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EARLY OCEAN-BORNE EXPLORATION 400 bc - 1500 ad. The Mediterranean World Discovers the Arctic Pytheas of Massalia - 330 bc.
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The Mediterranean WorldDiscovers the ArcticPytheas of Massalia - 330 bc
In 600 BC, people from a small Asia Minor Greek state, Phocaea, sailed west the length of the Med and founded Massila, now Marseilles, at the river Rhone mouth. The Phocaeans were entrepeneurs and the major competitors of the Phoenicians, Semites from Lebanon who had founded Carthage some 200 years before. The Phocaeans meant to interdict the inland river trade routes that fostered commerce between Egypt, Crete and Mycenae and communities to the northwest along the Atllantic Ocean. A Phocaean mathematician, Pytheas, had correctly identified the moon as controlling tides and worked out an accurate way to determine relative latitudes. When Massilas’s rulers decided to explore northern markets, he was chosen as expedition leader because of his scientific approach and ability to produce charts. The voyage was documented in Pytheas’ book The Oceans of which fragments remain. The community’s motivation was commercial. Ottar was a seafarer from Helgoland in northern Norway. Like Pytheas, he had an insatiable urge for exploration and his King, Alfred, gratified this by having Ottar explore ocean coastline to find out more about the commercially valuable horse whale, that is, walrus. These animal’s teeth were highly prized and their skins were used to make cables for ships. Local stocks were being depleted.The extent of the land and its population, if any, was unknown in Helgoland and exploration continued northward, ocean to laboard and apparently deserted land to starboard, eastward and then to the south and so discovered the major river, Dvina, populations of Fynnes and Biarmes [the names the Norse then called Russians] . As with the Phocaean voyages, exploration was driven by a government and commerce while carried out by adventurers.
Europe Crosses the AtlanticBrendan the Irish Legend - 550Erik the Red - 982Davis and the Greenland Mystery - 1585
Historians consider that Tilli [Iceland] and Greenland [Crona] may have been the stepping stones used to the New World counted after the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe Islands. From Greenland one can walk to mainland North America as Eskimos must have done in reverse. The Brendan legends, partially myths that were widespread in the middle ages, gave credit to this Sainted Irish priest for the discovery of Greenland. There is an alternative explanation, given by advocates of another, that the “crystal pillar” sighted rising from the sea and topped off with clouds was an iceberg adrift off the Greenland coast; or a glacier’s front about to become an iceberg, or whatever. Retrospective nationalism in the form of Eirikr Rau [Erik the red] , a Norse-man [read Norwegian], apparently was the founder of the first settlement on Greenland. Redheaded, of evil temper, and given to murder, he was one step ahead of the sheriff from Norway to Iceland to Greenland. Incidently one can find that Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakuson was the first to see Greenland and one Snaebjorn Galti, the first to try to colo-nize Greenland. The latter sounds half Italien to me. The English got into the act with Martin Frobisher, commissioned by Queen Elizabeth in 1578 to find a western approach to the Far East via a Northwest Passage [originally sought by John Cabot in 1497; by the way, Cabot’s real last name was Caboti and he was an Italien]. Elizabeth’s other idea was to lay hold of very large deposits of gold that Frobisher had found on the shores of Baffin Island during an earlier voyage. After two summers of mining : iron pyrite, all that glitters … John Davis visited Greenland in 1578, had the Davis Strait named after himself, and described the locals in some detail. Davis did not know what an Eskimo should look like, and did not realize that he went ashore where European colonists had been before. Consequently, his descriptions of Eskimo features were biased by intermarriages with natives; so much for amateur anthropologists
Polynesians Cross the PacificVikings of the Sunrise - 400 adAotea is the canoe,Turi is the chief,Te Roku-o-whiti is the paddle.
The Bering land bridge presents a path from Asia to North and South America. And since the ocean is there, we have these questions: Were stone age men good sailors? How well could they navigate? Island hopping could be another possible way. Is there evidence for such sea-borne immigration ? Pytheas reported that the Scots told him about Iceland. In order to do so, someone had to cross 600 miles of Gulf Stream Extension and return. In the Pacific, Easter Island was inhabited by stone age men when Europeans first saw it. The nearest inhabitable land, an island, is more than 1000 miles away and Easter Island is 2000 miles west of South America. on Easter Island appear to have come from the Marquesas or Tuamato Islands, a journey of over 1500 miles.
Northern Europe Discovers North AmericaLief (the lucky) Erikson - 1000John (giovanni) Cabot(o) - 1497
… sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred andninety-two …
Drakes Mission In the mid- to late 1500’s, Sir Francis Drake was given a buccaneer’s license by England to plunder and destroy Spanish settlements and ships in the new world. The financial backing came in secret from Queen Elizabeth I and her war council. While patrolling the west coast of New Albion (North America), Drake managed to reach the latitudes of the Gulf of Alaska. On the way south, he discovered the protected inland seaway unknown to other Europeans and clearly of economic value. His discoveries were hidden away by government order, but Drake wanted eventually to receive credit for what he found. He had two sets of charts prepared by the cartographer. In the public set, Drake’s cruise track and the features he found were displaced 600 miles to the south off what is now California. From our perspective, the geographic features are unmistakable. Drake was knighted on his return in 1580. Oh yes, he also managed to destroy the Spanish Armada in 1587 and save England from a fate worse than ?, all in a day’s work for an true British hero.
Better … the mid-latitude is correct on the chart, that of British Columbia It’s a fake … the central latitude is about that of Northern California
