14. Inscriptions relating to the casting of Athena Promachos, a towering bronze statue that once stood on the Acropolis, indicate that in the mid-fifth century BC one talent of tin sold for 233 drachmas and one talent of copper sold for 35 drachmas. James D. Muhly, “Sources of Tin and the Beginnings of Bronze Metallurgy,” Amer. J. Archaeology 89:2 (Apr. 1985), 276–77.
15. Muhly writes, “Contact between the Aegean (and lands to the east) and Iberia goes back no earlier than the ninth century BC and the onset of Phoenician expansion/colonization of the western Mediterranean” (“Sources of Tin,” 286). Javier G. Chamorro seems to disagree: “The archaeological and metallurgical evidence points to Iberian exploitation of the [silver] mines [of Tartessos] prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians and Greeks in the eighth to sixth centuries B.C.E. The mines remained in Tartessian hands; Phoenicians and Greeks simply provided new markets.” Chamorro, “Survey of Archaeological Research on Tartessos,” Amer. J. Archaeology 91:2 (Apr. 1987), 200.
16. A review of S. Bianchetti’s Pitea di Massalia: L’Oceano by K. Zimmerman mentions earlier journeys to northwestern Europe by Colaeus (blown off course), Midacritus, and Himilco (Classical Review, new ser. 50:1 [2000], 29). But some scholars apparently think there are even fewer bits of unarguable evidence concerning these than concerning Pytheas’s. One account that ascribes greater credibility to Himilco’s voyage than to Pytheas’s is Luis A. García Moreno, “Atlantic Seafaring and the Iberian Peninsula in Antiquity,” Mediterranean Studies 8 (1999), 1–13.
17. Casson, Ancient Mariners, 75.
18. Christina Horst Roseman, Pytheas of Massalia: On the Ocean—Text, Translation and Commentary (Chicago: Ares, 1994). C. F. C. Hawkes, in The Eighth J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture—Pytheas: Europe and the Greek Explorers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) mentions that Virgil’s phrase was “ultima Thule”; he contends that “Thule as Iceland seems to me clear” (34–35). Another scholar on Thule: “[T] here are three schools of thought: that Thule is indeed Iceland, that it was Norway, and that it was Shetland. It will be clear from the way I have presented the evidence that I belong to the Iceland school. To me the evidence seems unassailable” (Cunliffe, Extraordinary Voyage, 131–32).
19. Cunliffe, Extraordinary Voyage, 95–97, 102–103, 128–31; Hawkes, Eighth Myres Lecture, 37; Roseman, Pytheas, 121. Quoted descriptions are taken from Geminus, Introduction to Celestial Phenomena (first century AD) and Polybius. Cunliffe points out that Pytheas would have been measuring in the unit known as the stade, equivalent to 125 paces and amounting to 8.0 or 8.3 stades to the Roman mile, depending on who was doing the measuring. Ignoring fractals, the long and the short of it is that Britain’s coastline, as given in Encyclopaedia Britannica and cited by Cunliffe, measures 4,548 miles—and Pytheas’s approximation amounted to something in the neighborhood of 4,400 miles. Today (presumably taking into account only some of the ins and outs), according to the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, “The coastline length around mainland Great Britain is 11,072.76 miles,” www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/freefun/didyouknow/ (accessed May 17, 2010). But as Benoit Mandelbrot famously proposed in “How Long Is the Coastline of Britain?” there is no end of different numbers. Nevertheless, Pytheas was certainly on the right track compared with contemporaries of his, such as the disbelieving Strabo.
20. Roseman, Pytheas, 7–20, writes that eighteen known ancient writers referred to Pytheas by name between 300 BC and AD 550, notably Eratosthenes, Hipparkhos, Polybius, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder. Two more—Poseidonios and Diodoros—likely used his information but did not name him in their extant works. For a discussion of reasons not to credit Pytheas with this voyage, see Moreno, “Atlantic Seafaring and the Iberian Peninsula.”
21. Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 44; Casson, Ancient Mariners, 124; Cunliffe, Extraordinary Voyage, 99–100; Hawkes, Eighth Myres Lecture, 27–28, 30, 35–37.
22. Roseman, Pytheas, 117ff.
23. There is much doubt as to whether the Necho expedition was completed, though no doubt that it was undertaken. Herodotus, in Histories 4.42, reported that “[o]n their return, they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round [Africa] they had the sun upon their right hand.” In fact, only by going south of the equator can one see the Sun in such a position, so the very assertion Herodotus rejects is the one that best argues for the journey’s actually having taken place. See discussion of Necho’s seventh-century BC and Carthaginian king Hanno’s fifth-century BC voyages in Casson, Ancient Mariners, 116–24.
24. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker, 2005), 4.
25. Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 12–13; Williams, Sails to Satellites, 8–9; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, 129–32, 314; B. Arunachalam, “Traditional Sea and Sky Wisdom of Indian Seamen and Their Practical Applications,” in Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, ed. Himanshu Prabha Ray and Jean-François Salles (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), 264 and nn. 6–8. Tibbetts includes ibn Mājid quoting the Syrian rationalist philosopher and poet al-Ma’arri (129):
Suhail is the cheek of the beloved in colour
As the heart of the lover with its throbbing
Standing alone like the leading horseman
Clearly visible before the cavalry’s ranks.
26. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, 125; Alfred Clark, “Medieval Arab Navigation on the Indian Ocean: Latitude Determinations,” J. Amer. Oriental Society 113:3 (July–Sept. 1993), 360, 363.
27. Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 129, 161, x.
28. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 37; Abdul Sheriff, “Navigational Methods in the Indian Ocean,” in Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology on the Indian Ocean, ed. Ruth Barnes and David Parkin (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 216–18.
29. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 39; Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 92, 96, and generally 89–97. See also Barbara M. Kreutz, “Mediterranean Contributions to the Medieval Mariner’s Compass,” Technology and Culture 14:3 (July 1973), 367–83.
30. Guyot of Provins, quoted in Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 95–96.
31. Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 111–16, 140; Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 1–16, 38–40, 77, 88–89.
32. Gail Vines, “The Other Side of Ohthere,” New Scientist, June 28, 2008, 52–53; Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 97, 155–56. As Williams puts it, “Plutarch, writing in the first century AD, had a clearer idea of African geography than any West European had in, say, AD 1400” (Sails to Satellites, 6; see also 13). Re Zheng He, Deng notes, “Zheng He’s round-Asia marathon was by no means unprecedented in Chinese diplomacy: twelve centuries earlier, during the Three Kingdoms Period, Sun Quan, king of Wu, sent Zhu Ying and Kang Tai overseas for a twenty-year-long diplomatic mission, visiting southeast Asia, the Asian subcontinent, the Arabian sea region, and even the eastern Roman Empire” (Chinese Maritime Activities, 12). See also “Tuan Ch’eng-shih: Chinese Knowledge in the Ninth Century,” in G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 10. Deng also contends that “Zheng He’s maritime activities were military, or at least semimilitary,” pointing out that “the great majority of the passengers were soldiers to ‘show off China’s wealth and strength to overseas by presenting arms’ ” (10). Mark Denny, by contrast, presents Zheng He’s voyages as a version of the peaceable potlatch in How the Ocean Works: An Introduction to Oceanography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008): “Unlike the Portuguese, who arrived in India with thoughts of spices and the slave trade, the Chinese desired to demonstrate the superiority of China by handing out gifts. Thus, the Treasure Ship carried treasure from China to the rest of the world to dazzle natives with the majesty of the Middle Kingdom.” Chapter 1, “Discovering the Oceans,” available at press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8693.html (accessed Apr. 7, 2017).
33. Tr
anslation of Azurara’s chronicle in Emilia Viotti da Costa, “The Portuguese–African Slave Trade: A Lesson in Colonialism,” Latin American Perspectives 12:1 (Winter 1985), 44; also see Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 35–36.
34. William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (New York: Random House, 1998), 435.
35. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations in the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 10–11, 20–21. The author cites a number of images that reinforce this interpretation: Captain John Smith, colonizer of Virginia, appears in his Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) “as a fully armored knight standing right next to a globe.” America Retectio (ca. 1589), a series of engravings by a Flemish artist, shows Amerigo Vespucci using a quadrant for astronomical observation; beside him is “a banner bearing the cross, a reminder that Vespucci first described the constellation of the Southern Cross. A broken mast reminds the viewer that the knight-cosmographer has survived a tempest.” In another engraving, Ferdinand Magellan is “depicted as a knight clad in full armor who charts the heavens by means of an armillary sphere, a lodestone, and a compass.”
36. Arthur Davies, “Prince Henry the Navigator,” Transac. and Papers (Institute of Brit. Geographers) 35 (Dec. 1964), 119–27; Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 159; Viotti da Costa, “Portuguese–African Slave Trade,” 45–46; Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo on the reason to undertake voyages of conquest, quoted in Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 19.
37. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 3–40. See also “al-Idrisi: The First Western Notice of East Africa,” in Freeman-Grenville, East African Coast, 19–20: “The Zanj of the East African coast have no ships to voyage in, but use vessels from Oman and other countries which sail to the islands of Zanj which depend on the Indies . . . They own and exploit iron mines; for them iron is an article of trade and the source of their largest profits.”
38. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 15; Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created, 142–43.
39. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 80–81, 83–99; Williams, Sails to Satellites, 27; Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 160–61.
40. Viotti da Costa, “Portuguese–African Slave Trade,” 44–45, 47. See also Garrett Mattingly, “No Peace beyond What Line?” Transac. Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 13 (1963), 147; Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 32.
41. John Law, “On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India,” Sociological Rev. 32:S1 (May 1984), 234–63; Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 94–96; Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 162–66. The first extant terrestrial globe (1492), the “Erdapfel,” made by Martin Behaim, was executed on parchment and then stretched over a globe.
42. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 11–15.
43. The author of Breve compendio de la sfera y de la arte de navegar (1551) noted, “If two points on the equator are 60 leagues apart, two points on the same meridians at latitude 60° are only 30 leagues apart, but the chart, being plane, shows them still to be 60 leagues apart.” The FRS was John Wood, who attempted the Northeast Passage in 1676. See Williams, Sails to Satellites, 42, 45.
44. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 72–73.
45. David B. Quinn, “Columbus and the North: England, Iceland, and Ireland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 49:2 (Apr. 1992), 278–97; P. E. H. Hair, “Columbus from Guinea to America,” History in Africa 17 (1990), 115. There is some debate about the Iceland trip. The trip to what is now Ghana was to a recently established Portuguese fort on the Gold Coast, São Jorge da Mina de Ouro.
46. Columbus’s incorrect calculations are discussed in detail in, e.g., W. G. L. Randles, “The Evaluation of Columbus’ ‘India’ Project by Portuguese and Spanish Cosmographers in the Light of the Geographical Science of the Period,” Imago Mundi 42 (1990), 50–64; Williams, Sails to Satellites, 15–16. See also “Privileges and Prerogatives Granted by Their Catholic Majesties to Christopher Columbus: 1492,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu/15th_century/colum.asp (accessed Apr. 8, 2017).
47. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 69–70; Williams, Sails to Satellites, 9, 16, 18; Randles, “Evaluation of Columbus’ ‘India’ Project,” 54–55. Seventeen centuries earlier, Eratosthenes had raised the idea of heading west from Lisbon to reach China. For Mandeville, see C. W. R. D. Moseley, “Behaim’s Globe and ‘Mandeville’s Travels,’ ” Imago Mundi 33 (1981), 89–91. The e-book of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is available at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/782 (accessed Apr. 8, 2017). Two contradictory passages give the flavor: “And therefore in the Septentrion, that is very north, is the land so cold, that no man may dwell there. And, in the contrary, toward the south it is so hot, that no man ne may dwell there, because that the sun, when he is upon the south, casteth his beams all straight upon that part” (chap. 14) vs. “In Ethiopia be many diverse folk; and Ethiope is clept Cusis. In that country be folk that have but one foot, and they go so blyve that it is marvel. And the foot is so large, that it shadoweth all the body against the sun, when they will lie and rest them. In Ethiopia, when the children be young and little, they be all yellow; and, when that they wax of age, that yellowness turneth to be all black” (chap. 17). For details of the Columbus brothers’ intrigue, see Arthur Davies, “Behaim, Martellus and Columbus,” Geographical J. 143:3 (Nov. 1977), 451–59.
48. Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 70, 83–84, 90–96.
49. Williams, Sails to Satellites, 26–27.
50. Re Hipparchus, see David Royster, “Mathematics and Maps,” Carolinas Mathematics Conference, Oct. 17, 2002, 2–3, www.ms.uky.edu/~droyster/talks/NCCTM_2002/Mapping.pdf (accessed Apr. 8, 2017). For an extensive analysis of the map as state secret, see J. B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988), 57–76. Re grids, see Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 101.
51. See Gomes Eannes de Azurara (Portugal’s royal chronicler), The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, trans. C. R. Beazley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), 84–85, e-text at archive.org/details/chroniclediscov00presgoog (accessed Apr. 8, 2017).
52. Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation (1534), trans. and ed. R. A. Skelton (New York: Dover, 1969), 1, 5–8, 148.
53. J. B. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82:3 (Sept. 1992), 529–30.
54. Denis Cosgrove, “Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography,” Annals of the Assoc. of Amer. Geographers 93:4 (Dec. 2003), 854; 852–70.
55. E. G. R. Taylor, “Gerard Mercator: A.D. 1512–1594,” Geographical J. 128:2 (June 1962), 202; Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 3, “Mercator’s Résumé,” www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/534316.html (accessed Apr. 8, 2017); David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996), 14, 23 nn. 46, 48. Mercator was not only a mapmaker but also an instrument maker, engraver, and author of a comprehensive project, published in three phases, called Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (Atlas, or Cosmographic Meditations on the Fabric of the World and the Figure of the Fabrick’d). One of his speculations was that magnetic variation in compasses had a terrestrial cause. His work did not, however, result in the comprehensive scientization of cartography, whether oceanic or terrestrial: as late as the 1750s, on a major map of Germany that included two hundred locations, a mere thirty-three were fixed by astronomical determinations of latitude, and none well fixed by longitude. Mercator, by the way, was imprisoned in 1544 for four months on grounds of heresy. Re the questionnaires, Turnbull writes that the Consejo Real y Supremo
de las Indias issued them between 1569 and 1577: “On the whole this attempt to assemble the empire failed because of the lack of trained and disciplined personnel. Many failed to answer the questionnaire; those who did often misunderstood the questions or the instructions on making observations or gave inaccurate responses.”
56. Wright published his mathematical principles and his world map in 1599, in Certaine Errors in Navigation, and is sometimes credited with creating the first world map based on the Mercator projection after Mercator’s own of 1569. But Wright had given a Dutch acquaintance, Jocodus Hondius, an early version of the manuscript of Certaine Errors sometime before 1593, and Hondius, although having promised not to publish any of the information, seems to have preempted Wright by creating a world map of his own in 1598, as well as maps of individual regions. As the Dutch were ramping up their maritime exploration in the 1590s, presumably Hondius had much to gain from stealing Wright’s ideas. See Brian Hooker, “New Light on Jodocus Hondius’ Great World Mercator Map of 1598,” Geographical J. 159:1 (Mar. 1993), 45–46. Even more interesting is the expedition that ultimately resulted in Certaine Errors: having become a noted mathematician and cosmographer, Wright was in 1589 “ ‘called forth to the public business of the nation, by the Queen’ ” and asked to take part in an “expedition”—a thieving party, a pirates’ voyage—to the Azores, led by the Earl of Cumberland. See E. J. S. Parsons and W. F. Morris, “Edward Wright and His Work,” Imago Mundi 3:1 (1939), 61. “The object of Cumberland’s expedition,” write Parsons and Morris, “was to prey upon Spanish commerce.” Cumberland and his men took several ships: one full of spices, three full of sugar, and a fifth, the most valuable, full of hides, silver, and cochineal, which was wrecked off Cornwall.
57. See, e.g., Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, 100–127. In chap. 2 Parry contends, “It was not the sixteenth century, but the seventeenth, which saw the eclipse of the Mediterranean. The heirs of Italian mercantile predominance were not the Portuguese, but the English and the Dutch. . . . The Spaniards and the Portuguese, however, lacked the capital . . . and the financial organization to exploit commercially the discoveries which they made” (48).
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