Fishermen may keep quiet about good fishing grounds for commercial reasons. Apparently Basque fishermen visited Greenland and Newfoundland shortly after 1492 and kept fairly quiet about it and it has been suggested that they went there before 1492, but there's no evidence for them being there before 1492, according to Wikipedia.
There was that confusing moment in grade school history class where they casually stated that the pilgrims found a translator among the Indians. Moving on.
Umm... How tf did the Indians have someone who already spoke English? Jamestown isn't exactly a short walk, even if it has been a dozen years.
Yeah because fisherman had already been trading with them. But that's 1620, not 1491. It's reasonable to think fisherman had been leveraging this information a century after it was known.
The fault is in your teachers pretending that the pilgrims discovered jack-all. They meant to be farmers, but did not pack shovels. They were a grumpy religious splinter group that couldn't get along with others, not amazing explorers of the "New World".
It's often mockingly said that they landed when they ran out of beer, which is true, but not because of frustrated frat bro reasons - they ran out of drinking water, more generally. And small beer was more nutritious than intoxicating.
