excellent article

Maybe everybody already knows all of this, but I didn't. European fishing boats visiting New England as early as 1480? Tisquantum, kidnapped across the Atlantic, talking Englishmen into a trans-Atlantic venture so that he could get home, only to discover his people wiped out by disease? That is some serious post-apocalyptic science fiction there, except for the part where it actually happened in 1619.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/squanto.html?c=y&page=1