Ocean
A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A magisterial cultural history of the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus, ranging from the early shaping of the continents and the emergence of homo sapiens to the story of shipbuilding, navigation, maritime exploration, slavery, and nascent European imperialism.
A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.
John Haywood eloquently argues that the perception of Atlantic history beginning with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus is a mistaken one, and that the seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not arrive fully formed in the fifteenth century, but instead were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its peripheral seas. The pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans. This story is, therefore, key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the world's other seafaring peoples, who “discovered” the world.
Informed by the author's extensive travels around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfoundland's Grand Banks, the Sea of Darkness, and the weed-covered Sargasso Sea, and populated by a heterogeneous and multiethnic cast of seafarers, fishermen, monks, merchants, and dreamers, Ocean is an in-depth history of a neglected subject, fusing geology, geography, mythology, developing maritime technologies, and the early history of exploration to narrate an enthralling an story—one which lies at the very heart of Europe's modern history and its relationship with the rest of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Haywood (Northmen) begins this rich account by noting that historians' nearly exclusive focus on post-Columbian Atlantic seafaring has reduced "168,000 years of human history on and around" the Atlantic's shores to "little more than a footnote." Pointing to the unique geography of Europe—with "the longest coastline in relation to its area of any continent" and numerous inland "nursery seas," which served as "ideal environments" for learning shipbuilding and navigation skills—Haywood traces the development of seafaring on the continent, starting around 5500 BCE, when hunter-gatherers were first displaced by farmers whose thirst for territorial expansion pushed them to settle "every significant island in the entire British and Irish archipelago within a few hundred years of their first arrival." After tracking European seafaring through the the Viking era, Haywood then turns to the Atlantic's other coasts, profiling among others the Calusa, a hunter-gatherer empire that "flourished in southern Florida from around 1100 BC" until the 18th century, ruling over the peninsula's many tributaries with a "large fleet of canoes," and the seafarers of West Africa, where a lack of the deep inlets and bays that encouraged costal navigation in other places meant that river transport was the focus, with "canoes of over 20 meters in length" piloting the Niger river delta and venturing into open ocean to fish. Colorfully written with the flair of a seasoned guide, this is an excellent survey of ocean exploration's lesser-known histories.
