Drakes Voyage to Coast of California: Nova Albion (1579)

The journey of Francis Drake up the Pacific Coast in 1579, artist's impression.

After looting the Cacafuego, Drake turned north, hoping to meet another Spanish treasure ship coming south on its return from Manila to Acapulco. Although he failed to find a treasure ship, Drake reputedly sailed as far north as the 38th parallel, landing on the coast of California on 17 June 1579. He found a good port, landed, repaired and restocked his vessels, then stayed for a time, keeping friendly relations with the Coast Miwok natives. He claimed the land in the name of the Holy Trinity for the English Crown, called Nova Albion—Latin for "New Britain". Assertions that he left some of his men behind as an embryo "colony" are founded on the reduced number who were with him in the Moluccas.

Drake's landing in California, engraving published 1590 by Theodor de Bry.

The precise location of the port was carefully guarded to keep it secret from the Spaniards, and several of Drake's maps may have been altered to this end. All first-hand records from the voyage, including logs, paintings and charts, were lost when Whitehall Palace burned in 1698. A bronze plaque inscribed with Drake's claim to the new lands – Drake's Plate of Brass – fitting the description in his account, was discovered in Marin County, California but was later declared a hoax. Now a National Historic Landmark, the officially recognized location of Drake's New Albion is Drakes Bay, California.

Ancient Navigators: Sir Francis Drake

Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era. Elizabeth I of England awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581. He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the second circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580.

At age 23, Drake made his first voyage to the New World, sailing with his second cousin, Sir John Hawkins, on one of a fleet of ships owned by his relatives, the Hawkins family of Plymouth. In 1568 Drake was again with the Hawkins fleet when it was trapped by the Spaniards in the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulúa. He escaped along with Hawkins.

Following the defeat at San Juan de Ulúa, Drake vowed revenge. He made two voyages to the West Indies, in 1570 and 1571, of which little is known.

In 1572, he embarked on his first major independent enterprise. He planned an attack on the Isthmus of Panama, known to the Spanish as Tierra Firme and the English as the Spanish Main. This was the point at which the silver and gold treasure of Peru had to be landed and sent overland to the Caribbean Sea, where galleons from Spain would pick it up at the town of Nombre de Dios. Drake left Plymouth on 24 May 1572, with a crew of 73 men in two small vessels, the Pascha (70 tons) and the Swan (25 tons), to capture Nombre de Dios.

His first raid was late in July 1572. Drake and his men captured the town and its treasure. When his men noticed that Drake was bleeding profusely from a wound, they insisted on withdrawing to save his life and left the treasure. Drake stayed in the area for almost a year, raiding Spanish shipping and attempting to capture a treasure shipment.

In 1573, he joined Guillaume Le Testu, a French buccaneer, in an attack on a richly laden mule train. Drake and his party found that they had captured around 20 tons of silver and gold. They buried much of the treasure, as it was too much for their party to carry. (An account of this may have given rise to subsequent stories of pirates and buried treasure.) Wounded, Le Testu was captured and later beheaded. The small band of adventurers dragged as much gold and silver as they could carry back across some 18 miles of jungle-covered mountains to where they had left the raiding boats. When they got to the coast, the boats were gone. Drake and his men, downhearted, exhausted and hungry, had nowhere to go and the Spanish were not far behind.

At this point Drake rallied his men, buried the treasure on the beach, and built a raft to sail with two volunteers ten miles along the surf-lashed coast to where they had left the flagship. When Drake finally reached its deck, his men were alarmed at his bedraggled appearance. Fearing the worst, they asked him how the raid had gone. Drake could not resist a joke and teased them by looking downhearted. Then he laughed, pulled a necklace of Spanish gold from around his neck and said "Our voyage is made, lads!" By 9 August 1573, he had returned to Plymouth

Journal of Christopher Columbus: Cuba

 

Columbus Cuba.—The following is the narrative of the explorer's visit to Cuba during his first voyage (1492) from his Journal. The Journal was forwarded to the King and Queen, but is now lost. In his Life of Columbus, Ferdinand Columbus drew largely from the Journal, and in the subjoined abstract we have parts of the Journal word for word, with many quotations by another chronicler concerning what Columbus did and said:

christopher columbus in cuba

Sunday, Oct. 28—" I went thence in search of the island of Cuba on a south-southwest coast, making for the nearest point of it, and entered a very beautiful river without danger of sunken rocks or other impediments. All the coast was clear of dangers up to the shore. The mouth of the river was 12 brazos across, and it is wide enough for a vessel to beat in. I anchored about a lombard-shot inside." The Admiral says that " he never beheld such a beautiful place, with trees bordering the river, handsome, green, and different from ours, having fruits and flowers each one according to its nature. There are many birds, which sing very sweetly. There are a great number of palm-trees of a different kind from those in Guinea and from ours, of a middling height, the trunks without that covering, and the leaves very large, with which they thatch their houses. The country is very level." The Admiral jumped into his boat and went on shore. He came to two houses, which he believed to belong to fishermen who had fled from fear. In one of them he found a kind of dog that never barks, and in both there were nets of palm-fibre and cordage, as well as horn fish-hooks, bone harpoons, and other apparatus " for fishing, and several hearths. He believed that many people lived together in one house. He gave orders that nothing in the houses should be touched, and so it was done." The herbage was as thick as in Andalusia during April and May. He found much purslane and wild amaranth. He returned to the boat and went up the river for some distance, and he says it was great pleasure to see the bright verdure, and the birds, which he could not leave to go back. He says that this island is the most beautiful that eyes have seen, full of good harbors and deep rivers, and the sea appeared as if it never rose; for the herbage on the beach nearly reached the waves, which does not happen where the sea is rough. He says that the island is full of very beautiful mountains, although they are not very extensive as regards length, but high; and all the country is high like Sicily. It is abundantly supplied with water, as they gathered from the Indians they had taken with them from the island of Guanahani. These said by signs that there are ten great rivers, and that they cannot go round the island in twenty days. When they came near land with the ships, two canoes came out; and, when they saw the sailors get into a boat and row about to find the depth of the river where they could anchor, the canoes fled. The Indians say that in this island there are gold-mines and pearls, and the Admiral saw a likely place for them and mussel-shells, which are signs of them. He understood that large ships of the Gran Can came here, and that from here to the mainland was a voyage of ten days. The Admiral called this river and harbor San Salvador.

Reposted From Son of the South

Admiral Zheng He - China's Treasure Fleet

Over a period of almost three decades in the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent out a fleet the likes of which the world had never seen. These enormous treasure junks were commanded by the great admiral, Zheng He.  Zheng He and his armada made seven epic voyages from the port at Nanjing to India, Arabia, and even East Africa.

Zheng He's most important role in his master's service, and the reason he is remembered today, was as the commander in chief of the new treasure fleet, and as the emperor's principal envoy to the peoples of the Indian Ocean basin. The Yongle Emperor appointed him to head the massive fleet of 317 junks, crewed by over 27,000 men, that set out from Nanjing in the fall of 1405. At the age of 35, Zheng He had achieved the highest rank ever for a eunuch in Chinese history.  

The so-called "Zheng He map", probably produced in 1763.

During his career as a naval commander, Zheng He negotiated trade pacts, fought pirates, installed puppet kings, and brought back tribute for the Yongle Emperor in the form of jewels, medicines and exotic animals, among other things. He and his crew travelled and traded with not only with the city-states of what is now Indonesia and Malaysia, with Siam and India, but even with the Arabian ports of modern-day Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and as far as Somalia and Kenya.

Replica of Zheng He Treasure Ship

The first expedition of this mighty armada (1405-07) was composed of 317 ships, including perhaps as many as sixty huge Treasure Ships, and nearly 28,000 men. In addition to thousands of sailors, builders and repairmen for the trip, there were soldiers, diplomatic specialists, medical personnel, astronomers, and scholars of foreign ways, especially Islam. The fleet stopped in Champa (central Vietnam) and Siam (today's Thailand) and then on to island Java, to points along the Straits of Malacca, and then proceeded to its main destination of Cochin and the kingdom of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. On his return, Zheng He put down a pirate uprising in Sumatra, bringing the pirate chief, an overseas Chinese, back to Nanjing for punishment.

The route of the voyages of Zheng He's fleet.

The seventh and final voyage (1431-33) was sent out by the Yongle emperor's successor, his grandson the Xuande emperor. This expedition had more than one hundred large ships and over 27,000 men, and it visited all the important ports in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean as well as Aden and Hormuz. One auxiliary voyage traveled up the Red Sea to Jidda, only a few hundred miles from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It was on the return trip in 1433 that Zheng He died and was buried at sea, although his official grave still stands in Nanjing, China. Nearly forgotten in China until recently, he was immortalized among Chinese communities abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia where to this day he is celebrated and revered as a god.

Zheng He’s naval adventures were not universally popular. The Confucian bureaucrats opposed them for a number of reasons. At a basic political level, Confucian bureaucrats despised eunuchs in the government, and Zheng He and the other supporters of overseas expansion were eunuchs. At a practical level, the Confucian bureaucrats considered the great fleets tremendously expensive, producing little benefit to China, and they opposed such egregious wastes of the nation’s resources. As traditionalists, they also opposed the expansionism policy on principle; it was militaristic, and they were anti-militarists. The expeditions promoted commercial expansion, while they desired economic self-sufficiency for China, and they increased China’s foreign contacts, while the Confucians advocated isolationism.

The Confucian bureaucrats won the struggle by winning over succeeding emperors to their point of view. China withdrew from the rest of the world, and a little over 60 years later, Vasco da Gama reached India by sea from Europe. In one of history’s ironic twists of fate, it was da Gama’s tattered little fleet of a few vessels and his small, dirty crew that truly changed the course of history, not Zheng He’s magnificent armada with its crew in the tens of thousands. Ming China did not become a nation of world travelers; the Western world came to them.

One has to wonder how different the world would be today if China’s emperors had continued on the path of expansionism, world exploration and expanding trade. Recently, there has been serious exploration of the idea that on one of Zheng He’s expeditions he visited the Americas years before Columbus. Stranger still is that Zheng He may have been using maps created by Kublai Khan’s fleet (Kublai Khan’s maps were recently discovered at the U.S. Library of Congress and may date back to the late 13th century).

Sources: Net Central,  Wikipeida

Ancient Navigators: Zheng He the Christopher Columbus of China

Zheng He was an ethnically Muslim Chinese figure of the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China for 276 years between the 1368 and 1644. Zheng He might be called the “Christopher Columbus” of China because of his spectacular journeys to far-off lands, such as East Africa, the Middle East, and Sri Lanka. But he was also much more. He was a great military and naval commander, diplomat, adviser, emissary and political insider.
Rediscovering Zheng He

Zheng He was all but forgotten to Chinese history until his story was rediscovered and documented in a popular 1909 book by the Chinese scholar, Liang Qihao. Shortly after this incredible biography became widespread knowledge, a monument to the explorer placed in Sri Lanka was also rediscovered. It is known as the Trilingual Stele because written on the stone are homages to the Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu religions in three different languages.
 

The Galle Trilingual Inscription is a stone tablet inscription in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, that was erected in 1409 in Galle, Sri Lanka to commemorate the second visit to the island by the Chinese admiral Zheng He. The text concerns offerings made by him and others to the Buddhist temple on Adams Peak, a Mountain in Sri Lanka, Allah (the Muslim term for God) and the god of the Tamil people, Tenavarai Nayanar. The admiral invoked the blessings of Hindu deities here for a peaceful world built on trade. The stele was discovered in Galle in 1911 and is now preserved in the Colombo National Museum.

Zheng He’s Background

Zheng He belonged to a Muslim subgroup of Chinese culture known as the Hui people. He was born in 1371, the second son in a large family. His birth name was Ma He, and his father was Ma Hajji. Even though he was born into a Muslim family, his own religious convictions are uncertain.

It is likely that Zheng was a broad-minded intellectual whose contact with many cultures and belief systems gave him and expanded worldly view and perspective. He was honored and admired by Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu alike.

Zheng He was born in a time of turmoil. When he was 10 years old, Ming forces had invaded Yunnan, the land of Zheng’s birth and family. Yunnan was controlled by the Mongols at the time. His father was killed fighting against the Ming army, although historical records differ on the actual circumstances and allegiance of Ma Hajji. He may have simply been killed in the complicated, chaotic violence of war between opposing forces.

Captured and Castrated

At this time, young Zheng He was captured by Muslim forces allied with the Ming. He was subsequently castrated so that he could be placed in servitude to the Prince of Yan, who would become the future emperor, the Yongle Emperor. He eventually became a soldier in the Ming wars against the Mongols.

He distinguished himself as a soldier and rose steadily through the ranks of the military hierarchy. This path led him to gain the personal confidence of the Prince of Yan. When the Prince rose to the supreme position of Emperor, Zheng also gained a position of considerable power.

In 1404, the Emperor appointed Zheng “Grand Director” of Palace Servants. It was a reward for his considerable achievements as a military leader in battles fought not only against enemies of the Ming Dynasty, but against the many internal feuding factions which characterized those complicated times.

Zheng He’s Sea Campaigns

Zheng He’s role in the Ming Dynasty evolved from that of soldier to a commander of ships. In 1424, he sailed to Palembang to confer an official seal upon and appoint an important official as a commissioner. Shortly after, the Yongle Emperor died and was succeeded by his son, the Hongxi Emperor. His new master wanted Zheng to serve as commander of the important city of Nanjing, and so his naval career was suspended for a time.

In 1430, the next ruler, the Xuande Emperor, ordered Zheng to lead an expedition to the “Western Ocean.” This was a time when China was moving aggressively to expand its trade and imperial power throughout the southeastern nations of Asia. The Ming Dynasty was also interested in expanding trade to distant locations in the West, which meant far-reaching efforts to establish links, trade, and power in Africa and the Middle East.

A relief wall telling the story of Chinese navy explorer Zheng He in front of the Sam Poo Kong Temple, in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia

Legacy and Death of Zheng He

Similar to the way Europe began looking westward after the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492, the years of 1404 through the 1430s were a major age of seafaring expansion for China. The gigantic role Zheng He played in these expeditions cannot be overestimated.

His mind, skills, bravery, military instincts and superior diplomatic talents made Zheng He a natural to make significant gains for his country and to earn his place as one of the greatest explorers of all time. His accomplishments at sea included considerable military actions that expanded Chinese interests throughout Southeast Asia and among nations of the Indian Ocean.

Zheng He died at sea in 1433. His tomb remains today in the city of Nanjing. Numerous monuments to his memory can be found throughout the Asian world today.


Reposed from Totally History

Ancient Navigators: Sir Francis Drake

The journey of Francis Drake up the Pacific Coast in 1579, artist's impression.

 Francis Drake (1540 - 1596) was one of the most famous naval captains of the 16th century. His numerous exploits brought him great fame and recognition in his home country of England, but also great amount of notoriety by the Spaniards who regarded him as a pirate. As an explorer, he is hailed as a first Englishman that has managed to circumvent the world.

He started his naval career in 1570, with few visits to West Indies as a trader, but two years later he become English privateer and begun raiding Spanish ships in the area of the Caribbean. His first naval victory was in 1572 when he successfully raided Spanish town and its harbor, but due to wounds he and his army retreated. A year later he joined with French buccaneer Guillaume Le Testu in a attract that brought them incredible raid. They managed to intercept Spanish mule traders that were carrying 20 tons of silver and gold stolen from the land of MiddleAmerica. That kind of bounty could not be easily transported to the 28 kilometers distant shoreline so they decided to burry the majority of the treasure on a secret location. The remainder of a treasure was buried at the shoreline when they noticed that Spaniards were close. A year later Francis Drake returned to England where his fame escalated to new heights.

Following that success in 1577, he received an order from Elizabeth I of England who directed him to go to the South America and explore its lands and defeat any Spain's forces that he encounter. He embarked with a fleet of 6 ships, but only three of them reached the MagellanStrait, but there he was hit with a massive storm that destroyed one of his ships and made one too damaged for the journey ahead. From there he continued north following the cost and raiding Spanish towns reaching the northern parts of Chile. There he managed to capture two Spanish ships that were full of treasure - more than 26tons of silver and several thousands of golden coins and jewels. He traveled to the shores of the North America and then went westward and toward the Asia and Africa.

Drake receives knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. Bronze plaque by Joseph Boehm, 1883, base of Drake statue, Tavistock.

Circumnavigation of the earth (1577–1580)
 
A map of Drake's route around the world. The northern limit of Drake's exploration of the Pacific coast of North America is still in dispute. Drake's Bay is south of Cape Mendocino.

With the success of the Panama isthmus raid, in 1577 Elizabeth I of England sent Drake to start an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of the Americas. Drake used the Plans that Sir Richard Greynvile had received the Patent for in 1574 from Elizabeth, which was rescinded a year later after protests from Philip of Spain. He set out from Plymouth on 15 November 1577, but bad weather threatened him and his fleet. They were forced to take refuge in Falmouth, Cornwall, from where they returned to Plymouth for repair.

After this major setback, he set sail again on 13 December, aboard Pelican, with four other ships and 164 men. He soon added a sixth ship, Mary (formerly Santa Maria), a Portuguese merchant ship that had been captured off the coast of Africa near the Cape Verde Islands. He also added its captain, Nuno da Silva, a man with considerable experience navigating in South American waters.
A replica of the Golden Hind

Drake's fleet suffered great attrition; he scuttled both Christopher and the flyboat Swan due to loss of men on the Atlantic crossing. He made landfall at the gloomy bay of San Julian, in what is now Argentina. Ferdinand Magellan had called here half a century earlier, where he put to death some mutineers.

Drake's men saw weathered and bleached skeletons on the grim Spanish gibbets. They discovered that Mary had rotting timbers, so they burned the ship. Following Magellan's example, Drake tried and executed his own 'mutineer' Thomas Doughty. Drake decided to remain the winter in San Julian before attempting the Strait of Magellan.

 Entering the Pacific (1578)

The three remaining ships of his convoy departed for the Magellan Strait at the southern tip of South America. A few weeks later (September 1578) Drake made it to the Pacific, but violent storms destroyed one of the three ships, the Marigold (captained by John Thomas) in the strait and caused another, the Elizabeth captained by John Wynter, to return to England, leaving only the Pelican. After this passage, the Pelican was pushed south and discovered an island which Drake called Elizabeth Island. Drake, like navigators before him, probably reached a latitude of 55°S (according to astronomical data quoted in Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation of 1589) along the Chilean coast.

By 1580, he returned home being the first Englishman who has successfully circumnavigated the Earth. His cargo full of his Spanish treasure secured that his success, and in 1581 he received his knighthood, become Mayor of Plymouth and a member in English Parliament.

A map of Drake's route around the world. The northern limit of Drake's exploration of the Pacific coast of North America is still in dispute. Drake's Bay is south of Cape Mendocino.

Map of Drakes Great Expedition in 1585 by Giovanni Battista Boazio

Great Expedition

War had already been declared by Phillip II after the Treaty of Nonsuch, so the Queen through Francis Walsingham ordered Sir Francis Drake to lead an expedition to attack the Spanish colonies in a kind of preemptive strike. An expedition left Plymouth in September 1585 with Drake in command of twenty one ships with 1,800 soldiers under Christopher Carleill. He first attacked Vigo in Spain and held the place for two weeks ransoming supplies. He then plundered Santiago in the Cape Verde islands after which the fleet then sailed across the Atlantic, sacked the port of Santo Domingo and captured the city of Cartagena de Indias in present-day Colombia. On 6 June 1586, during the return leg of the voyage, he raided the Spanish fort of San Augustín in Spanish Florida.

After the raids he then went on to find Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement much further North at Roanoke which he replenished and also took back with him all of the original colonists before Sir Richard Greynvile arrived w/ supplies & more colonists. He finally reached England on 22 July, when he sailed into Portsmouth, England to heroes welcome.

After that, he continued his service in English military and died from dysentery at the age of 55 in the year of 1596. He was buried in lead coffin at the sea, and his body has still yet to be found.

Ancient Navigators: The Quadrant

Favored by Columbus, the quadrant is a metal plate in the shape of a quarter- circle, with a weight on a string that crossed the opposite edges of the circle hung from its center. The navigator would sight the North Star along one edge, and the point where the string crossed the edge would show the star’s altitude or angle above the horizon.

Mariner’s brass quadrant. The quadrant shown above is a replica of the type Columbus might have used on his voyages to the New World. This one is marked off at the latitudes of Lisbon, Cabo Verde and Serra Leoa, down near the Equator where Columbus is known to have visited.

Uncovering Hidden Text on a 500-Year-Old Map That Guided Columbus

The 1491 Martellus map  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Christopher Columbus probably used the map above as he planned his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. It represents much of what Europeans knew about geography on the verge discovering the New World, and it’s packed with text historians would love to read—if only the faded paint and five centuries of wear and tear hadn’t rendered most of it illegible.

But that’s about to change. A team of researchers is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden text. They scanned the map last month at Yale University and expect to start extracting readable text in the next few months, says Chet Van Duzer, an independent map scholar who’s leading the project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The map was made in or around 1491 by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer working in Florence. It’s not known how many were made, but Yale owns the only surviving copy. It’s a big map, especially for its time: about 4 by 6.5 feet. “It’s a substantial map, meant to be hung on a wall,” Van Duzer said.

The Martellus map during preparations for multispectral imaging. Chet Van Duzer

The Martellus map is interesting for several historic reasons, Van Duzer says. One is it’s relevance to Columbus. “It’s extremely likely, just about unquestionable that Christopher Columbus saw this map or a very similar one made by the same cartographer, and that the map influenced his thinking about the world’s geography,” Van Duzer said.

There are several lines of evidence for this, Van Duzer says. Columbus sailed west from the Canary Islands hoping to find a new trade route to Asia. Writings by Columbus and his son suggest that he began searching for Japan in the region where it appears on the Martellus map, and that he expected to find the island running north to south, as it does on the Martellus map, but not on any other surviving map made before his voyage. (You can see Japan floating too far off the coast of Asia in the top right corner of Martellus’s map above).

Of course, what Columbus found instead was something Martellus hadn’t known about—the New World.

Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map was influenced by Martellus's earlier map.

A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it’s not normally visible. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Martellus’s map was also a big influence on Martin Waldseemüller, another German cartographer whose 1507 map is the first to apply the name “America” to the New World. The Library of Congress purchased the only surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s map in 2003 for $10 million. “There are many places where the same information was in the same place on the two maps,” Van Duzer said. “The layout is very similar, a lot of the decorative elements are very similar.”

What isn’t known, because of the condition of the Martellus map, is how similar the text on the two maps is. “One of the most exciting images I’ve ever seen of a map is an ultraviolet image of the Martellus map taken in the early ’60s,” Van Duzer said. “If you look at eastern Asia with natural light, if you look closely, you get a hint that there’s text there, but if you look in ultraviolet light suddenly you see that there’s text everywhere.”

Most of the text still isn’t legible in those older UV images, but some of the parts that are appear to be drawn from the travels of Marco Polo through east Asia. There are also indications of where sailors could expect to find sea monsters or pearls. “In northern Asia, Martellus talks about this race of wild people who don’t have any wine or grain but live off the flesh of deer and ride deer-like horses,” Van Duzer said. Waldseemüller copied much of this.
A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it's not normally visible.

A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it’s not normally visible. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

There are also interesting differences between the two maps. Waldseemüller gets the shape of Africa more or less right, but on the Martellus map, southern Africa juts out way too far to the east (Africa is on the left side of both maps). In addition, Martellus’s depiction of rivers and mountains in the interior of southern Africa, along with place names there, appear to be based on African sources. It’s likely that this information came from an African delegation that visited the Council of Florence in 1441 and interacted with European geographers. Three other surviving maps contain some of this same information, but the Martellus map covers more territory than any of them, making it the most complete surviving representation of Africans’ geographic knowledge of their continent in the 15th century. “In my mind, that’s absolutely amazing,” Van Duzer said.

Van Duzer hopes to learn more about Martellus’s sources from the new images the team is creating. Scanning the map only took a day, after two and a half days of set up, he says. The team used an automated camera system developed by a digital imaging company called Megavision. The system uses LEDs to deliver light within a narrow band of wavelengths and minimize the amount of heat and light the map was exposed to. The camera has a quartz lens, which transmits ultraviolet light better than glass. The team photographed 55 overlapping tiles of the map, using 12 different types of illumination, ranging from ultraviolet to infrared.

Conceptually, the process isn’t very complicated, says team member Roger Easton, an expert on imaging historical manuscripts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “We’re really just looking at the object under different colors of light and trying to find the combination of images that best enhance whatever it is that we’re trying to see.”

But extracting legible text from all those images will take a lot of imaging processing and analysis, and a lot of trial and error, Easton says. A combination that works on one part of the map might be useless for another part. “It depends on the details of how the map has eroded or how the color of the pigments has changed,” Easton said. “Different pigments reflect different wavelengths of light, and they deteriorate differently too.”

When the project is complete, probably sometime next year, the images will be available for scholars and the general public to examine on the website of the Beinecke Digital Library at Yale.




Original Post: By Greg Miller  Permalink

ANCIENT NAVIGATORS: FERDINAND MAGELLAN ( 1480-1521)

A Portuguese nobleman, Ferdinand Magellan belonged to the romantic era of sea exploration characterized by Columbus and Vasco a Gama.

History books tell of his navigational prowess, ambition and courage in battle, describing his circumnavigation of the world as “the greatest”

single human achievement on the seas.

 In 1519 Magellan, under Spanish patronage, led an expedition of five ships to seek a westward passage to the Moluccas Islands. He discovered the Strait of Magellan (at the southern tip of South America) and gave the name "Pacific" to the Pacific Ocean based on its supposed calmness.

It was also a brutal three-year voyage that cost Magellan four ships 237 crew, and his own life. On route he killed several of his captains for mutiny and burned the villages of natives refusing to be Christianized.

His own down fall came in the Philippines while attacking a village that had failed to provide him with provisions.

Secrets of Ancient Navigators: Chart and compass

 By Peter Tyson

The chart and the compass were two early technological breakthroughs that benefited seafarers. Photo credit: © DNY59/iStockphoto.com

Charts have aided mariners ever since the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy created the first world atlas in the second century A.D. The redoubtable Ptolemy even plotted latitude and longitude lines on his atlas's 27 maps, though the farther one got from the known world centered on the Mediterranean, the dangerously less reliable they became. Even before Ptolemy, there were sailing directions—the Greeks called them periplus or "circumnavigation"—that were compiled from information collected from sailors far and wide. One of these, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a document written in the first century by a Greek merchant living in Alexandria, described trading routes as far east as India. By the 10th century, Italian-made portolans supplied detailed directions, distances, depths, and coastal descriptions, and by the 13th century, sea maps with scale and bearings began to appear.

The greatest advance in navigation came with the compass. The Chinese apparently knew about the powers of magnetism as early as the third millennium B.C., when, historians tell us, one army defeated another after the battlefield had become enveloped in dense fog by using a device known as a "point-south carriage." This was a standard carriage for carrying royalty with a small, rotating figure mounted on the front, which by magnetism always pointed south. (The Chinese chose to have the arrow point south rather than north.)

But no one seems to have manipulated the lodestone for sea navigation until early in the present millennium. The first mention of the compass in the West comes from the Englishman Alexander Neckham, who wrote in 1187 that "sailors use a magnetic needle which swings on a point and shows the direction of the north when the weather is overcast." Despite its usefulness, the compass took a long time to come into wide use, as many seamen thought it operated by black magic. (Hence the invention of the binnacle, in which sea captains could hide their recondite instrument from the suspicious eyes of the crew.) In the meantime, sailors relied on natural forces they could readily comprehend.

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Polynesia's Genius Navigators

How did the first inhabitants of Easter Island arrive? It is the most remote inhabited island on Earth. The coast of Chile lies 2,300 miles to the east, Tahiti 2,500 miles to the northwest, and the nearest island, with a total population of 54 people, is tiny Pitcairn, 1,400 miles to the west. The answer lies in the deeply rooted traditions of Polynesian culture.

Photo credit: © Grafissimo/iStockphoto

For the ancient Polynesians, finding Easter Island, a small 64-square-mile speck in this vast ocean, must have been like finding a needle in a haystack; but the Polynesian community today is convinced their navigators intuitively discovered and settled this island. "At the backbone of the maritime tradition lies the outrigger canoe," explains archeologist and Easter Island specialist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, "the quintessential symbol of Polynesian mastery of the sea. The outrigger canoe is today part of every Polynesian island child's upbringing, except on Easter Island. There, the outrigger canoe was lost sometime in the mid-1800s." Van Tilburg has been instrumental in reintroducing three outrigger canoes to the island. The islanders' loss of their seafaring past, according to Van Tilburg, "took away the traditional link people had with the sea."

For Van Tilburg, the Polynesian canoe is a metaphor in her theories of how the Easter Islanders transported and erected their 15-ton moai. "It's not much different from erecting a mast on a very large canoe. It's a transfer of technology from one industry to another. The people who built these structures were both sailors and farmers, and they used their seafaring technology to help them in moving and erecting their moai....Erecting a mast on a ship or a statue on a platform requires similar abilities, skills, and tools."

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Secrets of Ancient Navigators: Land and Air

How did mariners of old navigate their way around the open ocean?

By Peter Tyson

 Photo credit: © Felix Möckel/iStockphoto.com

The first seafarers kept in sight of land. That was the first trick of navigation—follow the coast. To find an old fishing ground or the way through a shoal, one could line up landmarks, such as a near rock against a distant point on land; doing that in two directions at once gave a more or less precise geometric location on the surface of the sea. Sounding using a lead and line also helped. "When you get 11 fathoms and ooze on the lead, you are a day's journey out from Alexandria," wrote Herodotus in the fourth century B.C. The Greeks even learned to navigate from one island to the next in their archipelago, a Greek word meaning "preëminent sea." They may have followed clouds, which form over land, or odors, which can carry far out to sea.

But what if land were nowhere nearby? The Phoenicians looked to the heavens. The sun moving across the commonly cloudless Mediterranean sky gave them their direction and quarter. The quarters we know today as east and west the Phoenicians knew as Asu (sunrise) and Ereb (sunset), labels that live today in the names Asia and Europe. At night, they steered by the stars. At any one time in the year at any one point on the globe, the sun and stars are found above the horizon at certain fixed "heights"—a distance that mariners can measure with as simple an instrument as one's fingers, laid horizontally atop one another and held at arm's length. The philosopher Thales of Miletos, as the Alexandrian poet Kallimachos recorded, taught Ionian sailors to navigate by the Little Bear constellation fully 600 years before the birth of Christ.

 Now to Miletos he steered his course
That was the teaching of old Thales
Who in bygone days gauged the stars
Of the Little Bear by which the Phoenicians
Steered across the seas.

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Polynesia's Genius Navigators

Hawaiian navigators sailing multi-hulled canoe, ca 1781

A world of water

The people of the Pacific are intimately tied to the ocean. They sailed the sea hundreds of years before Europeans, using voyaging canoes crafted from island materials and stone tools. The Polynesians approached the open ocean with respect; indeed, the ocean was integrated naturally into Polynesian culture, as they came from small islands surrounded by vast ocean expanses. No other culture embraced the open sea so fully.

For the continental Europeans, on the other hand, the ocean was looked upon as a menacing world that only the bravest explorers ventured upon for long periods of time. And even these explorers felt at odds with the ocean upon which they traveled. One of Magellan's chroniclers described "a sea so vast the human mind can scarcely grasp it." To a Polynesian islander, the world is primarily aquatic, since the Pacific ocean covers more area than land in this region. The Pacific, in fact, covers one-third of the Earth's surface.

a learned art

In island culture, the double canoe and its navigator were integral to the survival of the people. As an island became overpopulated, navigators were sent out to sail uncharted seas to find undiscovered islands.

For weeks, they would live aboard boats made from wood and lashings of braided fiber. Thousands of miles were traversed, without the aid of sextants or compasses. The ancient Polynesians navigated their canoes by the stars and other signs that came from the ocean and sky. Navigation was a precise science, a learned art that was passed on verbally from one navigator to another for countless generations.

In 1768, as he sailed from Tahiti, Captain Cook had an additional passenger on board his ship, a Tahitian navigator named Tupaia. Tupaia guided Cook 300 miles south to Rurutu, a small Polynesian island, proving he could navigate from his homeland to a distant island.

Cook was amazed to find that Tupaia could always point in the exact direction in which Tahiti lay, without the use of the ship's charts. Sadly, Cook was never able to learn and document Tupaia's navigational techniques, for Tupaia, and many of Cook's crew, died of malaria in the Dutch East Indies. Unlike later visitors to the South Pacific, Cook understood that Polynesian navigators could guide canoes across the Pacific over great distances.

instruments of nature

But these navigational skills, along with the double canoe, disappeared with the emergence of Western technology, which mariners the world over came to rely on.

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Polynesian Navigation

Polynesian navigation is a system of navigation used by Polynesians to make long voyages across thousands of miles of open ocean.

Polynesian navigation device showing directions of winds, waves and islands, c. 1904

Navigators traveled to small inhabited islands using only their own senses and knowledge passed by oral tradition from navigator to apprentice, often in the form of song. In order to locate directions at various times of day and year, Polynesian navigators memorize important facts: the motion of specific stars, so where they would rise and set on the horizon of the ocean; weather and the seasons of travel; wildlife species (which gather at particular positions); the direction, size and, speed of ocean waves; colors of the sea and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some islands; and angles for approaching harbors.

Outrigger canoes at Waikiki beach, late 1800s

These wayfinding techniques along with their unique outrigger canoe construction methods have been kept as guild secrets. Generally each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status and in times of famine or difficulty these navigators could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighboring islands. To this day, the original methods of Polynesian Navigation are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako Island in the Solomon Islands.

Ancient Navigators: Sir Francis Drake and the Second Circumnavigation of the World

 

Map of Drake's route around the world.

With the success of the Panama isthmus raid, in 1577 Elizabeth I of England sent Drake to start an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of the Americas. He set out from Plymouth on 15 November 1577, but bad weather threatened him and his fleet. They were forced to take refuge in Falmouth, Cornwall, from where they returned to Plymouth for repair. After this major setback, he set sail again on 13 December, aboard Pelican, with four other ships and 164 men. He soon added a sixth ship, Mary (formerly Santa Maria), a Portuguese merchant ship that had been captured off the coast of Africa near the Cape Verde Islands. He also added its captain, Nuno da Silva, a man with considerable experience navigating in South American waters.

Drake's fleet suffered great attrition; he scuttled both Christopher and the flyboat Swan due to loss of men on the Atlantic crossing. He made landfall at the gloomy bay of San Julian, in what is now Argentina. Ferdinand Magellan had called here half a century earlier, where he put to death some mutineers. Drake's men saw weathered and bleached skeletons on the grim Spanish gibbets. They discovered that Mary had rotting timbers, so they burned the ship. Following Magellan's example, Drake tried and executed his own 'mutineer' Thomas Doughty. Drake decided to remain the winter in San Julian before attempting the Strait of Magellan.

Entering the Pacific

The three remaining ships of his convoy departed for the Magellan Strait at the southern tip of South America. A few weeks later (September 1578) Drake made it to the Pacific, but violent storms destroyed one of the three ships in the strait and caused another to return to England, leaving only the Pelican. After this passage, the Pelican was pushed south and discovered an island which Drake called Elizabeth Island. Drake, like navigators before him, probably reached a latitude of 55°S (according to astronomical data quoted in Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation of 1589) along the Chilean coast. Despite popular lore, it seems unlikely that he reached Cape Horn or the eponymous Drake Passage,[15] because his descriptions do not fit the first and his shipmates denied having seen an open sea. The first report of his discovery of an open channel south of Tierra del Fuego was written after the 1618 publication of the voyage of Willem Schouten and Jacob le Maire around Cape Horn in 1616.

He pushed onwards in his lone flagship, now renamed the Golden Hind in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton (after his coat of arms). The Golden Hind sailed north along the Pacific coast of South America, attacking Spanish ports and rifling towns. Some Spanish ships were captured, and Drake used their more accurate charts. Before reaching the coast of Peru, Drake visited Mocha Island, where he was seriously injured by hostile Mapuche. Later he sacked the port of Valparaíso further north in Chile where he also captured a ship full of Chilean wine.

A most consequential action

Near Lima, Drake captured a Spanish ship laden with 25,000 pesos of Peruvian gold, amounting in value to 37,000 ducats of Spanish money (about £7m by modern standards). Drake also discovered news of another ship, Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, which was sailing west towards Manila. It would come to be called the Cacafuego. Drake gave chase and eventually captured the treasure ship, which proved their most profitable capture. Aboard Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, Drake found 80 lb (36 kg) of gold, a golden crucifix, jewels, 13 chests full of royals of plate and 26 tons of silver.

Nova Albion
Main article: New Albion


On 17 June 1579, Drake landed somewhere north of Spain's northern-most claim at Point Loma, in Alta California. He found a good port, landed, repaired and restocked his vessels, then stayed for a time, keeping friendly relations with the natives. He claimed the land in the name of the Holy Trinity for the English Crown as called Nova Albion—Latin for "New Britain". Assertions that he left some of his men behind as an embryo "colony" are founded on the reduced number who were with him in the Moluccas.

The precise location of the port was carefully guarded to keep it secret from the Spaniards, and several of Drake's maps may have been altered to this end. All first-hand records from the voyage, including logs, paintings and charts, were lost when Whitehall Palace burned in 1698. A bronze plaque inscribed with Drake's claim to the new lands – Drake's Plate of Brass – fitting the description in his account, was discovered in Marin County, California but was later declared a hoax. Now a National Historic Landmark, the officially recognized location of Drake's New Albion is Drakes Bay, California.

Drake headed westward across the Pacific, and a few months later reached the Moluccas, a group of islands in the south west Pacific, in eastern modern-day Indonesia. While there, Golden Hind became caught on a reef and was almost lost. After the sailors waited three days for expedient tides and dumped cargo, they freed the barque. Befriending a sultan king of the Moluccas, Drake and his men became involved in some intrigues with the Portuguese there. He made multiple stops on his way toward the tip of Africa, eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached Sierra Leone by 22 July 1580.

Return to Plymouth

On 26 September, Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth with Drake and 59 remaining crew

aboard, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasures. The Queen's half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown's income for that entire year. Drake was hailed as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth (and the second such voyage arriving with at least one ship intact, after Elcano's in 1520). The Queen declared that all written accounts of Drake's voyages were to become the Queen's secrets of the Realm, and Drake and the other participants of his voyages on the pain of death sworn to their secrecy; she intended to keep Drake's activities away from the eyes of rival Spain. Drake presented the Queen with a jewel token commemorating the circumnavigation. Taken as a prize off the Pacific coast of Mexico, it was made of enamelled gold and bore an African diamond and a ship with an ebony hull. For her part, the Queen gave Drake a jewel with her portrait, an unusual gift to bestow upon a commoner, and one that Drake sported proudly in his 1591 portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts now at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. On one side is a state portrait of Elizabeth by the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, on the other a sardonyx cameo of double portrait busts, a regal woman and an African male. The "Drake Jewel", as it is known today, is a rare documented survivor among sixteenth-century jewels; it is conserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Ancient Navigators: Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh was an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.

Raleigh's plan in 1584 for colonisation in the "Colony and Dominion of Virginia" in North America ended in failure at Roanoke Island, but paved the way for subsequent colonies.[8] These expeditions were funded primarily by Raleigh and his friends, but never provided the steady stream of revenue necessary to maintain a colony in America. (Subsequent colonization attempts in the early 17th century were made under the joint-stock Virginia Company, which was able to raise the capital necessary to create successful colonies.)

In 1587, Raleigh attempted a second expedition, again establishing a settlement on Roanoke Island. This time, a more diverse group of settlers was sent, including some entire families, under the governance of John White.[9] After a short while in America, White returned to England to obtain more supplies for the colony. He was unable to return the following year as planned, because the Queen had ordered that all vessels remain at port for potential use against the Spanish Armada.[10]:125–126

The threat of the Armada was only partially responsible for delaying White's return until 1590. After England's victory over the Spanish fleet in 1588, the ships were given permission to sail. Unfortunately for the colonists at Roanoke, the small fleet first made an excursion towards Cuba. They tried to capture the treasure-laden Spanish merchant ships reported to proliferate in those waters at that time. White is said to have objected to this unplanned foray, but was helpless to dissuade the crews.[10]:125–126 They had been told by the experienced Portuguese pilot, hired by Raleigh to navigate the voyage, of enormous riches to be had. It was not until 1590, 3 years after White left, that the supply vessel arrived at the colony – only to find that all colonists had disappeared.[10]:130–33

The only clue to their fate was the word "CROATOAN" and letters "CRO" carved into tree trunks. White had arranged with the settlers that if they should relocate, the name of their destination be carved into a tree or corner-post. This suggested the possibilities that they had relocated to Croatoan Island (now Hatteras Island). But a hurricane prevented John White from investigating the island for survivors.[10]:130–33 Other speculation includes their having starved, or been swept away or lost at sea during the stormy weather of 1588. No further attempts at contact were recorded for some years. Whatever the fate of the settlers, the settlement is now remembered as the "Lost Colony of Roanoke Island".

Ancient Navigators: Francisco de Orellana

Francisco de Orellana (1511, Trujillo, Spain – November 1546, Amazon River) was a Spanish explorer and conquistador. He completed the first known navigation of the length of the Amazon River, which initially was named after him.

 
Orellana entered upon an exploration of the Amazon system. Drifting with the current, he reached the mouth of the river in August 1542. Proceeding to Trinidad, he finally returned to Spain, where he told of hoards of gold and cinnamon and of encounters with tribes led by women resembling the Amazons of Greek mythology—a comparison that is presumed to have led him to name the river the Amazon.

Ancient Navigators: William Adams

 
1707 map of Japan, with a cartouche representing the audience of William Adams with the Shogun. From Naaukeurige Versameling der Gedenk-Waardigste Zee en Land-Reysen (a series of accounts of famous voyages). Thought to be by Pieter van der Aa.

First foreign samurai: William Adams

William Adams is known as the first and only officially-recognized foreign samurai

William Adams (24 September 1564 – 16 May 1620), also known in Japanese as Anjin-sama (anjin, "pilot"; sama, a Japanese honorific) and Miura Anjin ("the pilot of Miura"), was an English navigator who traveled to Japan and is believed to be the first Englishman ever to reach that country. He was the inspiration for the character of John Blackthorne in James Clavell's bestselling novel Shōgun.

Soon after Adams' arrival in Japan, he became a key advisor to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and built for him Japan's first Western-style ships. Adams was later the key player in the establishment of trading factories by the Netherlands and England. He was also highly involved in Japan's Red Seal Asian trade, chartering and captaining several ships to Southeast Asia. He died in Japan at age 55, and has been recognized as one of the most influential foreigners in Japan during this period.

The shogun took a liking to Adams and made him a revered diplomatic and trade advisor and bestowed great privileges upon him. Ultimately, Adams became his personal advisor on all things related to Western powers and civilization and, after a few years, Adams replaced the Jesuit Padre João Rodrigues as the Shogun's official interpreter. Padre Valentim Carvalho wrote: "After he had learned the language, he had access to Ieyasu and entered the palace at any time"; he also described him as "a great engineer and mathematician".

Age of Discovery: Vasco da Gama

"Vasco da Gama Leaving Portugal," by John Henry Amshewitz, early 1900's

Vasco da Gam, aPortuguese explorer, was one of the most successful in the Age of Discovery and the commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India.

He is one of the most famous and celebrated explorers from the Discovery Ages, being the first European to reach India through sea. This discovery was very impactful and paved the way for the Portuguese to establish a long lasting colonial empire in Asia. The route meant that the Portuguese wouldn't need to cross the highly disputed Mediterranean nor the dangerous Arabia and that the whole voyage would be made by sea.

After decades of sailors trying to reach India with thousands of lives and dozens of vessels lost in shipwrecks and attacks, Gama landed in Calicut on the 20 May 1498. Reaching the legendary Indian spice routes unopposed helped the Portuguese Empire improve its economy that, until Gama, was mainly based on trades along the Northern and coastal West Africa. These spices were mostly pepper and cinnamon at first, but soon included other products, all new to Europe which lead to a commercial monopoly for several decades.