books without adding value or a new context, I should say a little bit more.
In the film about diving in unexplored underwater caves, Diving Into The Darkness, that was featured at the Anchorage International Film Festival last December, an astronaut says cave divers' explorations were much more dangerous than that of the astronauts because they were totally on their own, out of contact with the rest of the world. If they had a problem, they had to overcome it on their own.
Think about how much more that applied to the sailors of the past - especially those who went on long voyages of exploration.
"It took Western civilization* about 1500 years to discover all the oceanic islands, and it appears that Captain Cook and his lieutenants were almost the only people in all that time who took their surveying job very seriously.
The probability that an island will be found by sailors depends on its size, its distance from a home port, the number of voyages from port, the freedom of action and spirit of adventure of captains, the likelihood of ships' being driven long distances by storms, and so on. All in all, it is not surprising that the largest oceanic volcano, Iceland, was the first to be discovered, in the fourth century A.D., by the Norsemen, who lived not far to the east. They colonized the island by the ninth century and roamed the northern seas - which contain few oceanic islands.
The next phase of discovery was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Portuguese, Spanish, and other European explorers began to seek a sea route to the spice and silk of the East. Just as Columbus accidentally found the vast area of the Americas, so others sighted tiny oceanic islands or ran aground on them. In 1420 the Portuguese Zarco discovered the Madeira islands, for the last time, when storms drove him west from his exploration of the coast of Africa. A Genoese map of 1351 shows that contact had been made before - the islands are only 670 km west of Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar. The Azores, even further west, were already known to the Carthaginians, who left coins, and Arabian geographers. They were discovered for the last time in 1432, when Van den Berg was driven on the islands by a storm. Although the Azores are in three widely separated groups, all nine islands were found and some even colonized by the Portuguese within twenty-five years. . .
As the Europeans sailed farther south, further discoveries were made apparently for the first as well as the last time by man. These included the cluster of the Cape Verdes in 1456; the tiny, isolated, mid ocean islands of Ascension, in 1501, and St. Helena, in 1502. Clearly, the explorers were tracking far into the Atlantic to follow the latitudinally zoned winds. The Portuguese reached oceanic islands in the Indian Ocean soon after. Mauritius in 1505, and Reunion in 1513. All of the islands discovered to this time had several features in common. They were high volcanoes, active or dead, uninhabited, and wholly lacking gold, diamonds, or anything else offering quick profit. Some were ironbound by great cliffs but even these had a few protected anchorages and fresh water, so the islands had some use. Moreover, being high, they were visible from great distances and thus hardly hazardous to navigation.
So when Magellan entered the Pacific, in 1520, he had some knowledge of oceanic islands. We may pause to consider what else he knew and his situation. He knew about the trade winds. After beating his way through the straits that bear his name it could hardly have escaped his attention that he was in the wrong latitude to sail west. Not to mention that the known riches of the East were in the Northern Hemisphere. His ship was marginal for the voyage and his supplies were already low. Considering all these factors, his only logical course was to sail northwestward until he reached the tropics and the gentle, persistent easterlies of the trade winds. This he did.
The state of the science of navigation in Magellan's time enabled him to determine latitude at sea, but not longitude. Indeed, in those days before surveying by triangulation, no one knew longitude very well on land , either. The course being steered and speed made through the water could be measured, but wind and sea drift were always uncertain, and often hopelessly so after a series of storms. As a consequence, the longitudinal positions of ships not infrequentlywere in error by hundreds of kilometers and occasionally by more than two thousand kilometers. Not until Captain Cook's time, in the late eighteenth century, were nautical chronometers accurate enough to permit determinations of longitude. Even two centuries after Cook, positioning errors of 15 km to 30 km were common in celestial navigation. Not until the invention of electronics and artificial satellite navigation in the 1960s and 1970s did a ship at last know where it was most of the time. Then, naturally almost everything that had been discovered had to be relocated."
From H. W. Menard, Islands, Scientific American Library, 1986, (pp. 6-9)
*Reading The Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi recently also piqued my interest in this passage. And is also a reminder that there were non-European discoverers as well who are documented in Western libraries as well as the European discoverers. The book does mention this. It also mentions the plant and animal 'discoverers' that made their way to distant islands.
But I also wonder how much better we know where we are today, with the constant flood of social media misinformation?
I don't just mean if we're in the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of Power, but whether we're in a democracy, a failing state, an insane asylum, or a fascist dictatorship, or all of them at once.
You can probably get Islands at your public library. Loussac library in Anchorage doesn't have it, but they can get it from several University of Alaska libraries. [Not sure how well that library search link will hold up, but we can try.]
