EARLY OCEANBORNE EXPLORATION 400 bc 1500 ad

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EARLY OCEAN-BORNEEXPLORATION400 bc - 1500
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The Mediterranean WorldDiscovers the
ArcticPytheas of Massalia - 330 bc
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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 Massilass 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
communitys 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 animals 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.
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Europe Crosses the AtlanticBrendan the Irish
Legend - 550Erik the Red - 982Davis and the
Greenland Mystery - 1585
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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 glaciers 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, Cabots real last
name was Caboti and he was an Italien.
Elizabeths 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
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Polynesians Cross the PacificVikings of the
Sunrise - 400 adAotea is the canoe,Turi is
the chief,Te Roku-o-whiti is the paddle.
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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.
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Journey of the Malayo-Polynesian Language Family
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Asia Discovers North AmericaEastward to Fusang
- 499
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Northern Europe Discovers North America Lief
(the lucky) Erikson - 1000 John (giovanni)
Cabot(o) - 1497
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sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred
andninety-two
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Drakes Mission In the mid-
to late 1500s, Sir Francis Drake was given a
buccaneers 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, Drakes 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 days work for an
true British hero.
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Better the mid-latitude is correct on the
chart, that of British Columbia
Its a fake the central latitude is about that
of Northern California
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BAIL OUT NOW
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