"1,500 meters. I want volunteers to climb it."
TodayDiego de Ordaz did climb the volcano Popocatépetl in 1519, but it stands about 5,400 m high, roughly 3,000 m above the valley floor. The figure may be a mishearing.
This episode (French original) picks up with Moctezuma's council arguing over whether the Spaniards are gods, then follows Cortés in Tenochtitlan: the city and its market, the seizure of Moctezuma, Alvarado's massacre at the Toxcatl festival, the Noche Triste, Otumba, the brigantines and the siege of 1521. It ends with Cuauhtémoc's capture and death, the demographic collapse of Mexico and Cortés's disgrace in Spain. Much of it is narrated through Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and it is frank about Spanish greed, the massacre and epidemic disease.
"L'éclipse du soleil, les comètes dans le ciel," [The eclipse of the sun, the comets in the sky,]
TodayThe list of omens before the conquest comes from Sahagún's Florentine Codex (Book 12, compiled in the 1550s–70s). Since the 1990s, historians (James Lockhart, We People Here, 1993; Restall 2003; Townsend 2019) have generally treated the omens as written after the fact, in the style of European prophecy literature, not as something people saw and noted in 1519. The show presents them as real events.
"Le divin Quetzalcoatl, notre aimable et doux seigneur, avait la même coiffe, le même teint pâle, la même barbe que les nouveaux venus." [The divine Quetzalcoatl, our kind and gentle lord, had the same headdress, the same pale skin, the same beard as the newcomers.]
TodayThe story that the Aztecs took Cortés for a returning, pale, bearded Quetzalcoatl is now widely seen as a post-conquest invention. It does not appear in Cortés's own letters, and it took shape decades later in Franciscan and Nahua writings that tried to explain the defeat after the fact. Susan Gillespie (The Aztec Kings, 1989) first argued this. Camilla Townsend ("Burying the White Gods", American Historical Review, 2003) and Matthew Restall (Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, 2003; When Montezuma Met Cortés, 2018) made it the mainstream view. No pre-conquest image shows Quetzalcoatl as pale or bearded in a European sense.
"Et il avait dit qu'il reviendrait l'année des roseraies pour rétablir son autorité." [And he had said he would return in the year of the reeds to restore his rule.]
Today"Roseraies" (rose gardens) is a mishearing of "roseaux" (reeds): 1519 was a year 1 Reed (Ce Acatl). That date match is part of the same post-conquest story (see above), not evidence that Moctezuma expected Quetzalcoatl to return.
"Cortés ne le tua pas tout de suite. Il le mit d'abord au supplice pour qu'il révèle où était l'or." [Cortés did not kill him right away. First he had him tortured to reveal where the gold was.]
TodayThe torture is true: in 1521, after the fall of the city, Cuauhtémoc's feet were burned, under pressure from the royal treasurer Julián de Alderete. But it was not followed directly by his execution, as the next line ("Comme il s'obstinait à se taire, Cortès le fit étrangler" [As he still refused to talk, Cortés had him strangled]) suggests. Cuauhtémoc was kept prisoner for more than three years. Cortés had him hanged in February 1525, during the march to Honduras, on a charge of plotting a revolt. The two events are merged into one.
"La population indigène décimée par les guerres et les maladies était tombée de 20 à 1 million d'âmes." [The native population, decimated by wars and disease, had fallen from 20 to 1 million souls.]
TodayThis follows Cook and Borah (1963): about 25 million in central Mexico in 1519 and about 1 million by 1605. That was the leading estimate in 1991. It is still debated, and many scholars now prefer lower starting figures (for example Whitmore's 1992 model, about 16 million; others suggest 5–10 million). Everyone agrees on a collapse of roughly 90%, but it took most of a century, not just the conquest years. Later research also stresses the great cocoliztli epidemics of 1545 and 1576. Ancient DNA has linked the 1545 epidemic to Salmonella Paratyphi C (Vågene et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2018). Forced labour and famine made these epidemics much worse.
"Sept ans plus tard, il n'a toujours pas pu le rencontrer." [Seven years later, he still hasn't managed to meet him.]
TodayCortés met Charles V in Toledo in 1528, soon after he returned to Spain, and in 1529 was made Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca. His long, frustrating wait at court came later, on his second stay in Spain (1540–47). The roadside scene that follows, where Cortés climbs onto the emperor's carriage and says he gave him more kingdoms than his ancestors left him cities, comes from Voltaire's Essai sur les mœurs (1756) and has no contemporary source.
Why it was believedVoltaire's anecdote was copied into many 19th- and 20th-century French histories and schoolbooks as a fitting ending to Cortés's story.
The episode follows Francisco Pizarro from his obscure origins and Panama years, through the partnership with Almagro and Luque, the "line in the sand" and the first sight of Tumbes, to his royal commission from Charles V. It then shows everyday Inca life (quipus, storehouses, messengers), the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa, the ambush at Cajamarca, the ransom and execution of Atahualpa, Manco Inca's siege of Cusco and the civil war between the Pizarros and Almagro.
No major errors in this episode. 11 minor slips hidden.
"We know with certainty he was a pig swiller, a farmhand, and a soldier."
TodayPizarro was the illegitimate son of Captain Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisca González, a servant in Trujillo. The swineherd story (and the tale of a baby abandoned at a church door and suckled by a sow, which the show also tells) goes back to López de Gómara's hostile Historia (1552). It is a plausible tradition, but not something "we know with certainty".
Why it was believedGómara, then Prescott (1847), made the swineherd-to-conqueror story a set piece of popular history.
"He would serve many captains, including Ponce de Leon,"
TodayNo record puts Pizarro under Ponce de León. His known commanders were Alonso de Ojeda (Urabá, 1509–10), Balboa and Pedrarias Dávila. Ponce de León was conquering Puerto Rico and Florida at that time.
"I shall state our case personally when we see Governor Pedrarias."
TodayBy the Isla del Gallo episode (1527) Pedrarias had been replaced as governor of Panama by Pedro de los Ríos. It was de los Ríos who sent Juan Tafur to bring the men back and who later gave the stayers a fixed time to return.
"Cortez brings back three tons of gold every year."
TodayNo such annual flow existed. The total gold taken from the Aztecs was a few tonnes at most, and much of it was lost on the Noche Triste. Large shipments of American bullion came later and were mostly silver, after Potosí (1545) and Zacatecas (1546).
"Almagro will become governor of Tumbez,"
TodayThe Capitulación de Toledo (26 July 1529) made Almagro only commander of the fortress of Tumbes, with the rank of hidalgo, a slight that soured his partnership with Pizarro. Pizarro was made governor and captain-general of Peru and a knight of Santiago (both correct). The marquisate the show adds ("and the Marquis") came only in 1537.
"you are Viracocha, the thunder god."
TodayViracocha was the Andean creator god; the thunder and weather god was Illapa. The Spaniards were called viracochas, but the idea that Andeans took them for gods comes mostly from post-conquest writers, much like the Quetzalcoatl story in Mexico.
"A thousand Incas killed on the spot and not one Spaniard wounded."
TodaySpanish eyewitnesses (Xerez, Mena) give about 2,000 dead at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532; other accounts give up to 7,000. The one Spaniard wounded was Pizarro himself, cut on the hand while shielding Atahualpa. The show reduces the scale of the massacre.
"One of those strange quirks of history with a handful of soldiers, Pizarro,"
TodayAbout 170 Spaniards captured Atahualpa, but they did not end the empire on their own. Earlier epidemics (probably smallpox, which killed Huayna Capac and his heir around 1528) and the succession war had already broken the state. Thousands of Native allies (Cañari, Chachapoya, Huáscar's supporters) fought alongside the Spaniards, and Spanish reinforcements followed. Inca resistance went on from Vilcabamba until 1572.
Why it was believedPrescott's Conquest of Peru (1847) set the "handful of heroes" story. Studies of Native allies and of epidemics (Hemming 1970; later Restall 2003) were not yet standard in popular works.
"His brother Manco Capac to keep them quiet."
TodayThe puppet ruler Pizarro crowned in 1533 was Manco Inca (Manco Inca Yupanqui), after the brief reign of Túpac Huallpa. Manco Capac is the legendary founder of the Inca dynasty. This may be a slip in the dub.
"raised 400,000 men for the siege of Cusco."
TodayChroniclers estimated the 1536 besieging army at roughly 40,000–200,000, and even 200,000 is thought to be exaggerated. 400,000 goes beyond any source.
"Spago was strangled while imprisoned three months later in the city of Lima"
TodayDiego de Almagro was garrotted in July 1538 in Cusco, on Hernando Pizarro's orders, about three months after Las Salinas. Francisco Pizarro was in Lima. The transcript may have run two clauses together, but as heard it is wrong. Episode 13 itself correctly says Almagro's son was executed "in the same place as his father", which was Cusco.
The episode covers France's late start in the race for the Americas: Verrazzano's 1524 voyage along the North American coast for Francis I, then Jacques Cartier's first two voyages (1534 and 1535–36). It shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the first fur trading, Donnacona's sons taken to France, the trip upriver to Stadacona (Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal), and the scurvy winter cured by a Native cedar remedy. It closes with Roberval's later voyage and Cartier's "gold and diamonds" turning out to be pyrite and quartz.
"He was the first to say that the New World was a new continent as well."
TodayAmerigo Vespucci's Mundus Novus (1503) had already called the lands a "new world", and the Waldseemüller map (1507) drew them as a separate continent. Verrazzano's letter does describe a long new coastline unknown to the ancients, but he was not the first to say so.
"There was no passage to the West, and he was the first man who dared to say it."
TodayThe opposite is true. Verrazzano took the Outer Banks of North Carolina for a narrow isthmus and the sound behind it for the Pacific (the "Sea of Verrazzano"). Maps showed this imaginary sea for decades, and it encouraged the hope of a passage that Cartier was sent to find.
"Cartier is only 30 and the darling of the port city of Saint-Malo,"
TodayCartier was born in 1491, so he was 42 in 1534.
"Today, the 13th day of August, 1535, we have entered a bay which our captain has named the Bay of St. Lawrence."
TodayCartier named the small bay (on the north shore, near Sainte-Geneviève/Pillage Bay) on 10 August 1535, the feast of St Lawrence, which is where the name comes from. The name later spread to the gulf and the river.
The episode surveys the Spanish expeditions into what is now the southern United States: Balboa reaching the Pacific (1513), Ponce de León naming Florida, Narváez's disastrous 1528 expedition and Cabeza de Vaca's eight-year odyssey, Hernando de Soto's march to the Mississippi (1539–42) and Coronado's search for the Seven Cities of Cíbola and Quivira (1540–42). It ends with a roll-call of the conquistadors' violent or miserable deaths. It is sympathetic to Cabeza de Vaca and clear-eyed about why Native peoples resisted.
"who after a troublesome voyage caused by a false maneuver"
TodayBalboa reached the Pacific on an overland march across the Isthmus of Panama in September 1513, guided by Native people. He first saw the ocean from a ridge on 25 September. No sea voyage or mistake by Pizarro (who was one of his men) was involved.
"Imagine, he was 53."
TodayThis uses the traditional birth year of 1460. Most modern biographers prefer about 1474, based on his own testimony, which would make him about 39 in 1513. The exact year is uncertain.
Why it was believedThe 1460 date appeared in older reference works.
"Well, he believed there was a fountain of youth, and he even became governor of Bimini for that."
TodayPonce de León's royal contracts (1512–14) for Bimini and Florida talk about land, gold and slaves, and never mention a fountain. The fountain story was first attached to him after his death, mockingly by Oviedo (1535), then by Fontaneda and Herrera (1601). Historians now treat the "quest for the Fountain of Youth" as a legend (see, e.g., J. Michael Francis's work, 2010s).
Why it was believedHerrera's widely read history and 19th-century American textbooks made the fountain the standard story of Florida's discovery.
"He was an old soldier who had been companion to Columbus and to Cortez."
TodayPonce de León sailed on Columbus's second voyage (1493), but he never served with Cortés. Cortés's conquest of Mexico (1519–21) came after Ponce had already explored Florida.
"My forefathers earned it by charging the enemy with bullhorns having no weapons."
TodayAccording to the family legend, an ancestor, the shepherd Martín Alhaja, marked a hidden mountain pass with a cow's skull before the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). That let the Christian army surprise the Almohads. The show substitutes a different (invented) legend.
"And suddenly, they reached their objective, Tampa Bay in Florida, the very spot where Ponce de Leon had been mortally wounded."
TodayNarváez's grant covered the coast from Florida to the Río de las Palmas in Mexico, and his pilots thought they were near the Pánuco. He landed near Tampa Bay in April 1528 more or less by accident. Ponce de León was wounded in 1521 further south, probably among the Calusa around Charlotte Harbor or the Caloosahatchee River.
"they cross into Alabama and then into Mississippi and Louisiana,"
TodayNarváez's men went along the Gulf Coast past Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in makeshift boats (late 1528) and were wrecked on the Texas coast. Cabeza de Vaca's walk began in Texas. From there he and three companions (Dorantes, Castillo and the enslaved Moroccan Estebanico, all left out) crossed Texas and northern Mexico, reaching Spanish slavers in Sinaloa in 1536.
"who himself is stuck in alabama while waiting he raises an even bigger army"
TodayMendoza did not wait for de Soto. Coronado's expedition left in February 1540, at the same time as de Soto was marching through the Southeast. It was sparked by Fray Marcos de Niza's 1539 report and Estebanico's death at Zuni. Its 1540 muster lists about 290 Europeans (226 horsemen, 63 foot), with about 80 more joining later, plus about 1,300 Native allies from Mexico. It did not have the "1,000 infantry soldiers" the show gives.
"before whose armies enemy forces parted, as the Red Sea before Moses."
TodayCortés and Pizarro did not succeed by miracle. They had tens of thousands of Native allies (Tlaxcalans and others in Mexico; Cañari, Chachapoya and Huáscar's supporters in Peru), and epidemics and civil wars had already weakened both empires. The show's own Episodes 10 and 11 partly show this.
Why it was believedThe 19th-century Prescott story of tiny bands of heroes was still the popular version in 1991 (see Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, 2003).
"who was already abandoned by everybody."
TodayColumbus died in Valladolid in 1506, ill and bitter about his lost titles, but not poor or alone. He had a large income from his share of the Indies trade, his sons were at court, and his son Diego became governor of Hispaniola in 1509.
Why it was believedRomantic biographies, especially Washington Irving's (1828), made the forgotten, poverty-stricken Columbus a set piece.
The episode follows English colonisation of North America from Drake's 1579 claim and the lost Roanoke colony to the founding of Georgia in 1732. It covers Jamestown, tobacco, Pocahontas, the first Africans in Virginia, the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, the Puritan Great Migration and its dissenters (Hooker, Williams, Hutchinson), New Amsterdam becoming New York, Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
"an expedition has just arrived, commanded by Sir Walter Raleigh."
TodayRaleigh never went to North America. He sponsored the Roanoke voyages: the 1584 scouting trip under Amadas and Barlowe, the 1585 colony under Grenville and Lane, and the 1587 colony under John White. "Oak Island" is almost certainly a mishearing of Roanoke Island.
Why it was believedPopular history credited Raleigh as Virginia's "founder" because he held the royal patent.
"virginia dare the first child born in the new england colony"
TodayVirginia Dare (born 18 August 1587) was the first English child born in the Americas, on Roanoke Island in what was then "Virginia" (now North Carolina), not New England. Her grandfather John White, the governor, was not a knight ("sir john white"). This may be a dub slip.
"colony mysteriously disappeared for 12 years they searched for survivors but in vain"
TodayWhite left for supplies in 1587 and could not return until August 1590, three years later. He found the settlement abandoned and "CROATOAN" carved on a post. Raleigh sent searches in the 1600s and Jamestown made inquiries after 1607, but the "12 years" does not match either event.
"They had vanished."
TodayThe Roanoke colonists' fate is still unproven, but since the 1990s archaeology has strengthened the old theory that survivors moved in with Native neighbours. The Croatoan Archaeological Project on Hatteras Island (from 1998, mainly 2010s) has found late-16th-century English objects, and the First Colony Foundation's "Site X" work inland (from 2012) points to a possible move up the Albemarle Sound. The show's "vanished" framing reflects the older popular mystery.
"And 200 million pounds, a thousand times more, 50 years later."
TodayA thousand times 20,000 lb is 20 million lb, which is about right for Chesapeake exports in the late 1660s–1670s. Exports never reached 200 million lb in the colonial period; they peaked around 100 million lb in the 1770s. The dub probably mistranslated "20 millions".
"Here in Chesapeake Bay, you found a splendid place to settle."
TodayJohn Smith did not lead the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Christopher Newport commanded the voyage, Edward Maria Wingfield was the first council president, and Smith arrived under arrest. He became president only in September 1608. The site was a malarial, brackish swamp chosen for defence, and was a major reason so many died.
"Me, Pocahontas, your own daughter."
TodayThe rescue rests only on John Smith's own account, written in 1624 (his 1608 report does not mention it). Many historians doubt it or read it as an adoption ceremony that Smith misunderstood. Pocahontas was about 11 in December 1607. Smith was also captured by Opechancanough while exploring the Chickahominy River, not put on trial for cheating on land deals as the show has it.
Why it was believedThe rescue was a fixture of American schoolbooks and folklore from the 19th century on.
"30 pounds of tobacco surely isn't too high a price to pay for a charming girl."
TodayThis seems to refer to the Virginia Company's "tobacco brides" (1619–1621). A colonist who married one paid her passage, set at 120 lb of tobacco, later 150 lb. The women chose their husbands and were not sold at auction.
"Slaves arrive in Virginia. This was the beginning of slavery in America."
TodayThe "20 and odd" Africans who reached Point Comfort in August 1619 were the first recorded in English Virginia. Slavery in the Americas was a century older. Spain and Portugal had shipped enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and Brazil since the early 1500s, and Native Americans were enslaved from Columbus onward. Whether the 1619 Africans were treated as slaves or as indentured servants is still debated. Virginia's slave laws came later (1660s).
Why it was believedUS history was told from the English colonies outward, which made 1619 "the start".
"That 147 of them died in this way."
TodayAbout 189 Catholics were executed under Elizabeth I (roughly 130 priests and 60 lay people). Only a handful of them were Jesuits, the best known being Edmund Campion (1581). The figure and the "Jesuits" label do not match. The fine (£20 a month for not attending church) and the 1581 treason law for reconciling with Rome are correct.
"Now, 20,000 pilgrims who disagreed with this,"
TodayThe Separatists who went to Holland (the Scrooby congregation, 1607–08) numbered a few hundred at most, and they left under James I, not Elizabeth. They were radical Protestants fleeing pressure from the Church of England, not people objecting to anti-Catholic laws. 20,000 is the size of the later Puritan Great Migration to New England (1630–1640), which the episode also cites correctly further on.
"First, our leader will sign Captain Bradford."
TodayJohn Carver signed first and was the colony's first governor. William Bradford became governor in 1621 after Carver died, and he was never a captain.
"Then, Captain Lionel Standish, you will be responsible for our safety."
TodayThe colony's military leader was Captain Myles Standish. This is probably a dub or transcription error.
"We might name it Thanksgiving Day."
TodayThe 1621 harvest feast was not called a "thanksgiving". To the Pilgrims a thanksgiving was a religious day of prayer. The only eyewitness (Edward Winslow) mentions fowl, five deer brought by about 90 Wampanoag under Massasoit, and recreation. Turkey is possible, but cranberry sauce is unlikely because there was no sugar. The show also leaves out the Wampanoag guests, who were the majority.
Why it was believedThe turkey-and-cranberry Thanksgiving was created in the 19th century (Sarah Josepha Hale's campaign, Lincoln's 1863 proclamation) and projected back onto 1621.
"Great Pilgrim's Festival lasted three days and now every November Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day."
TodayThe feast did last about three days, but it was a one-off in autumn 1621 (probably late September to mid-November), not the start of an annual tradition. The national November holiday dates from 1863.
Why it was believedSame 19th-century origin myth as above.
"The Quakers are banned in Boston and leave the city."
TodayThe scene before this one is the Antinomian controversy of 1636–38 (Hutchinson, Wheelwright). Quakers first reached Boston in 1656. Massachusetts did more than ban them: it whipped and mutilated them, and hanged four between 1659 and 1661, among them Mary Dyer.
"To the north he founds New Hampshire."
TodayJohn Wheelwright founded the town of Exeter (1638). New Hampshire grew out of the Mason and Gorges grants (1622, 1629), with settlements at Dover and Portsmouth from 1623, years before he arrived.
"And a group of 300 Catholics came and founded Maryland."
TodayThe Ark and the Dove brought about 140–150 settlers in 1634. The Calverts and the gentlemen leaders were Catholic, but most of the settlers, especially the servants, were Protestant. Maryland was meant as a refuge for Catholics, not a Catholic colony.
"And that was that. The island of Manhattan was bought for $24 worth of junk jewelry."
TodayThe only contemporary source (Pieter Schaghen's 1626 letter) gives the price as trade goods worth 60 guilders and does not list beads. The "$24" is a conversion made in the 1840s and is worth about $1,000 or more today. The Lenape probably understood the deal as shared use, not an outright sale. The show gets credit for having the Native characters dispute who owns the land.
Why it was believedThe $24 figure was a staple of schoolbooks.
"May I just point out that we are at war, but surrendering will treat you well, well?"
TodayEngland and the Dutch Republic were at peace when Richard Nicolls's fleet took New Amsterdam in August–September 1664. The Second Anglo-Dutch War was declared only in March 1665, and the seizure was one of its causes. The wet-powder joke stands in for a real shortage of powder. In reality the townspeople petitioned the stubborn Stuyvesant to surrender.
"Then there will be land gravenes who will hold 15,000 hectares each."
TodayThe Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669) gave each landgrave 48,000 acres (about 19,400 ha) and each cacique ("cassock") 24,000 acres (about 9,700 ha), not "a thousand". "Land gravenes"/"khakis" are mishearings of landgraves/caciques.
"My son William would like to go to America, sire."
TodayAdmiral Sir William Penn died in 1670. Charles II granted Pennsylvania in 1681 to William Penn the younger to pay off a debt (about £16,000) owed to his late father. The father could not have asked for it. Penn also wanted the name "Sylvania"; it was the king who added "Penn" to honour the admiral.
"The colony of Georgia in honor of our King George III!"
TodayGeorgia was chartered in 1732 and named after George II. George III became king in 1760. Oglethorpe was a colonel when he founded Savannah in 1733 and became a general later.
A travelling Native family carries the story of the 17th-century East Coast as Native peoples saw it. It covers the Powhatan chiefdom and Jamestown (Pocahontas, the 1622 and 1644 uprisings), the Lenape between Swedes, Dutch and Iroquois, the wampum and gun trades, King Philip's War, and the Five Nations Iroquois facing French Governor Denonville. The episode is openly critical of colonial land theft and violence, which was unusual for children's TV at the time. It ends with William Penn's fairness being undone by his son's Walking Purchase.
"No, Powahattans detest any violence."
TodayWahunsenacah (Powhatan) built his paramount chiefdom of about 30 tribes partly by conquest. Strachey reports that he destroyed the Chesepian people and drove out the Kecoughtan. The Powhatans were neither more nor less violent than their neighbours. This line is the "noble savage" myth stated as fact.
"I do, Father, and I think the man is handsome."
TodayAs in episode 15, the rescue of John Smith comes only from Smith's 1624 account and is doubted. The romance hinted at here ("You know, you're a pretty girl.") has no historical basis. Pocahontas was about 11 in 1607. She was later kidnapped by the English (1613) and married John Rolfe (1614).
Why it was believedThe Smith–Pocahontas romance was a staple of 19th-century plays, paintings and schoolbooks.
"On that morning, 27 white people die in the St. James River."
TodayThe coordinated attack on 22 March 1622 killed about 347 colonists, a quarter to a third of the English in Virginia, all along the James River settlements. "27" may be a dub or speech-recognition error.
"So the war against the Powhatans was to last for 14 years."
TodayThe Second Anglo-Powhatan War ran from 1622 to a peace in 1632, about ten years. The "powwow" with guaranteed safety refers to a real betrayal: at a peace parley in May 1623 the English served poisoned wine and killed about 200 Powhatans. The show only hints at this.
"Tomorrow at dawn, we attack Jamestown."
TodayOpechancanough's 1644 uprising (18 April 1644, indeed 22 years after 1622) struck the outlying plantations and killed about 400–500 colonists. Jamestown itself was not attacked, and the war ended in Powhatan defeat: Opechancanough was captured in 1646 and shot while a prisoner in Jamestown. Calling it an "Indian victory at Jamestown" is misleading.
"But they were able to keep it only one year."
TodayNew Sweden lasted 17 years, from Peter Minuit's land purchase from the Lenape and Fort Christina in 1638 until Stuyvesant conquered it in 1655. What lasted only a year was Governor Risingh's 1654 seizure of the Dutch Fort Casimir and his treaty with the Lenape that year.
"They hunted them down and exterminated them."
TodayThe Powhatan peoples were defeated, lost most of their land and population, and were bound by the treaties of 1646 and 1677, but they were not wiped out. The Pamunkey and Mattaponi have held reservations in Virginia since the 17th century. The Pamunkey were federally recognised in 2015, and six more Virginia tribes in 2018.
Why it was believedThe "vanishing Indian" idea, that East Coast peoples simply disappeared, was standard in popular history. Many Native communities in the East had no federal recognition in 1991.
"They completely massacred King Philip's whole tribe."
TodayKing Philip's War (1675–76) was catastrophic. Thousands of Native people were killed, and many were sold into slavery in the West Indies, Philip's wife and son among them. But the Wampanoag survived. The Aquinnah (Gay Head) Wampanoag were federally recognised in 1987 and the Mashpee in 2007.
Why it was believedSame "vanishing Indian" idea.
"They wiped out the Mohegans who were allies."
TodayThe Mohegans were English allies in the Pequot War and King Philip's War, and they survived. The Mohegan Tribe was federally recognised in 1994. The nation nearly destroyed in the 1637 Mystic massacre was the Pequot, and they also survive (Mashantucket Pequot, recognised 1983). "Same with the Delawares" is also wrong: the Lenape were pushed west but survive today as the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe in Oklahoma and the Munsee in Ontario.
Why it was believedSame "vanishing Indian" idea. The name Mohegan is also often confused with Mohican.
In the early 1700s a Plains band that still hunts on foot with dogs first meets mounted Apaches. The band's boys go through vision quests, and the band then captures and trades for horses, which changes buffalo hunting and travel. The episode closes on rifles, whiskey and European diseases reaching the Great Plains as settlers push Native peoples ever farther west. (The transcript starts about 1 min 50 s in, mid-sentence, so the opening narration is only partly covered.)
No major errors in this episode. 2 minor slips hidden.
"I want you to kill the number we need, no more."
TodayCommunal hunts were tightly controlled by hunt police (akicita among the Lakota). But the idea that Plains peoples always took "only what they needed" has since been challenged. Shepard Krech's The Ecological Indian (1999), Dan Flores (1991) and Andrew Isenberg (The Destruction of the Bison, 2000) document buffalo jumps that killed more animals than could be used, and Native market hunting for the hide and robe trade in the 1800s. Historians agree the main cause of the bison's collapse was non-Native commercial hunting, but the "ecological Indian" image is now seen as simplified.
"Another one if you kill an enemy, and especially one if you scalped one."
TodayAmong Plains peoples the highest war honour was usually counting coup: touching or striking a living enemy, or taking his weapon or horse. That outranked killing him. Scalping carried relatively little prestige in most coup systems, so the show reverses the order. Eagle-feather awards did vary from nation to nation.
Why it was believedWestern films and pulp fiction made scalping the defining act of "Indian warfare".
The episode follows René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle from his arrival in New France in the 1660s, through the Iroquois destruction of the Huron, Bishop Laval's church quarrels, Talon and the King's Daughters, Frontenac and Fort Frontenac, the Griffon and Fort Crèvecoeur, to his 1682 descent of the Mississippi and claim of "Louisiana". It ends with his failed 1684–87 Gulf colony, his murder in Texas, and a fast run through the Seven Years' War (Braddock, the Acadian expulsion, Louisbourg, Quebec) to the loss of New France in 1763.
"Robert Cavalier de La Salle was 25 when he saw Canada for the first time"
TodayLa Salle was born on 22 November 1643 and reached Canada in 1667, so he was 23. A small slip.
"But now, well, those 400 Dutch rifles tipped the balance."
TodayDutch guns mattered, but the Huron (Wendat) collapse of 1649 had deeper causes. Smallpox and other epidemics in 1634–40 killed about half the Wendat. Christian and traditionalist Wendat factions had also split. Historians since Bruce Trigger (The Children of Aataentsic, 1976) have made this point. Gunfire alone did not decide the war.
Why it was believedThe "Beaver Wars" story, in which Iroquois firepower crushed the Huron, was the standard textbook account from Parkman to the mid-20th century.
"The Jesuit, Monseigneur de Laval, who was to emerge the winner, consecrated a bishop."
TodayFrançois de Laval was not a Jesuit. He was a secular priest, educated by the Jesuits and backed by them. Rome made him vicar apostolic and titular bishop of Petraea in 1658, and bishop of Quebec in 1674. The episode does get the rivalry right: the Archbishop of Rouen's Sulpician vicar-general, Gabriel de Queylus, against Rome's appointee.
"Monsieur, with your permission, I would present the brothers Marquette and Joliet."
TodayJacques Marquette (a Jesuit priest) and Louis Jolliet (a layman, a former seminarian) were not brothers, either by birth or in a religious order. Their Mississippi voyage was in 1673, not before La Salle's 1669 expedition. The episode never says that they reached the Mississippi nine years before La Salle. ("Brothers" may be a dubbing slip for Père/Father.)
"Listen, the Abbé Jolier has decided to go on all the way to Lake Erie."
TodayIn 1669 it was the Sulpicians Dollier de Casson and Galinée who decided to follow Jolliet's route west by Lake Erie. Jolliet was not an abbé. This is probably a dub or transcription mix-up of the names.
"Alone, exhausted, and with no food in a hostile land 2,000 kilometers from home."
TodayNobody knows where La Salle was between leaving the Sulpicians in 1669 and 1671. The claim that he spent two heroic years alone, or reached the Ohio, comes from a doubtful anonymous memoir. In 1671 Nicolas Perrot reportedly met him on the Ottawa River hunting with a party of Iroquois, so he was not alone.
Why it was believedFrancis Parkman's romantic biography (1869) and later popular accounts filled the gap with heroics.
"The Jesuits wanted credit for most of the big discoveries being made, and that's why."
TodayThe Jesuits plotting against La Salle comes mainly from La Salle's own letters, which often blamed enemies for his failures. Colbert did distrust Jesuit influence, and the Jesuits did oppose La Salle's fur-trade monopoly. But modern biographers such as Céline Dupré (Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 1966) treat the plot story with caution. The show presents one side of a feud as fact.
Why it was believedParkman's strongly anti-Jesuit telling shaped popular accounts of La Salle for a century.
"In a word, returning to Creve Coeur on January 25, 1681,"
TodayThe expedition down the Illinois and Mississippi left in December 1681 and January 1682. It reached the Mississippi on 6 February 1682 and the Gulf in early April. La Salle claimed Louisiana on 9 April 1682.
"He has under his command a certain ship's captain, who was to be no help at all, Captain Beaujeu."
TodayLa Salle and Beaujeu did quarrel bitterly. However, the 1684–85 expedition overshot the Mississippi mainly because of La Salle's own mistakes: a wrong longitude for the river's mouth and wrong assumptions about the Gulf currents. Robert Weddle (The French Thorn, 1991) and other historians blame La Salle at least as much as Beaujeu. Even the episode's dialogue has La Salle steering west.
Why it was believedThe heroic-La Salle story, based on his own letters and Parkman, needed a villain.
"Once again, de la Salle missed it, but one year after his departure and after endless searching,"
TodayThe fleet left France in August 1684 and landed in Matagorda Bay, Texas, in February 1685, about six months later. Most of the "endless searching" came after the landing, from Fort Saint-Louis in 1685–87.
"Rule 1687, Robert de La Salle is assassinated together with two of his men, by one of his own bandits, said."
TodayOn 19 March 1687 Pierre Duhaut shot La Salle in an ambush near the Trinity River, with the surgeon Liotot as his accomplice. La Salle was killed alone. His nephew Moranget, his servant Saget and the Shawnee hunter Nika had been murdered a few days earlier. ("said" is probably a mishearing of "Duhaut".)
"You realize, one-third of the USA territory today was controlled by France?"
TodayFrance claimed the Mississippi basin, roughly a third of the lower 48 states. It controlled only a few forts, missions and trading posts, and a few thousand colonists lived there. The land was held and governed by Native nations: Illinois, Osage, Chickasaw, Natchez, Choctaw, Sioux and many others. The closing line, "by the sheer willpower of the Cavalier de La Salle, it was French", repeats this "empty continent" framing.
Why it was believedMaps coloured by European claims were the normal way to teach colonial North America.
"In the English offensive in Arcadia, the inhabitants were deported or shot."
TodayAcadia had been British Nova Scotia since 1713, so this was not an offensive into French territory. From 1755 the British deported Acadians who refused an unconditional oath of loyalty: about 11,000–12,000 people up to 1764, and thousands died of disease or at sea. Some were killed in raids, but the policy was deportation and burning farms, not shooting. "Great disturbance" translates le Grand Dérangement, usually called the Great Upheaval.
"the English send their 30,000 soldiers to meet the French's 300."
TodayBy 1758 the British had about 20,000+ regulars and a similar number of colonial provincials in North America. The French had about 6,800 regulars (troupes de terre and troupes de la marine), plus Canadian militia and Native allies, together well over 10,000. "300" is absurd and may be a dubbing error for 3,000 or for regiments. The British advantage was real but nothing like 100 to 1.
The episode surveys the 13 colonies in the mid-1700s: Georgia's founding, population growth, slavery, the Great Awakening and the gap between planters, farmers and frontiersmen. Benjamin Franklin links the story, from the Albany Congress (1754) and his lightning experiments to British trade laws, the Stamp Act, the Boston Tea Party, the Continental Congress and the Minutemen. It ends with the ride to Lexington and Concord in April 1775.
"It was in 1733 that General Oglethorpe, an idealist, landed there with about a hundred men who'd been in debtor's prison."
TodayOglethorpe did first propose Georgia as a refuge for imprisoned debtors. But the roughly 114 settlers on the Anne (who landed in February 1733) were chosen from the "worthy poor", and none are known to have come out of debtors' prison. Few, if any, came later either. The colony was also meant as a military buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe was not yet a general in 1733. The Jews (July 1733), the Salzburger Lutherans (1734) and the Highland Scots (1736) arrived on later ships.
Why it was believedOglethorpe's prison-reform work and his early pamphlets made "the debtors' colony" a fixture of school textbooks. Georgia historians (e.g. Albert Saye, Betty Wood) had shown otherwise by the 1970s–80s.
"So 300,000 blacks in the South, who it's understood are supposed to be freed after six or seven years, but things didn't always work out that way."
TodayBy the mid-1700s, Africans in the colonies were held in lifelong, hereditary slavery. Virginia made slave status pass through the mother in 1662 and codified slavery in its 1705 slave code, and the other colonies did the same. Terms of 4–7 years applied to indentured servants, who were mostly European. Some early Africans in 1620s–40s Virginia did have servant status, but by 1750 none were "supposed to be freed". Presenting slavery as a broken indenture badly minimises it. (The figure of about 300,000 Black people, mostly in the South, is about right for around 1760.)
"for doing the very hard work on the cotton and tobacco plantations"
TodayIn the colonial South, enslaved people grew tobacco (Chesapeake), rice and indigo (Carolina/Georgia). Cotton became a major plantation crop only after Eli Whitney's gin (1793).
"because the Indians, they're fanatics for liberty"
TodayThe idea that Native Americans "would not be enslaved" is a myth. Carolina ran a huge Indian slave trade: Alan Gallay (2002) estimates that 24,000–51,000 Native people were captured and sold between 1670 and 1715, many shipped to the Caribbean. The colonies turned to Africans because of epidemics, wars like the Yamasee War (1715) that ended the trade, Native captives escaping easily into familiar country, and a growing Atlantic supply. The flip side of the line, that Africans were "docile", is false too: there were revolts such as New York in 1712 and Stono in 1739.
Why it was believedThe romantic "noble, freedom-loving Indian" image and older planter apologetics. Native slavery was studied in the 1910s (Lauber, 1913) but left out of popular histories until Gallay (2002) and Reséndez (2016).
"This would-be subject of His Majesty George III dumped him to Boston Harbor to a value of £12,000 sterling."
TodayThe 342 chests destroyed on 16 December 1773 were valued by the East India Company at about £9,659, usually rounded to "about £10,000".
"Paul, you will be responsible for training them. We count on you."
TodayPaul Revere was the Boston committees' express rider and an engraver. He did not train the Minutemen. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress organised them in late 1774, and the town militias elected their own officers to drill them.
The episode follows the American Revolutionary War from Ticonderoga and Washington's appointment through the Declaration of Independence, the loss of New York, Trenton and Princeton, Saratoga and the French alliance, Valley Forge, Benedict Arnold's treason, and the French-American victory at Yorktown. It closes with the Treaty of Paris (1783) and Washington's inauguration (1789).
"oh no a third of the population remained indifferent to their war and another third"
TodayThe "one third patriot, one third loyalist, one third neutral" formula comes from a John Adams letter, but there he was talking about American attitudes to the French Revolution. Paul H. Smith (1968) estimated Loyalists at about 19–20% of the white population, and most historians now put them at 15–20%.
Why it was believedThe neat "thirds" was repeated in textbooks for generations as Adams's verdict on the Revolution.
"And don't forget the Battle of Bunker Hill. Our patriots fought like heroes there."
TodayCongress chose Washington as commander-in-chief on 15 June 1775, two days before Bunker Hill (17 June). The news of the battle reached Philadelphia after he had been appointed, so it could not have been an argument for appointing him.
"To this I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor."
TodayThat phrase closes the Declaration of Independence (July 1776). Washington's acceptance (16 June 1775) is correctly paraphrased in the line before ("I do not think myself equal to the command"). He also refused a salary.
"Richard Henry Lee will now read an article which he helped to frame."
TodayLee moved the resolution for independence (7 June 1776), but the Declaration ("We hold these truths...") was drafted by Thomas Jefferson for the Committee of Five (Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Livingston, Sherman). Lee was not on that committee and had gone home to Virginia when it was adopted.
"Providence arranged things very well, delaying General Howe's advance by two days."
TodayThis is the story of Mary Lindley Murray (Murray Hill, 15 September 1776), who supposedly delayed Howe with cake and wine while Putnam's troops escaped. Even the legend says hours, not days. Historians think Howe was halted anyway, waiting for his second wave of troops, and treat the story as embellished folklore.
Why it was believedIt was told in 19th-century histories and memorials, and it is a charming, patriotic anecdote.
"James, would you bring me a lettuce leaf and one of those new fruits from the colonies?"
TodayThe Earl of Sandwich did not invent the sandwich during the war. "Sandwich" as a food is already recorded in Edward Gibbon's journal in 1762, and the gambling-table anecdote was printed in 1765. The tomato came from Mexico via Spain, not from Britain's colonies, and was little eaten in Britain in the 1770s. Sandwich (First Lord of the Admiralty) and Germain (Colonial Secretary) are correctly identified.
"I shall leave my 12,000 men, plus our loyalists, as well as Indians,"
TodayBurgoyne set out in June 1777 with about 7,000 regulars (roughly 3,700 British and 3,000 German). With Canadians, Loyalists and about 400–500 Native allies, he had roughly 8,000–9,500 men in all.
"General Gates, General Arnold, I appreciate your extreme generosity."
TodayBenedict Arnold was not at the surrender on 17 October 1777. He had been badly wounded in the leg at Bemis Heights (7 October), was recovering in Albany, and had quarrelled with Gates. Gates accepted the surrender alone.
"Monmouth was a complete rout, mostly because of the cowardice of General Lee."
TodayMonmouth (28 June 1778) was tactically a draw. Lee's advance guard fell back in confusion, Washington rallied the army, the two sides fought to a standstill, and the British withdrew overnight. Lee was court-martialled for disobeying orders, an "unnecessary, disorderly" retreat and disrespect to Washington, not for cowardice. Many historians think he was treated unfairly (e.g. Lender & Stone, 2016).
Why it was believedWashington-centred histories cast Lee as the villain of the day, and his later disgrace (and the discovery in 1858 that he gave the British a plan while a prisoner) fixed that image.
The episode follows the Atlantic slave trade ("ebony wood" was the traders' euphemism for captives) from an African kingdom where a king's raiders capture whole villages and his trade minister bargains with a European captain, through the Middle Passage, to a slave auction and plantation in the Americas. A family plans to escape north, and the episode closes with the abolition of the trade and an estimate of how many Africans were deported.
No major errors in this episode. 2 minor slips hidden.
"You will purchase all you've got of rubber, an ivory, pepper,"
TodayIvory and pepper (melegueta, the "grains of paradise" of the Grain Coast) were real West African exports. Rubber became a significant African export only in the late 19th century. The French original probably said gomme (gum arabic, a major Senegal export), which the dub translated as "rubber".
"She's with Mokhtar in a beautiful coffee plantation."
TodayThe escape plan ("up north, in those states, there's no slaves") puts the story in the United States, where coffee was never a plantation crop. US plantations grew tobacco, rice, sugar and, after 1793, cotton. Coffee plantations worked by enslaved people were in Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Jamaica and above all Brazil. (The setting is only implied, so this may be a deliberate composite.)
The episode follows the young United States from about 1790 to 1850. It covers Daniel Boone's hunting trips into Kentucky, the Louisiana Purchase (shown as a comic haggle), new states joining the Union, slavery in the South, Indian removal, Texas and the Alamo, the Mexican War and a wagon train on the Oregon Trail. It is notably frank about slavery and broken treaties, and it points to slavery as a cause of the Texas conflict. But it mixes up some geography and chronology, and it uses the "ecological Indian" stereotype.
"Baltimore, Boston, Charleston with just a few thousand."
TodayThe 1790 census counted Boston at about 18,300, Charleston at about 16,400 and Baltimore at about 13,500. These were substantial towns, not places of "a few thousand". (The show's New York figure of 33,000 matches the 1790 census, and 46,000 is roughly right for Philadelphia with its suburbs.)
"White man has to understand. Massacring animals is wrong way. Animals belong to all people, like the sky and the clouds and the wind on the prairie."
TodayThe Shawnee who caught Boone and John Stewart in December 1769 (led by "Captain Will") took their skins and told them to leave because Kentucky was Shawnee and Cherokee hunting ground. It was a claim of territory, not a belief that animals belonged to everyone. The Shawnee were themselves deeply involved in the commercial deerskin trade. The words echo the invented "Chief Seattle" speech, which was largely written by Ted Perry in 1971. Shepard Krech's The Ecological Indian (1999) brought wide criticism of the "ecological Indian" stereotype.
"Louisiana was purchased for 11 million dollars and was well worth it."
TodayFrance was paid 60 million francs (about $11.25 million), and the US also took on about $3.75 million of its citizens' claims against France, so the total was about $15 million. More importantly, the US bought France's imperial claim, not land empty of owners. Robert Lee ("Accounting for Conquest", Journal of American History, 2017) calculated that the United States later spent at least $2.6 billion (nominal) on 222 land cessions from Native nations within the territory. The "bargain" framing of the purchase price looks very different now.
"Population soared because new immigrants came in every day."
TodayBetween 1800 and about 1830, US population growth came overwhelmingly from natural increase: very high birth rates. Immigration was low during the Napoleonic Wars and averaged only around 10,000 a year until the 1820s. Mass immigration began in the 1830s and 1840s.
Why it was believedThe "nation of immigrants" story projected the later mass migrations (Irish and German in the 1840s and 1850s) back onto the early republic.
"If you want Fort Almond, take it."
Today"Fort Almond" is a mishearing of the Alamo. The "come and take it" defiance belongs to the Battle of Gonzales (October 1835), where the slogan was on the Texans' cannon flag. At the Alamo, Travis's famous letter ended "Victory or Death", and Santa Anna offered no terms.
"It's held out for 1,500 Mexicans paid with their lives at the Alamo."
TodayMost Alamo historians put Mexican losses at about 400–600 killed and wounded in all, with perhaps 60–200 dead. Santa Anna reported 70 killed and 300 wounded. The figure of 1,500 or more dead comes from early Texan claims.
Why it was believedInflated Texan casualty figures from 1836 were repeated in Alamo legend, in school texts and in films such as Disney's Davy Crockett (1955) and John Wayne's The Alamo (1960).
"Mexico, Utah, California joined the Union."
TodayOnly California became a state in 1850. New Mexico and Utah were organised as territories in the Compromise of 1850. Utah became a state in 1896 and New Mexico in 1912.
"Only one region remained unexplored, the Oregon Territory."
TodayOregon was hardly unexplored. Lewis and Clark had reached it in 1805. The fur post at Astoria was founded in 1811, and the Hudson's Bay Company ran Fort Vancouver from 1825. Its Native peoples (Chinook, Kalapuya, Cayuse, Nez Perce and others) had of course always known it. The episode's order is also wrong: large-scale emigration on the Oregon Trail began in 1843, before the Mexican War (1846–48). Britain and the US jointly occupied Oregon until the Oregon Treaty of 1846.
The episode tells Bolívar's life as a flashback from his death at Santa Marta in 1830: his education under Simón Rodríguez, his brief marriage and his time in Paris, and the first Venezuelan republic under Miranda and its collapse. It then follows the Admirable Campaign, the war against Boves, help from Haiti, the Congress of Angostura and the crossing of the Andes. It ends with the founding of Gran Colombia and Bolivia, the meeting with San Martín, the attempt on his life and his bitter end as the union breaks apart.
No major errors in this episode. 6 minor slips hidden.
"The Congress declares unanimously the Republic of Venezuela free and independent."
TodayThe vote of 5 July 1811 was not unanimous. Most accounts give 40 deputies for. At least one, the priest Manuel Vicente Maya, voted against, and some counts give more dissenters.
"Wellington inflicted a stinging defeat on the French at Waterloo,"
TodayThe scene is set in 1813–14, after Bolívar entered Caracas (August 1813). Waterloo was in June 1815. The defeat that drove the French out of Spain was Vitoria (21 June 1813), and Ferdinand VII returned to Spain in March 1814.
"and creoles, whose frustrations and misery he knew how to play on."
TodayBoves's llaneros ("Leoneros" is a mishearing) were mostly pardos (people of mixed African, European and Indigenous descent), free Black people and enslaved people, with some Indigenous people. "Creoles" (criollos) meant American-born whites, the class Boves turned his followers against, as his own line "kill the whites" shows. This may be a translation slip.
"The traitor who organized this plot, General Santander, is condemned to death."
TodaySantander was condemned to death after the attempt of 25 September 1828, and Bolívar commuted the sentence to exile, as the episode shows. But Santander's role is disputed. He knew a conspiracy was being planned and did not report it. Whether he organised it was never proven, and the trial was hasty and political.
Why it was believedThe Bolivarian version of events, and the verdict itself, made Santander the villain in popular accounts.
"Apparently I'm not needed. I relinquish all this power that you so covet."
TodayThe episode shows Bolívar as the only selfless man among greedy rivals. In fact he wanted power too. He wrote the 1826 Bolivian constitution with a president for life, and he ruled Gran Colombia as dictator from August 1828 under his Organic Decree. Fear of that dictatorship, and of rumoured plans for a monarchy, drove much of the opposition, including the September 1828 plot. Historians since Salvador de Madariaga (1951) and John Lynch (Simón Bolívar: A Life, 2006) describe a great but authoritarian leader.
Why it was believedAn official cult of Bolívar in Venezuela and Colombia shaped schoolbooks and popular biographies.
"When the man who wanted to unite all of Latin America died at 47, the region had no fewer than 16 countries."
TodayThe age is right: born 24 July 1783, died 17 December 1830. But in 1830 Latin America had about 13 independent states: Mexico, the Central American Federation, Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, the United Provinces (Argentina), Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Haiti. Sixteen or more came only after the Central American Federation broke up (1838–41) and the Dominican Republic was founded (1844).
The episode follows a group of men from the East and from Oregon who join the California Gold Rush of 1848–49. It shows San Francisco emptying and then booming, the sea and overland routes west, panning and claims, inflated prices, gambling, shootings and claim-jumpers. It ends with California joining the Union in 1850 and a look ahead to the Civil War.
No major errors in this episode. 1 minor slip hidden.
"There were only 15 women present."
TodayWomen were scarce but not that scarce. About 700 women arrived by sea in 1849, out of roughly 40,000 sea-borne arrivals, and San Francisco had grown to about 25,000 people by the end of that year. The 1850 census found women were about 8% of California's non-Native population. The sentence before this one is cut off in the transcript ("out of a total population in San Francisco"), so the dub may have meant something narrower, such as women at one gathering.
The episode (in French) says outright that Native Americans were treated unjustly and nearly wiped out. It goes from Lewis and Clark through Jackson's removal of the Cherokee, Manifest Destiny and Frémont to the Apache wars (Cochise, Geronimo) and the Plains wars: Sand Creek, the Bozeman Trail and Fetterman, Fort Laramie 1868, the bison slaughter, Little Bighorn, the deaths of Crazy Horse and others, and Chief Joseph. It ends with Native peoples confined to reservations and about 250,000 remaining. It is much more honest than the "cowboys and Indians" myths of its time, but some details are wrong.
"C'était hier ou plus avant-hier et en ce milieu du XVIIIe siècle, alors que les États-Unis ont déjà 23 millions d'habitants" [It was yesterday, or rather the day before, in the middle of the 18th century, when the United States already had 23 million inhabitants]
TodayThe figures (23 million Americans, France with about 36 million) are for the 1850 census, the middle of the 19th century. This may be a speech-recognition slip for "XIXe".
"Manhattan, Brooklyn, ce sont quelques maisons de campagne difficiles d'accès." [Manhattan, Brooklyn are a few hard-to-reach country houses.]
TodayIn 1850 Brooklyn was a city of about 97,000 people, one of the largest in the US, linked to Manhattan by frequent ferries. Upper Manhattan (Harlem) was indeed still rural.
"Chicago a environ 10 000 habitants." [Chicago has about 10,000 inhabitants.]
TodayThe 1850 census counted about 30,000 people in Chicago. The 10,000 figure belongs to the mid-1840s.
"Ces terres sont immenses, mais elles sont inhabitables et inexploitables, président Jefferson." [These lands are immense, but they are uninhabitable and unusable, President Jefferson.]
TodayLewis and Clark (who left in May 1804) reported rich, game-filled country. The "Great American Desert" label came later, from Zebulon Pike (1810) and Stephen Long's expedition (1820). Jefferson did already favour moving eastern Native peoples west of the Mississippi from 1803.
"Emmenez-les de l'autre côté du Mississippi, dans le désert de l'Oklahoma." [Take them across the Mississippi, into the Oklahoma desert.]
TodayIndian Territory (eastern Oklahoma), where the Five Tribes were sent, is mostly wooded, well-watered and farmable. The Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek rebuilt farms and plantations there. It was the forced removal that was disastrous, not the land being desert.
Why it was believedThe 19th-century idea of a "Great American Desert" west of the Mississippi lasted a long time in popular history.
"ils avaient 30 moulins, 10 siries, 60 échoppes de charrons, 300 charrues, 700 métiers attissés." [they had 30 mills, 10 sawmills, 60 wheelwright shops, 300 ploughs, 700 looms.]
TodayThe Cherokee census of 1825–26 counted 31 gristmills, 10 sawmills, 62 blacksmith shops, 762 looms, 22,000 cattle, about 7,600 horses and 46,000 pigs, all close to what the show says. But it counted about 2,900 ploughs, not 300. The same census also counted about 1,300 enslaved Black people held by Cherokee owners, which the show leaves out.
"30 000 hommes seront déportés." [30,000 people will be deported.]
TodayAbout 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly removed in 1838–39, and roughly 4,000 died. Counting all Five Tribes, about 60,000 people were removed in the 1830s. So 30,000 fits neither the Cherokee alone (as the context suggests) nor the total.
"Voilà ce qu'écrivait en 1846 un dénommé John O'Sullivan." [That is what a certain John O'Sullivan wrote in 1846.]
TodayJohn L. O'Sullivan used "manifest destiny" in 1845, in the July–August Democratic Review ("Annexation") and in the New York Morning News on 27 December 1845. The quotation itself is accurate.
"Je me fais fort de battre les sioux à plate couture et traverser le pays de long..." [I'm confident I can thrash the Sioux and cross the country from end to end...]
TodayThis is the famous Fetterman boast ("Give me eighty men and I'll ride through the whole Sioux nation"). Shannon Smith's Give Me Eighty Men (2008) showed it rests on later, hostile testimony, mostly from Carrington's circle shifting the blame. The image of Fetterman as an arrogant hothead who disobeyed orders is now widely doubted, though it is still uncertain why he crossed Lodge Trail Ridge.
"Qu'on dépêche à leur secours 30 cavaliers épaulés par 150 fantassins !" [Send 30 cavalry supported by 150 infantry to their aid!]
TodayOn 21 December 1866 Fetterman led 81 men in all (about 49 infantry, 27 cavalry, 2 civilians and 3 officers), and all of them were killed. ("Fort Kenny" in the transcript is Fort Phil Kearny.)
"Trois millions de bêtes seront abattues chaque année." [Three million animals will be slaughtered every year.]
TodayAbout 3 to 3.5 million bison were killed on the southern plains in all of 1872–74 (Dodge's and Hornaday's estimates), so roughly 1 to 1.5 million a year. The northern herd was destroyed later, in 1880–83. The scale of the slaughter is not exaggerated, but the yearly rate is.
"Le gouvernement a décidé de construire une voie ferrée entre les Big Horn et les Black Hills, messieurs." [The government has decided to build a railway between the Big Horns and the Black Hills, gentlemen.]
TodayWhat triggered the 1876 war was gold. Custer's 1874 expedition reported gold in the Black Hills, miners poured in against the 1868 treaty, and the Allison Commission (1875) tried to buy the Hills. The Northern Pacific's surveys along the Yellowstone (1873) also caused fighting, but they did not run between the Big Horns and the Black Hills.
"D'autres troupes partent à leur tour de Fort Lincoln et sous le commandement du général Crook." [Other troops leave in turn from Fort Lincoln under the command of General Crook.]
TodayThe 1876 campaign had three columns. Gibbon came from Fort Ellis (correct). Terry, with Custer's 7th Cavalry, came from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Crook came from Fort Fetterman in Wyoming. The line merges the last two, though the dub may have dropped a clause.
"Major Bentin, prenez-vous aussi trois compagnies." [Major Benteen, you also take three companies.]
TodayFrederick Benteen was a captain (Reno was the only major). He was sent scouting to the left (south-west) with three companies, not held as a reserve. Custer did take five companies, and Reno three.
"Buffalo Bill obtiendra leur libération pour qu'ils puissent participer à son spectacle." [Buffalo Bill will obtain their release so they could take part in his show.]
TodaySitting Bull spent 1877–81 in Canada. He surrendered in July 1881 and was held as a prisoner of war at Fort Randall until May 1883. He was released to Standing Rock before he had anything to do with Cody. In 1885 the government let him tour with Buffalo Bill's Wild West for about four months. Gall surrendered in 1881 and settled at Standing Rock, and there is no record of him being imprisoned. His reported refusal to be "exhibited" fits the sources.
"Un génie militaire qui, pour fuir la réserve, fait faire au sien homme, femme et enfant une retraite de 2700 kilomètres en 100 jours." [A military genius who, to escape the reservation, led his men, women and children on a 2,700-kilometre retreat in 100 days.]
TodayChief Joseph was mainly a civil and camp leader during the 1877 flight. The fighting was led mostly by Looking Glass, Joseph's brother Ollokot, White Bird, Toohoolhoolzote and Lean Elk (Poker Joe). The trek is usually given as about 1,170 miles (about 1,900 km) over about 110 days (June to 5 October 1877), though some accounts give longer distances.
Why it was believedNewspapers and army officers in 1877 made Joseph the "Red Napoleon" because he was the spokesman at the surrender, and his "I will fight no more forever" speech fixed that image in popular history.
The episode follows an escaped slave, Nat, who finds refuge in Pennsylvania and then fights in the Civil War. Around his story it covers Lincoln's election, secession, Fort Sumter, the Monitor and the Merrimack, Appomattox, Lincoln's assassination and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It then surveys late-19th-century America: mass immigration, the Homestead Act, railroad land grants, robber barons, child labour, unions, imperialism, inventions, and a closing tribute to the United States as a "beacon for brotherhood".
"Yes, and I tell you that the institution of slavery is evil in itself,"
TodayLincoln did call slavery a "monstrous injustice", but in 1858–60 his platform was to stop slavery from spreading, not to abolish it in the states where it existed. In the 1858 debates he also said he did not favour political or social equality between the races. The scene, and the line "Our Constitution guarantees liberty and justice for all", makes him sound like a straightforward abolitionist. ("Liberty and justice for all" comes from the 1892 Pledge of Allegiance, not the Constitution, which then protected slavery.)
Why it was believedThe "Great Emancipator" image of Lincoln dominated school and popular history.
"This is an anti-slave state."
TodayBeing in a free state did not protect a fugitive. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (and Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842), slaveholders could recapture escaped people anywhere in the North with federal help, and anyone who hid them could be fined and jailed. That is why the Underground Railroad led on to Canada. Pennsylvanians who resisted, as at Christiana in 1851, were prosecuted for treason. The homeowner's defiance is admirable, but it had no legal force.
"A few weeks later, all the other slave states followed except for Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland."
TodaySix more Deep South states seceded by 1 February 1861. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina left only after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops (April–May 1861). Delaware, a fourth slave state, also stayed in the Union, as did West Virginia, which split from Virginia.
"Then I will enlist, too. I will fight to defend our liberty."
TodayBlack men were turned away from the Union Army in 1861. They could enlist only from the second half of 1862, and in large numbers only after the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863), in segregated United States Colored Troops regiments under white officers. A formerly enslaved sergeant commanding white soldiers ("It's the Negro slave commanding us now") would not have happened. Black soldiers also got lower pay until 1864.
"No, they were just too far outnumbered."
TodayThis is the "Lost Cause" explanation: a flawless Lee beaten only by numbers. Historians point to Lee's own costly choices (Malvern Hill, Pickett's Charge), the Confederacy's strategic and economic weaknesses, desertion, enslaved people fleeing to Union lines, and Union generalship by 1864–65. Numbers mattered, but they were not the only reason.
Why it was believedLost Cause writers (Jubal Early and others) built Lee's image after 1865, and it ruled popular history for a century. Critiques such as Connelly's The Marble Man (1977) and Nolan's Lee Considered (1991) were only beginning to spread.
"Forces may retain their weapons and all men keep their horses."
TodayAt Appomattox (9 April 1865) Confederate soldiers stacked and surrendered their arms. Only officers kept their side-arms, and men who owned their horses or mules could take them home. The generous spirit of the terms is shown correctly.
"There were 600,000 dead, 400,000 wounded."
TodayThe long-standing figure of about 620,000 deaths comes from Fox and Livermore's 19th-century counts. In 2011 J. David Hacker used census data to estimate about 750,000 deaths (range 620,000–850,000), and this is now widely accepted. Wounded are usually put at about 475,000 or more.
"But that was child's play compared to the 6,000 hectares granted to the railroads for every kilometer of rail lane."
TodayThe Pacific Railway Acts gave 10 sections per mile of track (1862), doubled to 20 in 1864: about 3,200 ha per km. Only the Northern Pacific, in the territories, got 40 sections per mile (about 6,400 ha per km). The total of about 53 million ha in federal grants, "the size of France", is about right.
"At the end of this 19th century, railroad tracks would stretch across the continent 400,000 kilometers."
TodayIn 1900 the US had about 193,000 miles (about 310,000 km) of track. The network peaked at about 254,000 miles (about 409,000 km) in 1916.
"One percent of the population would hold seven-eighths of the country's wealth."
TodayThe famous figure comes from Charles B. Spahr (1896), who said that 1% of families held more than half the wealth, while seven-eighths of families held only one-eighth. Modern estimates (Lindert and others) put the top 1%'s share at roughly 25–45% around 1890–1910. The inequality was huge, but not 7/8.
"Thomas Edison was to change everyday life for most people, inventing the"
TodayThe list continues "telegraph, the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, movies". Edison did not invent the telegraph. Morse and Vail (1837–44), and Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain, did. Edison improved it (for example the quadruplex, 1874). He invented the phonograph (1877). He developed a practical incandescent bulb (1879) at the same time as Joseph Swan. Motion pictures came from his lab (Dickson's Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, 1891–93) alongside the Lumières and others.
"Opened in 1813 the Brooklyn Bridge, the massive suspension bridge that stayed up."
TodayThe Brooklyn Bridge opened on 24 May 1883. This may be a speech-recognition error.
"And New York is already the biggest city in the world."
TodayAround 1900, London (about 6.5 million in Greater London) was clearly the world's largest city. New York, even after it merged with Brooklyn in 1898, had about 3.4 million. New York only overtook London around 1925.