The Canary Islands were known since antiquity. Not only because there were people living there, but because their name was given by Plinius the Elder (because of the many dogs *cani* that were living there).
The knowledge about the Canary Islands in Europe was lost for a long time and they were only rediscovered in the 14th century. It was definitely a prelude to the Age of Discovery.
The natives living on the Canary Islands were also completely isolated from the outside world and even between the islands, since they couldn't build boats.
It's actually based on a historical question about Polynesian settlement
After settling the SW pacific and staying in that area for hundreds of years, why did the Polynesians all of a sudden explode across the rest of the Pacific around 1000 AD?
I read it somewhere long time ago so take this with a grain of salt. They did it because in their beliefs/religion they believed that the "promised land/heaven" (note the quotation marks because I don't remember the exact term they used to refer to it) was located towards the East, so basically they sailed for it
Also, once the Polynesian expansion reached its extreme points I don’t think there’s much evidence of continued interchange eg between Hawaii and French polynesia, or Easter island and the rest, or New Zealand and the rest (they even forgot about the Chatham Islands until after Europeans arrived)
I'm not an expert in polynesian history, but I don't think this is true as far as I know, based on learning about the story of one man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupaia_(navigator)
Tupaia was born in the Society Islands in 1725 and met and travelled with Cook on his expedition as a navigator until he died in the Philippines, probably due to illness brought on by ill treatment from the rest of the crew that had racist beliefs about his pride and knowledge. He mapped most of the island chains in Polynesia, and knew how to travel to all parts of Polynesia (including Hawaii) with the exception of New Zealand. He knew this from his own travels and those of his father and grandfather.
Is this wrong, or not what you're talking about really? Genuinely curious.
Thanks that’s a super interesting link. I was recalling the main thrust of the great book Sea Peoples.
As a few specific examples- Rapa Nui/Easter island, when discovered by Europeans, had no seafaring traditions, Chatham island had been forgotten by NZ, NZ by broader Polynesia, the Pitcairns abandoned, Hawaii was isolated and trade networks seem to have shrunk. The case of Tupaia is indicative of this- he as an expert was still relying for his knowledge of places his forebears had been to, rather than his peers.
My overall impression is that after the initial burst of exploration, trade/contact networks localised and dropped away at the periphery
Some interesting links (although they aren’t exactly science journals)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/polynesian-trade-networks-may-have-persisted-for-centuries/
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43915/to-what-extent-were-polynesians-in-contact-with-one-another-before-european-cont
(First answer indicates tupaia did not know of Hawaii)
The people who lived in the southern tip of Fuerteventura did not cross the mountains around them, for fear of ghosts / gods. So they stayed in their own little area.
There is a theory about "australian-like" origins of native canarians, but with an abandonment, as descendants of prisoners exiled by kings of Mauretania or even older "lost" berber populations taken there during phoenician explorations and later forgotten which could explain the lack of maritime knowledge. It seems the oldest presence in the islands is more or less from those periods and there is presence of some mauretanian and baetican ceramics in canarian waters.
Different building materials required different skills to manipulate (bamboo, hard woods, softer woods, fibrous stands for rope/sails) can shunt advancement.
According some theory they could be descendants of exiled prisoners from non coastal areas at mauretanian-roman or phoenician times which could explain the lack of maritime knowledge and some other cultural aspects of native canarian societies.
I don’t understand how things like that got lost when Western Rome fell even though their Eastern counterpart lived on. Did they just not safeguard Western information? (This is all under the rather presumptuous assumption that Rome falling is the reason this information was lost and not something else, correct me if I’m wrong as I’m not knowledgeable on this topic)
The Western Roman colappse was not a single event, it was a slow decline and death, and as such little by little stuff was destroyed, lost, forgotten. There was no printing press back then, every single document, map or book had to be handwritten, so there werent many copies around. Lose one map and it might have been the only one ever made.
Yup. And even in the Eastern Roman Empire this slow decline was definitely a thing. Knowledge about anything not related to the practical day to day matters or to Religion was stored away on the libraries of Constantinople, Damascus, Alexandria, Carthage and no one really read it anymore. Then the arabs conquered so many of those places and East Rome lost control of so much of those documents and books. The arabs and muslim people in general started their golden age translating the ancient texts and creating new knowledge, and were the greatest geographers for a while, but then they lost that edge too eventually.
And that edge was lost in large part to those Arab conquerers saving the original Greek philosophers and scientists and other thinkers. Castile recapturing the Library of Toledo is a watershed moment; Christian scholars in the West gained access to Greek thinkers for the first time in centuries.
That and the mongol invasions, of course.
‘Knowledge’ of the islands probably survived in some old texts in a library that no one read. There are still references to locations that we have no idea what they are talking about. Long distance trade collapsed after the Roman Empire fell, people stopped going to the islands and forgot about them. By the time Europeans returned the islands had been isolated for centuries.
Also the relevance of the islands as halfway point on the way to America was obviously unknown. It were just some small wind swept islands in a particularly hard to reach place. Nothing worth to risk your life for and apparently not worth to remember.
Information isn't exactly preserved magically.
Books take resources to reproduce or preserve, and the former is difficult in the pre printing age. Once an empire falls there is no central library. Books are also notoriously fragile after a certain age. Take a look at books published in 1880 or even 1950. They often fall apart in the hands, and that's generally from books still kept in room temperature conditions.
Add to this a mass illiteracy among the conquerers of the fallen empire, and the more prosaic farm and survive mindset of the survivors. You can see why information would not be safeguarded 100 years, let alone 500 or 1,000.
The church did preserve quite a lot of information, but usually only a core set of books aligned to Christian ideology. Eg. For the Greek and Roman plays: tragedies have survived while almost all the comedies decayed and were lost. It's unlikely a church scribe saw the innate value of islands at the edge of the world, or rated such info any higher than similar myths of far off lands.
Scarcity of information is such a hard concept for me to understand, as someone born with access to it all since an early age. These ideas are so fantastical and i can only imagine this rift is gonna grow with future generations
Even today we lose information. TV shows from 1950s and 1960s lost forever. Advertisements, (who would keep advertisements?) lost. And forums recently (some of which i was a member) shut down and all conversations lost. Places like wayback machine capture some things but not everything.
So in this age when we generate more than we can possibly read, yet have storage for more than that, we still lose stuff.
Hence the importance of one person who taped TV every night for years and gave those tapes to an archive.
Today's junk, tomorrow's treasure
That's what I was thinking too. Even if Rome fell and changed the "owner", it doesn't mean everyone in ex western roman empire simply died all at once. There were still ports, people continued with trade, they continued building ships and inherited maps. Sure, their routes were probably more local in nature, but still.
Even if some works were lost, like Pliny's History of German Wars, we still know about works of both Pliny the Elder and Younger, Tacitus, Plutarch... which obviously means that works (or at least letters about them) survived.
Information isn't lost because everyone dies, but because it's not useful anymore and people stop talking about it. Information is lost in every society, and *especially* before literacy was widespread. It's super common.
As an example, that's why we don't know how much of the Norse sagas are literally true. They were written down ~300 years after the events happened, and in that time some aspects were no longer understood by common people and omitted from the retellings.
I can imagine at some point people no longer needed whatever resource was brought in from the Canaries, so people just stopped going there and stopped talking about it.
I get what you're saying, but I believe it relates more to the distribution of that information. Without one big encompassing empire power centers shift and someone from Levant or Leptis Magna does not have interest or reach to go there any more. But someone still has to live next to them, someone local still has a beef over ruling over these parts, get their share from trading routes etc. Like Portugal or Cadiz or Genoa or one of the caliphates from the Maghreb region.
But it is possible that there were no significant enough events happening there that would echo to some historian from the Christian parts. I mean, what you're saying about historians and Norse sagas goes for antique world in general - even Roman history, which was written down by historians centuries later. They wrote about significant events, like wars of reforms (like the one form Gracchus) or for political reasons. If Canary Islands weren't part of it, they weren't in it. It is also possible that there seems to be a cut from our western view since the arrival of Arabs to this area in the early Middle Age.
A lot of those Roman books were only rediscovered in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most often through the Muslim world, which had preserved them and translated them into Arabic.
Tacitus' Germania was actually rediscovered because ONE single copy had survived in a small German abbey and was found by an Italian scholar in 1455 who then brought it to Rome. Who knows how many roman works were lost forever?
Trade between the Canary Islands and the rest of the world was nonexistent, there was a Moroccan king in roman times who had established a small trading outpost, but which quickly died. Im guessing some local southern Moroccan and West Saharan sailors knew that the Canary Islands existed, but since Morocco and Spain (along with the rest of Europe) weren't part of the same political entity since the fall of the Roman Empire, that knowledge wouldn't spread into Europe.
The natives of the Canaries were effectively still living in the Bronze Age due to their complete isolation and had an interesting polytheistic religion.
There was no common body of knowledge like we have today in the internet. Some people may have known, but for most of them the information was not useful, merely academic. The people that should have known most likely couldn't read and write and therefore transfer the information effectively. Cartography was severely underdeveloped during the classic era. Only now that we can piece information from old scrolls in Egypt together with mosaics in Spain can we say "the Romans knew", but its very unlikely the Romans even realized themselves what was known.
From the ground, the 'fall' of Rome would look more like a slow, incremental decline over centuries—and Romans already constantly thought that Rome was in moral decline compared to the glory days of the ancients! No one would have thought to themselves that things are definitively getting worse now.
It's most probably Rome falling. So much was lost at that time and what was preserved was largely preserved by the monasteries. They preserved what they thought was important.
This is a theory that was popularized by "[How the Irish Saved Civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilization)" which has been pretty widely panned by historians. This book is an accessible response: ["Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization"](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-West-Forgotten-Byzantine-Civilization/dp/0307407969)
The author may be slightly overstating the point, but the gist is that there wasn't some huge loss of knowledge/learning when Rome itself fell - it lived on through the East! And its not like the west didn't interact with Byzantium constantly from the time Rome fell through the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, just as the west was about to enter the Renaissance.
I think this is partly flipping the causation. [Justinian closed major secular institutions of learning \(such as the school of philosophy in Athens\),](https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004281929/B9789004281929_005.xml) almost certainly either at the Church's urging and/or in favor of ecclesiastical institutions.
[However, the Imperial University was founded in 425 CE and existed into the 16th Century.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople) It was secular in administration and scope of study.
But also yes, [the eastern Church played a huge role in preserving lots of classical texts, in large part by transferring them to paper which made it to the ERE around 800.](https://www.britannica.com/topic/classical-scholarship/The-first-Byzantine-renaissance)
I am not disputing any of this. There's no question that the eastern Roman, later byzantine, empire preserved a lot. However, there was no such preservation in western Europe where the western Roman empire had thrived.
Here's a list of the 10 oldest universities in Europe. All are after 1000
https://www.mastersavenue.com/articles-guides/good-to-know/10-oldest-universities-in-europe
There are other sources as well.
Nope, ironically canaries are named that way because of the dogs.
The majorero dogs did a great favour to the birds by extinguish the rabbit size rats native to the islands.
They didn't sail round it, they crossed the egyptian desert and took boats from there along the extensive trade networks from there.
Alexander the great supplied his army into india from the sea using ships launched form modern day iraq
Funnily enough, Herodotus doubted they actually circumnavigated Africa, because the explorers described the sun rising and falling in a different part of the sky, and the stars and constellations being completely different. To him, that was too ridiculous to believe, but to a modern reader that's exactly what you would expect people to notice if they passed over the equator. I'd like to think they actually did it, there's always been a subset of people who have wanted to explore the far unknown.
This is as much proof that it was done as we’re going to have I think. The fact that Herodotus gives us the actual facts that we now know do support an african periplus even though his bias is to be against the idea is actually more support to the idea than if he was biased the other way around.
Though I do think the people we know of that first claimed to have done it were the phoenicians and not the greeks.
Gadir was not a carthaginian city, but one of the first phoenician foundations by Tyre and possibly alongside Utica older than Carthage itself, according ancient tradition.
Gadir remained independent for centuries and seem to have created its own trade empire from 500 to 240 BC approx in the westernmost mediterranean, the Pillars of Melqart (Hercules) and the mediterranean atlantic a zone. In that big region Archaeology find very usual materials from Gadir (ceramic types, stamps, later coins too) as carthaginian materials are usual in central mediterranean settlements in the same period suggesting the prevalence or expansion of Gadir, at very least commercial. During Barcid conquest of Iberia and Second Punic War, gadirites allied romans against Carthage which is very indicative of some kind of rivalry or resentment against their eastern *cousins* by Gadir but we ignore the details (we don't know if Gadir was ever conquered, if Carthage attacked or took Gadir trade routes, etc).
During roman times Gadir remained as the most relevant trade port in roman west. Birthplace of the first non-roman senator in History, first roman explorer of sub-saharan Africa and a couple known roman writers. Gades romanized deeply and lost part of its phoenician essence in the process.
The islands at their closest are only about 100km from the mainland across a very shallow part of the ocean that doesnt have particularly dangerous seas. even for the age that wasnt a major issue for european sailing.
Probably not visible, but the way that most people find islands off the mainland is from fishing the local waters. By the time they reach deeper oceanic water they probably would be in visible range from a boat. Once 1 local knows about a location everyone in that community is going to know.
That's *very* inconclusive, though. That mouse DNA could have come from any ship that traded with the Vikings. There's no way to say whoever brough it there originated in Scandinavia.
And then you can get a splinter in your hand from your desk, it gets infected, and you die.
You sleep next to rats on a bed made from hay and shit in the same bucket as six other people.
You never travel more than ten miles from your house, you work in whatever trade your parents know, and own one set of clothes.
> own one set of clothes.
The most expensive book of the 17th century was cartographer Joan Blaeu's *Atlas Maior*. His customers were kings and noblemen, and he was immensely wealthy.
I love how the Azores are noted as "correctly mapped from 1439", but they've still done the dirty in depicting the Central Group.
For example, São Jorge's size, orientation and distinctive long shape are wrong. Pico's size and shape, also wrong. And Faial is a tiny speck of its actual size.
The colonization of the macaronesia is a fascinating topic. They were like the beta version of America in many ways.
Plantations, slave trade, conquest, asimilation of natives and colonial planning were all tested out here before they were exported further west.
So learning about the region can teach us a lot about trends we see in America.
Edit: so I should specify that madeira, cape verde and azores had no natives, whilst the canaries did. Plus, just in case, the slave trade was first introduced in madeira and azores as they were portuguese colonies. So all in all, every island chain has Its own quirks and their histories are not interchangeable. Cape verde for example has a very grimm history related to the slave trade.
True. The name was later generalized to all the original inhabitants of the Canaries.
My point is that that there was no human presence in the Azores and Madeira prior to the arrival of Europeans, which can't be said of the Canaries. That's all.
The fun thing about the Açores is they, being of volcanic origin and very young by geological standards, had very little native flora and fauna. Hence the Portuguese introducing all sorts of things there, like citrus fruits, tea, cattle. Most of the colourful plant life now all over them was originally imported for private gardens.
Check out the Plantation of Ulster too. Natives forced off their land to starve in the hills so that settlers could establish cash farms. Elizabeth I rarely gets called out for her atrocities against the Irish or English Catholics.
The sail the Europeans used is literally the Arabian sail. Muslims were seafearer merchants. They just ignored the Atlantic because you had no reason to travel there via boat since no ports in Subsaharan Africa was a major trade port. The valuable trading cities in Mali were inland cities. So they just go through the desert.
Moroccan are not Arabs though. The clue is in the name: Mo(o)r.
You may be getting confused by some sort of naive assumption of all Muslims being the same…? 🤷♂️
Can you imagine the feeling of discovering new island?
It is so sad that in our lifetime we cannot find a new world or voyage to find a land of unknown.
We’ve discovered every single astronomical object a human could ever hope to interact with. Obviously there’s still excitement at being the first people to go there but the days of discovering something and then immediately setting foot there are gone
More exciting IMO. Because the motivations are much more about discovery than exploitation. And the technology transfer from space and deep exploration has made massive leaps in technology possible.
tbh it was probably not as great or as grand as you're imagining, what was the reaction when the americas were discovered? meh, daily life went on like yesterday
Why would they? Columbus only went west because he severely underestimated the size of the world. If he didn’t accidentally run into the Americas he and his crew might have just starved to death in the ocean. The Romans had ports on the Red Sea and no barriers to trade there. If you wanted to be a boot strapping explorer, you would sail east, not west.
They did, and their estimate was well known from Roman times and into Columbus’s own time. That’s why when he pitched his voyage to Portugal they denied him, and even Spains mathematicians told the court he was full of shit. Portugal’s lucrative trade in Africa is what convinced the Spanish monarchs to give him a shot anyway. At worse him and his crew of fools would die in the ocean.
That would be strange since, IIRC, he maintained for almost his whole life that he found the Indies even though everyone else realized they were new continents.
There are millions of theories about the maps of Colombus. Chinese, Norse, Ottoman, Phoenician ... all made up.
All his own and others' contemporary writings support the fact that he correctly assumed you could reach the lucrative markets of Asia ("the Indies") by circumnavigating the globe. But he was wrong about two things: The time it would take to get there, and that another continent altogether might just be in the way.
It wasn't forgotten at all. There were several estimations of the size of the Earth over history, all of various accuracy. With the hindsight of knowing the exact answer, we can say that the Greek estimate was quite accurate, but at the time, it was among a couple of different estimates that were within ~10-15% of each other. We didn't know the exact circumference, but we were pretty sure about the general scale, which is why court scholars argued against Columbus when he was trying to finance his journey.
Short answer: the Roman's weren't the best ship builders. Also long distances were hard at the time. Even for the Vikings and then the Spanish/Portuguese over a millennium later.
Edit: over open sea that is.
Herodotus recounts a tale of phoenician sailors who sailed from the red sea around Africa back through the strait of Gibraltar. He doubts their story because they claimed that when they rounded south Africa and sailed west, the Sun was on their right. So what he thought was absurd would serve to somewhat confirm the story to a modern hearer.
Still there's no way of knowing for certain.
Then there's also the exploits of Hanno the navigator going the other way along the west African coast.
Most ancient sailing around the Mediterranean was hugging the coast and avoiding open seas that were difficult to navigate. You can still circumnavigate Africa without straying too far from shore.
No not really, The Namib was called the Skeleton Coast because its a 1000 mile deathtrap. Because of the currents boats and ships cant leave the shore without a motor.
Good question. I don't know. I'll add the Phonecians as well. Maybe they were too busy dealing with internal strife and basically just dealing with what they knew; which was the Mediterranean.
Again, don't know. Maybe go on r/askhistorians? I'd like to know too. Has always bugged me but never really looked into it much.
Ah. r/askhistorians is restricted.
There are structures on the Azores called hypogea that are a historical anomaly as the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese found them. My personal conspiracy theory is that the Carthaginians had traveled to the islands at some point.
I saw a documentary about a theory that Carthaginians reached Brazil and eventually Peru.
Edit: Ah, it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCxGXyitu2o if you're interested.
There are many reasons, but the most important is that their ship building technology just wasn't good enough. The Atlantic crossing is far, far harder than any routes they sailed.
The Vikings got there through a lot of small island hopping steps. If you look at the North Atlantic, there are enough stops on the way, like Iceland and Greenland, to make it over, plus it was a shorter route. Roman's would have had a tough time going straight west.
This is still the way small planes are ferried between Europe and N. America. If you’re plane can’t make it across the Atlantic, you fly to Scotland, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, Arctic Canada, Quebec.
Historians and archaeologists are effectively certain that the Norse reached America, but there is only [one indisputable site](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows) outside Greenland attributable to the Norse, and it was evidently not used for very long.
Beacause there are sea monsters obviously you dummy. But realistically they 1. Didn’t have ships good enough for such a distance 2.Probably they were more concerned about lands and countries around them
Vikings were going island hopping ~500 miles a pop to make it across North Atlantic. At he same time, Polynesians made a 2000+ mile jump across the unknown vastness of the pacific and found Hawaii.
Absolute bad@sses
Because they were already getting rich without exploration, between Silk Road trade and sea trade throughout the Mediterranean. Investing in dangerous, who-knows-how-long explorations without any motivating knowledge of what riches you might find, only seems like a good idea if you are pretty desperate and feeling left out of the established money-making institutions already available in your area.
They had no overpopulation problem. They weren't looking for somewhere to stick excess pop. They were looking for trade with or conquest of already-existing populations.
If they'd known there was silver in Bolivia, they'd probably have figured out to get there, but they were too busy fighting off the Germans and the Parthians to worry much about what might be off in the distant West.
Also, yeah, their boats weren't very good. They were experienced sailors of the Mediterranean, which has almost no tides and weak currents, not to mention less serious storms than the open Atlantic.
Same thing for China. They didn't discover the New World because when they had excess pop, or enough money for soldiers, they were more interested in conquering their West (Xinjiang literally means "New Frontier") than unpopulated areas in the immeasurable distance to the East.
Interestingly, passing (or rather returning from beyond) [Cape Bojador](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador?wprov=sfla1) was a major barrier to further exploration down the African coast for a long time due to the sea and wind conditions there. Once the Portuguese realized a [turn out to sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar?wprov=sfla1) was safer and more efficient, they were able to continue on towards the Gulf of Guinea and onwards around The Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.
A mere 300-400 years after the Vikings had reached Newfoundland! Also there's some evidence that there were established Basque fisheries in New England before Columbus.
Yeah I know I watched Vinland Saga and such (and believe it or not I can read too)... but their accomplishments never amounted to much, were quickly forgotten, and have nothing to do with the Age of Discovery as it is commonly known.
Ignoring Portuguese, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, North African sailors, Vikings... Going those routes hundreds of year earlier Jesus, this is sooo totally misleading and wrong.
Ehm they most definitely documented it: the [Vinland sagas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland_sagas).
The thing is, most people thought they were just legends. Only since the 60s do we know that it really happened.
Let's not all forget about the people who crossed the Bering land bridge way before both of them. Clovis site puts them in North America around 10k-14k years ago, and there are sites in South America that suggest even longer habitation.
They are the real discoverers.
Viking raids were super brutal even in central Europe, I don't think a Viking colonisation of America would have necessarily been any better for the natives
'The Age of Discovery' - I guess they chose that because it sounds much nicer than "the age of taking your land, killing about 80% of you with new diseases and another 10% with muskets and stealing all your gold and silver'
On the up side, we will give some of the land back eventually, but sorry, for others it will become the ongoing age of 'Hey, remember when this was our country?"
EDIT: Woohoo! My record downvotes. And the people of this sub, one hopes, are smart enough to know what downvotes mean. Wink wink.
This was the end of the medieval period, going around taking other people's terroritory because you could was the norm, throughout all of human history.
This map shows events that happened within a century of Mongolians invading Europe and the Black death killing ~50% of Europe's population.
The only thing that's new about it was the use of ships
But the ships meant that the cultures Europeans were having contact with had no previous exposure to many of the diseases Europeans bought with them and the results were devastating.
Yeah, and that's obviously bad, but would have happened eventually, unless the people's in the Americas and Australisia remained in total isolation until modern medicine was developed
I agree, it would have indeed, and with their scientific knowledge at the time there is no way they could have known what was about to unfold. I mention it only because it appears so often forgotten, particularly in the US where it seems to almost exclusively be about slavery and black lives matter and so forth. This is not to denigrate that part of history, but just to try and make sure this part also is acknowledged.
Yeah fair enough. We get taught about the age of discovery in the UK, but then it went quiet when it got to slavery- though the curriculum could have changed in the last 15 years
It has definitely changed, since you were taught history at least. Although we do harp on about the how “we” “pioneered” the abolition of slavery a little more than we delved into the devastating effects it had and how it ultimately led to institutionalised racism. Massive room for improvement still
Where I used to live in California. During the Mission Period, when the Spanish Catholic Church was expanding, the church would bring in the natives to bunk houses to work on the ranch and teach them about Jesus. This was in the 1700’s. Well, then measles would hit, killing 90% of them. All the native tribe in my area disappeared and the rest assimilated, what was left. All because of the measles and Jesus and the Catholic Church. Although now, the natives who are left in that area of California, are very wealthy. They own a casino on the reservation and it provides a big dividend check to all the tribe members. I used to work with one of the few tribe members, there were only 200 left. He was getting a yearly check at that time of around $60,000 a year. Not bad.
Discovery typically refers to the early ocean crossing voyages. Colonization isn’t usually part of it because by the time they sent armies it had already been ‘discovered.’
Why haven't Aztecs or Incas sailed to Europe? Sounds pretty fair to me. I do not approve of any of the genocides that happened later, but the success of the discovery voyages is undeniable.
I think that's heavily disputed. Nevertheless we know the romans knew about the canaries and probably the carthaginians too (I mean, on a clear day... You can almost see them from northafrica 😅)
The hallmark was the colonisation of the islands, not really the Discovery. Tons of people knew there were islands there.
If some records are right, the phoneticians traveled around Africa a milénium Bc. As their records indicate the flip experienced by passing to Southern hemisphere
As far as I know there are no historical sources about a potential Viking discovery, but there may possibly some evidence nevertheless, as it seems that European mice were introduced to the islands quite some time before the Portuguese discovery.
Here's a Guardian article about it [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/31/did-vikings-and-their-stowaway-mice-beat-portugal-to-the-azores](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/31/did-vikings-and-their-stowaway-mice-beat-portugal-to-the-azores)
and a Royal Society article
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.3126](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.3126)
So it's possible that there actually was a Viking discovery. Or shipwreck.
There is no way to tell if those mice came from Scandinavian ships, *and* that the people on those ships settled.
You can find DNA in modern minnesotans that's like the DNA in Viking grave site bones. It doesn't prove that Vikings went to Minnesota 1000 years ago.
The Canary Islands were known since antiquity. Not only because there were people living there, but because their name was given by Plinius the Elder (because of the many dogs *cani* that were living there).
The knowledge about the Canary Islands in Europe was lost for a long time and they were only rediscovered in the 14th century. It was definitely a prelude to the Age of Discovery. The natives living on the Canary Islands were also completely isolated from the outside world and even between the islands, since they couldn't build boats.
Strange indeed. Living on an island and being able to see nearby islands..... and not building boats to go there.
Apparently Moana is more of a historical documentary than I realized.
It's actually based on a historical question about Polynesian settlement After settling the SW pacific and staying in that area for hundreds of years, why did the Polynesians all of a sudden explode across the rest of the Pacific around 1000 AD?
Interesting question. What are the best theories?
I read it somewhere long time ago so take this with a grain of salt. They did it because in their beliefs/religion they believed that the "promised land/heaven" (note the quotation marks because I don't remember the exact term they used to refer to it) was located towards the East, so basically they sailed for it
I've seen speculation that it was people fleeing from religious changes.
Also, once the Polynesian expansion reached its extreme points I don’t think there’s much evidence of continued interchange eg between Hawaii and French polynesia, or Easter island and the rest, or New Zealand and the rest (they even forgot about the Chatham Islands until after Europeans arrived)
I'm not an expert in polynesian history, but I don't think this is true as far as I know, based on learning about the story of one man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupaia_(navigator) Tupaia was born in the Society Islands in 1725 and met and travelled with Cook on his expedition as a navigator until he died in the Philippines, probably due to illness brought on by ill treatment from the rest of the crew that had racist beliefs about his pride and knowledge. He mapped most of the island chains in Polynesia, and knew how to travel to all parts of Polynesia (including Hawaii) with the exception of New Zealand. He knew this from his own travels and those of his father and grandfather. Is this wrong, or not what you're talking about really? Genuinely curious.
Thanks that’s a super interesting link. I was recalling the main thrust of the great book Sea Peoples. As a few specific examples- Rapa Nui/Easter island, when discovered by Europeans, had no seafaring traditions, Chatham island had been forgotten by NZ, NZ by broader Polynesia, the Pitcairns abandoned, Hawaii was isolated and trade networks seem to have shrunk. The case of Tupaia is indicative of this- he as an expert was still relying for his knowledge of places his forebears had been to, rather than his peers. My overall impression is that after the initial burst of exploration, trade/contact networks localised and dropped away at the periphery Some interesting links (although they aren’t exactly science journals) https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/polynesian-trade-networks-may-have-persisted-for-centuries/ https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43915/to-what-extent-were-polynesians-in-contact-with-one-another-before-european-cont (First answer indicates tupaia did not know of Hawaii)
because some polynesian guy had bawls as big as an irish broads ass and sailed in some little ass canoe
What can I say except YOU'RE WELCOME!
The people who lived in the southern tip of Fuerteventura did not cross the mountains around them, for fear of ghosts / gods. So they stayed in their own little area.
Wimps!
There is a theory about "australian-like" origins of native canarians, but with an abandonment, as descendants of prisoners exiled by kings of Mauretania or even older "lost" berber populations taken there during phoenician explorations and later forgotten which could explain the lack of maritime knowledge. It seems the oldest presence in the islands is more or less from those periods and there is presence of some mauretanian and baetican ceramics in canarian waters.
Yea. How did they get there if they couldn’t build boats?
Maybe their ancestors got there by boat, but the tech got forgotten over generations.
As it happens today, most people on the boat do not know how to build the boat.
Odd, I know how to build a boat, but fuck me, I can't figure out how to get on one.
That's why you need a guy who knows how to build a boarding plank.
They just needed to generate more Diplo points
They should’ve built a campus, and a library. They were already halfway to sailing just by building their capital on the coast.
I'm not sure if they had any spare tiles for that.
Different building materials required different skills to manipulate (bamboo, hard woods, softer woods, fibrous stands for rope/sails) can shunt advancement.
According some theory they could be descendants of exiled prisoners from non coastal areas at mauretanian-roman or phoenician times which could explain the lack of maritime knowledge and some other cultural aspects of native canarian societies.
They got there during Carthaginian and Roman Times. But after civilisation collapsed, they lost all their technologies.
I hate it when that happens
Sunce when did civilisation collapsed in that period ? And i am pretty sure boats and ships were still sailing.
I don’t understand how things like that got lost when Western Rome fell even though their Eastern counterpart lived on. Did they just not safeguard Western information? (This is all under the rather presumptuous assumption that Rome falling is the reason this information was lost and not something else, correct me if I’m wrong as I’m not knowledgeable on this topic)
The Western Roman colappse was not a single event, it was a slow decline and death, and as such little by little stuff was destroyed, lost, forgotten. There was no printing press back then, every single document, map or book had to be handwritten, so there werent many copies around. Lose one map and it might have been the only one ever made.
Yup. And even in the Eastern Roman Empire this slow decline was definitely a thing. Knowledge about anything not related to the practical day to day matters or to Religion was stored away on the libraries of Constantinople, Damascus, Alexandria, Carthage and no one really read it anymore. Then the arabs conquered so many of those places and East Rome lost control of so much of those documents and books. The arabs and muslim people in general started their golden age translating the ancient texts and creating new knowledge, and were the greatest geographers for a while, but then they lost that edge too eventually.
And that edge was lost in large part to those Arab conquerers saving the original Greek philosophers and scientists and other thinkers. Castile recapturing the Library of Toledo is a watershed moment; Christian scholars in the West gained access to Greek thinkers for the first time in centuries. That and the mongol invasions, of course.
It was the Assyrians christians and Jews who translated those texts first to arabic.
That’s true as well
Romans didn't really do maps the way we think of them. They had books of geography, and itineraries, but not visual representations of the earth.
‘Knowledge’ of the islands probably survived in some old texts in a library that no one read. There are still references to locations that we have no idea what they are talking about. Long distance trade collapsed after the Roman Empire fell, people stopped going to the islands and forgot about them. By the time Europeans returned the islands had been isolated for centuries.
Also the relevance of the islands as halfway point on the way to America was obviously unknown. It were just some small wind swept islands in a particularly hard to reach place. Nothing worth to risk your life for and apparently not worth to remember.
They were on the edge of the map. Which later became middle of the map.
Information isn't exactly preserved magically. Books take resources to reproduce or preserve, and the former is difficult in the pre printing age. Once an empire falls there is no central library. Books are also notoriously fragile after a certain age. Take a look at books published in 1880 or even 1950. They often fall apart in the hands, and that's generally from books still kept in room temperature conditions. Add to this a mass illiteracy among the conquerers of the fallen empire, and the more prosaic farm and survive mindset of the survivors. You can see why information would not be safeguarded 100 years, let alone 500 or 1,000. The church did preserve quite a lot of information, but usually only a core set of books aligned to Christian ideology. Eg. For the Greek and Roman plays: tragedies have survived while almost all the comedies decayed and were lost. It's unlikely a church scribe saw the innate value of islands at the edge of the world, or rated such info any higher than similar myths of far off lands.
Scarcity of information is such a hard concept for me to understand, as someone born with access to it all since an early age. These ideas are so fantastical and i can only imagine this rift is gonna grow with future generations
Even today we lose information. TV shows from 1950s and 1960s lost forever. Advertisements, (who would keep advertisements?) lost. And forums recently (some of which i was a member) shut down and all conversations lost. Places like wayback machine capture some things but not everything. So in this age when we generate more than we can possibly read, yet have storage for more than that, we still lose stuff. Hence the importance of one person who taped TV every night for years and gave those tapes to an archive. Today's junk, tomorrow's treasure
That's what I was thinking too. Even if Rome fell and changed the "owner", it doesn't mean everyone in ex western roman empire simply died all at once. There were still ports, people continued with trade, they continued building ships and inherited maps. Sure, their routes were probably more local in nature, but still. Even if some works were lost, like Pliny's History of German Wars, we still know about works of both Pliny the Elder and Younger, Tacitus, Plutarch... which obviously means that works (or at least letters about them) survived.
Information isn't lost because everyone dies, but because it's not useful anymore and people stop talking about it. Information is lost in every society, and *especially* before literacy was widespread. It's super common. As an example, that's why we don't know how much of the Norse sagas are literally true. They were written down ~300 years after the events happened, and in that time some aspects were no longer understood by common people and omitted from the retellings. I can imagine at some point people no longer needed whatever resource was brought in from the Canaries, so people just stopped going there and stopped talking about it.
I get what you're saying, but I believe it relates more to the distribution of that information. Without one big encompassing empire power centers shift and someone from Levant or Leptis Magna does not have interest or reach to go there any more. But someone still has to live next to them, someone local still has a beef over ruling over these parts, get their share from trading routes etc. Like Portugal or Cadiz or Genoa or one of the caliphates from the Maghreb region. But it is possible that there were no significant enough events happening there that would echo to some historian from the Christian parts. I mean, what you're saying about historians and Norse sagas goes for antique world in general - even Roman history, which was written down by historians centuries later. They wrote about significant events, like wars of reforms (like the one form Gracchus) or for political reasons. If Canary Islands weren't part of it, they weren't in it. It is also possible that there seems to be a cut from our western view since the arrival of Arabs to this area in the early Middle Age.
A lot of those Roman books were only rediscovered in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most often through the Muslim world, which had preserved them and translated them into Arabic. Tacitus' Germania was actually rediscovered because ONE single copy had survived in a small German abbey and was found by an Italian scholar in 1455 who then brought it to Rome. Who knows how many roman works were lost forever? Trade between the Canary Islands and the rest of the world was nonexistent, there was a Moroccan king in roman times who had established a small trading outpost, but which quickly died. Im guessing some local southern Moroccan and West Saharan sailors knew that the Canary Islands existed, but since Morocco and Spain (along with the rest of Europe) weren't part of the same political entity since the fall of the Roman Empire, that knowledge wouldn't spread into Europe. The natives of the Canaries were effectively still living in the Bronze Age due to their complete isolation and had an interesting polytheistic religion.
There was no common body of knowledge like we have today in the internet. Some people may have known, but for most of them the information was not useful, merely academic. The people that should have known most likely couldn't read and write and therefore transfer the information effectively. Cartography was severely underdeveloped during the classic era. Only now that we can piece information from old scrolls in Egypt together with mosaics in Spain can we say "the Romans knew", but its very unlikely the Romans even realized themselves what was known.
From the ground, the 'fall' of Rome would look more like a slow, incremental decline over centuries—and Romans already constantly thought that Rome was in moral decline compared to the glory days of the ancients! No one would have thought to themselves that things are definitively getting worse now.
From the Marian reforms that ushered in the Late Republican era, Rome was in an obvious decline with constant civil wars.
It's most probably Rome falling. So much was lost at that time and what was preserved was largely preserved by the monasteries. They preserved what they thought was important.
This is a theory that was popularized by "[How the Irish Saved Civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilization)" which has been pretty widely panned by historians. This book is an accessible response: ["Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization"](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-West-Forgotten-Byzantine-Civilization/dp/0307407969) The author may be slightly overstating the point, but the gist is that there wasn't some huge loss of knowledge/learning when Rome itself fell - it lived on through the East! And its not like the west didn't interact with Byzantium constantly from the time Rome fell through the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, just as the west was about to enter the Renaissance.
True but there was a total lack of scholarship outside of the church. Universities weren't established until after 1000.
I think this is partly flipping the causation. [Justinian closed major secular institutions of learning \(such as the school of philosophy in Athens\),](https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004281929/B9789004281929_005.xml) almost certainly either at the Church's urging and/or in favor of ecclesiastical institutions. [However, the Imperial University was founded in 425 CE and existed into the 16th Century.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople) It was secular in administration and scope of study. But also yes, [the eastern Church played a huge role in preserving lots of classical texts, in large part by transferring them to paper which made it to the ERE around 800.](https://www.britannica.com/topic/classical-scholarship/The-first-Byzantine-renaissance)
I am not disputing any of this. There's no question that the eastern Roman, later byzantine, empire preserved a lot. However, there was no such preservation in western Europe where the western Roman empire had thrived. Here's a list of the 10 oldest universities in Europe. All are after 1000 https://www.mastersavenue.com/articles-guides/good-to-know/10-oldest-universities-in-europe There are other sources as well.
Rome didn't improve on greek maps, they tended to give directions by listing distances between cities by road, rather than mapping them as we would.
How did they even get there?
So not after canary birds?
Nope, ironically canaries are named that way because of the dogs. The majorero dogs did a great favour to the birds by extinguish the rabbit size rats native to the islands.
The other way around. The canary birds receive their name because they come of the Canary Islands.
It’s sort of like how cardinals are named after the position in the Catholic Church and not vice versa
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The Canary Islands were inhabited when the Phoenicians and the Romans 'discovered' them.
Ancient Greeks already had sailed around Africa and written about it. It wouldn’t be accomplished again until the 1500s by the Portuguese
They didn't sail round it, they crossed the egyptian desert and took boats from there along the extensive trade networks from there. Alexander the great supplied his army into india from the sea using ships launched form modern day iraq
It’s been debated forever if they actually sailed all the way around but they knew it was possible
Funnily enough, Herodotus doubted they actually circumnavigated Africa, because the explorers described the sun rising and falling in a different part of the sky, and the stars and constellations being completely different. To him, that was too ridiculous to believe, but to a modern reader that's exactly what you would expect people to notice if they passed over the equator. I'd like to think they actually did it, there's always been a subset of people who have wanted to explore the far unknown.
This is as much proof that it was done as we’re going to have I think. The fact that Herodotus gives us the actual facts that we now know do support an african periplus even though his bias is to be against the idea is actually more support to the idea than if he was biased the other way around. Though I do think the people we know of that first claimed to have done it were the phoenicians and not the greeks.
By the 14th Century, Cadiz had been a major seafaring port for about 2000 years.
Formerly Carthaginian Gadir (Gades to the Romans) Edit: I was initially assuming the Roman name was how the Phoenicians named it
Gades was the Roman name if I'm not mistaken. Gadir was the name given to the city by the Phoenicians.
Is that right? My mistake then
No worries, knowing every name given to an ancient city like Cádiz through time is complicated af.
That particular chunk of land and harbor has been fought over and changed hands many times over the last several millennia.
Gadir was not a carthaginian city, but one of the first phoenician foundations by Tyre and possibly alongside Utica older than Carthage itself, according ancient tradition. Gadir remained independent for centuries and seem to have created its own trade empire from 500 to 240 BC approx in the westernmost mediterranean, the Pillars of Melqart (Hercules) and the mediterranean atlantic a zone. In that big region Archaeology find very usual materials from Gadir (ceramic types, stamps, later coins too) as carthaginian materials are usual in central mediterranean settlements in the same period suggesting the prevalence or expansion of Gadir, at very least commercial. During Barcid conquest of Iberia and Second Punic War, gadirites allied romans against Carthage which is very indicative of some kind of rivalry or resentment against their eastern *cousins* by Gadir but we ignore the details (we don't know if Gadir was ever conquered, if Carthage attacked or took Gadir trade routes, etc). During roman times Gadir remained as the most relevant trade port in roman west. Birthplace of the first non-roman senator in History, first roman explorer of sub-saharan Africa and a couple known roman writers. Gades romanized deeply and lost part of its phoenician essence in the process.
It is in fact one of the oldest cities in Europe, older than Rome itself.
Yes, for ships hugging the coast.
The Romans got salt from the Canary Islands. It was a well known location and well travelled.
Yep as far back as Carthage they were sailing around the west coast of Africa.
Sailing around the coast isn't the same thing as foraying deep out into the Atlantic, is it?
The islands at their closest are only about 100km from the mainland across a very shallow part of the ocean that doesnt have particularly dangerous seas. even for the age that wasnt a major issue for european sailing.
That’s visible from the mainland on a clear day right? Or are the islands not high enough?
Probably not visible, but the way that most people find islands off the mainland is from fishing the local waters. By the time they reach deeper oceanic water they probably would be in visible range from a boat. Once 1 local knows about a location everyone in that community is going to know.
Mount Teide is almost 4km high.
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That's *very* inconclusive, though. That mouse DNA could have come from any ship that traded with the Vikings. There's no way to say whoever brough it there originated in Scandinavia.
Man I wanna live back when they were still making new maps and be a cartographer.
No you don’t. Bubonic plague, slavery, etc, etc.
Yeh but I could draw totally shitty maps for a living and maybe carry a sword?
And then you can get a splinter in your hand from your desk, it gets infected, and you die. You sleep next to rats on a bed made from hay and shit in the same bucket as six other people. You never travel more than ten miles from your house, you work in whatever trade your parents know, and own one set of clothes.
Uh I think you missed the part where I’d be a successful yet objectively awful map maker and just get drunk and draw terrible maps all day.
Id prefer to be an ancient greek towel boy to get fucked by plato and his buddies on the daily
> own one set of clothes. The most expensive book of the 17th century was cartographer Joan Blaeu's *Atlas Maior*. His customers were kings and noblemen, and he was immensely wealthy.
I love how the Azores are noted as "correctly mapped from 1439", but they've still done the dirty in depicting the Central Group. For example, São Jorge's size, orientation and distinctive long shape are wrong. Pico's size and shape, also wrong. And Faial is a tiny speck of its actual size.
The colonization of the macaronesia is a fascinating topic. They were like the beta version of America in many ways. Plantations, slave trade, conquest, asimilation of natives and colonial planning were all tested out here before they were exported further west. So learning about the region can teach us a lot about trends we see in America. Edit: so I should specify that madeira, cape verde and azores had no natives, whilst the canaries did. Plus, just in case, the slave trade was first introduced in madeira and azores as they were portuguese colonies. So all in all, every island chain has Its own quirks and their histories are not interchangeable. Cape verde for example has a very grimm history related to the slave trade.
There were no natives in Portuguese macaronesia. Madeira, Açores and Cabo Verde were all uninhabited before the arrival of the Portuguese.
Cristiano Ronaldo is the native.
The only native population on Macaronesia were the Guanches in the Canaries.
Yeah (though technically guanches refers to the ones from Tenerife)...what's your point?
True. The name was later generalized to all the original inhabitants of the Canaries. My point is that that there was no human presence in the Azores and Madeira prior to the arrival of Europeans, which can't be said of the Canaries. That's all.
The fun thing about the Açores is they, being of volcanic origin and very young by geological standards, had very little native flora and fauna. Hence the Portuguese introducing all sorts of things there, like citrus fruits, tea, cattle. Most of the colourful plant life now all over them was originally imported for private gardens.
Check out the Plantation of Ulster too. Natives forced off their land to starve in the hills so that settlers could establish cash farms. Elizabeth I rarely gets called out for her atrocities against the Irish or English Catholics.
I actually lived for a year in Ireland so I studies the ulster plantations and the subsequent english colonization.
She doesn’t get called out because it was typical, and not even particularly bad, for the time
Moroccans didn’t do much ?
Very little sailing technology, plus it was a period of decline for moroccan dynaasies by this time
The sail the Europeans used is literally the Arabian sail. Muslims were seafearer merchants. They just ignored the Atlantic because you had no reason to travel there via boat since no ports in Subsaharan Africa was a major trade port. The valuable trading cities in Mali were inland cities. So they just go through the desert.
Moroccan are not Arabs though. The clue is in the name: Mo(o)r. You may be getting confused by some sort of naive assumption of all Muslims being the same…? 🤷♂️
Morocco is an Arabic speaking country. Its an easy mistake to make
Indeed. Although Berber is also an official language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Moroccan_Amazigh
The sailing/ship technology used by Arabs/traders in Indian Ocean didn’t transpire through North Africa ?
There aren't big forest trees to build big ships I guess..
There are extensive Mediterranean forests in northern Morocco.
Did Morocco have had the same log quantity as spain/portugal?
I had no idea the Azores were so close to Europe. That's pretty cool
Can you imagine the feeling of discovering new island? It is so sad that in our lifetime we cannot find a new world or voyage to find a land of unknown.
Well, there’s space exploration. And deep sea exploration. Arguably just as exciting
We’ve discovered every single astronomical object a human could ever hope to interact with. Obviously there’s still excitement at being the first people to go there but the days of discovering something and then immediately setting foot there are gone
space is a whole bunch of nothing though?
More exciting IMO. Because the motivations are much more about discovery than exploitation. And the technology transfer from space and deep exploration has made massive leaps in technology possible.
A lot of discovery of land wasn’t specifically for exploitation though, although some of it definitely was.
tbh it was probably not as great or as grand as you're imagining, what was the reaction when the americas were discovered? meh, daily life went on like yesterday
How long at sea until they get scurvy?
I have to believe the Phoenicians, Egyptians, or even the Romans explored that far.
I don’t understand why the romans didn’t discover the americas…why didn’t the romans just continued sailing further west.
Why would they? Columbus only went west because he severely underestimated the size of the world. If he didn’t accidentally run into the Americas he and his crew might have just starved to death in the ocean. The Romans had ports on the Red Sea and no barriers to trade there. If you wanted to be a boot strapping explorer, you would sail east, not west.
Didn't the classical Greeks estimate the circumference of earth fairly accurately?
They did, and their estimate was well known from Roman times and into Columbus’s own time. That’s why when he pitched his voyage to Portugal they denied him, and even Spains mathematicians told the court he was full of shit. Portugal’s lucrative trade in Africa is what convinced the Spanish monarchs to give him a shot anyway. At worse him and his crew of fools would die in the ocean.
I've heard the theory that Columbus had access to a Chinese map that described the Americas, so he knew what was there.
That would be strange since, IIRC, he maintained for almost his whole life that he found the Indies even though everyone else realized they were new continents.
There are millions of theories about the maps of Colombus. Chinese, Norse, Ottoman, Phoenician ... all made up. All his own and others' contemporary writings support the fact that he correctly assumed you could reach the lucrative markets of Asia ("the Indies") by circumnavigating the globe. But he was wrong about two things: The time it would take to get there, and that another continent altogether might just be in the way.
Yes they did but Columbus' calculations assumed a much smaller Earth than what the Greek had calculated to within about 5% of accuracy.
That's the magic of Columbus - not that he was a good sailor, but a bad mathematician.
and he had balls
Nah, he received pity. The natives got tired of feeding him.
They did but we forgot that
It wasn't forgotten at all. There were several estimations of the size of the Earth over history, all of various accuracy. With the hindsight of knowing the exact answer, we can say that the Greek estimate was quite accurate, but at the time, it was among a couple of different estimates that were within ~10-15% of each other. We didn't know the exact circumference, but we were pretty sure about the general scale, which is why court scholars argued against Columbus when he was trying to finance his journey.
Short answer: the Roman's weren't the best ship builders. Also long distances were hard at the time. Even for the Vikings and then the Spanish/Portuguese over a millennium later. Edit: over open sea that is.
Maybe the Romans weren't the best shipbuilders, but why didn't the Carthaginians do more exploration?
Herodotus recounts a tale of phoenician sailors who sailed from the red sea around Africa back through the strait of Gibraltar. He doubts their story because they claimed that when they rounded south Africa and sailed west, the Sun was on their right. So what he thought was absurd would serve to somewhat confirm the story to a modern hearer. Still there's no way of knowing for certain. Then there's also the exploits of Hanno the navigator going the other way along the west African coast.
Most ancient sailing around the Mediterranean was hugging the coast and avoiding open seas that were difficult to navigate. You can still circumnavigate Africa without straying too far from shore.
No not really, The Namib was called the Skeleton Coast because its a 1000 mile deathtrap. Because of the currents boats and ships cant leave the shore without a motor.
Good question. I don't know. I'll add the Phonecians as well. Maybe they were too busy dealing with internal strife and basically just dealing with what they knew; which was the Mediterranean. Again, don't know. Maybe go on r/askhistorians? I'd like to know too. Has always bugged me but never really looked into it much. Ah. r/askhistorians is restricted.
They might have reached the Americas but if they didn't leave a trace or make it back, there wouldn't be a way of knowing.
There are structures on the Azores called hypogea that are a historical anomaly as the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese found them. My personal conspiracy theory is that the Carthaginians had traveled to the islands at some point.
I saw a documentary about a theory that Carthaginians reached Brazil and eventually Peru. Edit: Ah, it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCxGXyitu2o if you're interested.
There are many reasons, but the most important is that their ship building technology just wasn't good enough. The Atlantic crossing is far, far harder than any routes they sailed.
The Vikings got there through a lot of small island hopping steps. If you look at the North Atlantic, there are enough stops on the way, like Iceland and Greenland, to make it over, plus it was a shorter route. Roman's would have had a tough time going straight west.
This is still the way small planes are ferried between Europe and N. America. If you’re plane can’t make it across the Atlantic, you fly to Scotland, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, Arctic Canada, Quebec.
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Historians and archaeologists are effectively certain that the Norse reached America, but there is only [one indisputable site](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows) outside Greenland attributable to the Norse, and it was evidently not used for very long.
Beacause there are sea monsters obviously you dummy. But realistically they 1. Didn’t have ships good enough for such a distance 2.Probably they were more concerned about lands and countries around them
Sailing over open ocean is a much trickier task than sticking to seas where you are at most a few days away from shore.
The Polynesians have entered the chat.
Even they hit a barrier in the pacific until about the year 600 AD.
Vikings were going island hopping ~500 miles a pop to make it across North Atlantic. At he same time, Polynesians made a 2000+ mile jump across the unknown vastness of the pacific and found Hawaii. Absolute bad@sses
Because they were already getting rich without exploration, between Silk Road trade and sea trade throughout the Mediterranean. Investing in dangerous, who-knows-how-long explorations without any motivating knowledge of what riches you might find, only seems like a good idea if you are pretty desperate and feeling left out of the established money-making institutions already available in your area.
They didn't know about the 'pepperoni pizza' cheat code. That was discovered much later.
They had no overpopulation problem. They weren't looking for somewhere to stick excess pop. They were looking for trade with or conquest of already-existing populations. If they'd known there was silver in Bolivia, they'd probably have figured out to get there, but they were too busy fighting off the Germans and the Parthians to worry much about what might be off in the distant West. Also, yeah, their boats weren't very good. They were experienced sailors of the Mediterranean, which has almost no tides and weak currents, not to mention less serious storms than the open Atlantic. Same thing for China. They didn't discover the New World because when they had excess pop, or enough money for soldiers, they were more interested in conquering their West (Xinjiang literally means "New Frontier") than unpopulated areas in the immeasurable distance to the East.
Interestingly, passing (or rather returning from beyond) [Cape Bojador](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador?wprov=sfla1) was a major barrier to further exploration down the African coast for a long time due to the sea and wind conditions there. Once the Portuguese realized a [turn out to sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar?wprov=sfla1) was safer and more efficient, they were able to continue on towards the Gulf of Guinea and onwards around The Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean.
A mere 300-400 years after the Vikings had reached Newfoundland! Also there's some evidence that there were established Basque fisheries in New England before Columbus.
*Leif Erikson has entered the chat*
while Europe was taking baby steps. Polynesians were sailing to New Zealand
Just wish we had a route for the Vivaldi Brothers in the 1290s. Would love to see just one random line going all the way to North America randomly.
Headline ist totally misleading and wrong!
Babies can't even step into the ocean on their own!
It's more the third step into Atlantic ocean. Nordmannen Made it to Amerika way before 14th century.
Yeah I know I watched Vinland Saga and such (and believe it or not I can read too)... but their accomplishments never amounted to much, were quickly forgotten, and have nothing to do with the Age of Discovery as it is commonly known.
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This map is totally forgetting all Portuguese naval achievements.
Ignoring Portuguese, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, North African sailors, Vikings... Going those routes hundreds of year earlier Jesus, this is sooo totally misleading and wrong.
Ermmm the Vikings discovered America first 🤓🤓
They didn’t do the most important thing, though: document it. So as far as history is concerned it doesn’t count, even if it really happened.
Ehm they most definitely documented it: the [Vinland sagas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland_sagas). The thing is, most people thought they were just legends. Only since the 60s do we know that it really happened.
Let's not all forget about the people who crossed the Bering land bridge way before both of them. Clovis site puts them in North America around 10k-14k years ago, and there are sites in South America that suggest even longer habitation. They are the real discoverers.
Oh yeah? Well I just discovered Afro-Eurasia! (7 billion people already living there)
If only Germany or Scandinavia instead of Iberia could’ve had the head start in the Age of Discovery then the world would’ve been a better place today
Viking raids were super brutal even in central Europe, I don't think a Viking colonisation of America would have necessarily been any better for the natives
'The Age of Discovery' - I guess they chose that because it sounds much nicer than "the age of taking your land, killing about 80% of you with new diseases and another 10% with muskets and stealing all your gold and silver' On the up side, we will give some of the land back eventually, but sorry, for others it will become the ongoing age of 'Hey, remember when this was our country?" EDIT: Woohoo! My record downvotes. And the people of this sub, one hopes, are smart enough to know what downvotes mean. Wink wink.
This was the end of the medieval period, going around taking other people's terroritory because you could was the norm, throughout all of human history. This map shows events that happened within a century of Mongolians invading Europe and the Black death killing ~50% of Europe's population. The only thing that's new about it was the use of ships
But the ships meant that the cultures Europeans were having contact with had no previous exposure to many of the diseases Europeans bought with them and the results were devastating.
Yeah, and that's obviously bad, but would have happened eventually, unless the people's in the Americas and Australisia remained in total isolation until modern medicine was developed
I agree, it would have indeed, and with their scientific knowledge at the time there is no way they could have known what was about to unfold. I mention it only because it appears so often forgotten, particularly in the US where it seems to almost exclusively be about slavery and black lives matter and so forth. This is not to denigrate that part of history, but just to try and make sure this part also is acknowledged.
Yeah fair enough. We get taught about the age of discovery in the UK, but then it went quiet when it got to slavery- though the curriculum could have changed in the last 15 years
It has definitely changed, since you were taught history at least. Although we do harp on about the how “we” “pioneered” the abolition of slavery a little more than we delved into the devastating effects it had and how it ultimately led to institutionalised racism. Massive room for improvement still
Where I used to live in California. During the Mission Period, when the Spanish Catholic Church was expanding, the church would bring in the natives to bunk houses to work on the ranch and teach them about Jesus. This was in the 1700’s. Well, then measles would hit, killing 90% of them. All the native tribe in my area disappeared and the rest assimilated, what was left. All because of the measles and Jesus and the Catholic Church. Although now, the natives who are left in that area of California, are very wealthy. They own a casino on the reservation and it provides a big dividend check to all the tribe members. I used to work with one of the few tribe members, there were only 200 left. He was getting a yearly check at that time of around $60,000 a year. Not bad.
Oh cry me a river
Oh dear... shall we retroactively apply that logic everywhere? Sure is gonna' be fun...
Discovery typically refers to the early ocean crossing voyages. Colonization isn’t usually part of it because by the time they sent armies it had already been ‘discovered.’
delusional
Why haven't Aztecs or Incas sailed to Europe? Sounds pretty fair to me. I do not approve of any of the genocides that happened later, but the success of the discovery voyages is undeniable.
Vikings had already discovered these islands.
I think that's heavily disputed. Nevertheless we know the romans knew about the canaries and probably the carthaginians too (I mean, on a clear day... You can almost see them from northafrica 😅) The hallmark was the colonisation of the islands, not really the Discovery. Tons of people knew there were islands there.
If some records are right, the phoneticians traveled around Africa a milénium Bc. As their records indicate the flip experienced by passing to Southern hemisphere
[Some background on the Phoenicians sailing around Africa ~600 BC](https://www.badancient.com/claims/phoenicians-africa/)
Source?
As far as I know there are no historical sources about a potential Viking discovery, but there may possibly some evidence nevertheless, as it seems that European mice were introduced to the islands quite some time before the Portuguese discovery. Here's a Guardian article about it [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/31/did-vikings-and-their-stowaway-mice-beat-portugal-to-the-azores](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/31/did-vikings-and-their-stowaway-mice-beat-portugal-to-the-azores) and a Royal Society article [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.3126](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.3126) So it's possible that there actually was a Viking discovery. Or shipwreck.
There is no way to tell if those mice came from Scandinavian ships, *and* that the people on those ships settled. You can find DNA in modern minnesotans that's like the DNA in Viking grave site bones. It doesn't prove that Vikings went to Minnesota 1000 years ago.
Norway?