At Sea
How wide is the ocean! Leaning on the deck-rail watching dawn break this morning, I thought of the Psalmist who saw "the whole earth round." The roundness of his earth was, of course, not spherical: rather, he imagined the round edge of a saucer, supported by an elephant, perhaps, or a giant tortoise, with the firmament its canopy above. For the mediaeval sailor, the vastness of the ocean was terrifying to contemplate. To be out of sight of land for days on end, as we have been, brought grave risks: pursuit by sea monsters, boiling in a tropical sea, even falling off the very edge of the world. For many guests aboard the Endeavour, on this remarkable month-long voyage following the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the immensity of the ocean on our little blue planet still commands respect and stirs the soul.
And in these empty spaces, our history has been written. In the north Atlantic, following a stepping stone route from Western Europe, via Iceland and Greenland, it was possible to make a transatlantic crossing without ever being too far from land. A band of Irish monks may have made such a journey as early as the sixth century. We know that the Vikings made it to North America at the end of the first millennium. For the first time in history two human populations met that had expanded around the globe in opposite directions from a point of origin that may have been in East Africa or in the Indus valley. It was movement of population that had taken twelve thousand years and five hundred generations to achieve – and it seems that the first mutual encounter was unfavorable. The Vikings returned home and it was another five hundred years before a permanent European settlement was established in the Americas.
It was Christopher Columbus's second voyage of settlement in 1493 that began the process that historians call the Columbian Exchange, the wholesale exchange of fauna and flora between the Old World and the New that transformed life on a global scale. Strange to think that, before 1492, none of the Mediterranean sailors sailing with Columbus had ever seen or tasted a tomato or that the native peoples of the Americas knew nothing of the horse. Most spectacular, was the scale of transfer of human population from Africa to the Americas, so that Americans of African descent today represent one quarter of the population of continental Africa. Together with a later, voluntary, migration of Europeans to the Americas, the result was to create two Europes and two Africas to either side of the Atlantic.
Our next island destination, the Cape Verde archipelago, will be an ideal place to reflect on all of this. Here, the descendants of Africans captured as slaves and subsequently intermarried with Portuguese traders, make a living growing maize and sweet potatoes, the traditional food of the native Americans. It suggests a surprising text for this voyage, that no island is entire of itself. It is our mutual dependence that impresses from the middle of the ocean.
How wide is the ocean! Leaning on the deck-rail watching dawn break this morning, I thought of the Psalmist who saw "the whole earth round." The roundness of his earth was, of course, not spherical: rather, he imagined the round edge of a saucer, supported by an elephant, perhaps, or a giant tortoise, with the firmament its canopy above. For the mediaeval sailor, the vastness of the ocean was terrifying to contemplate. To be out of sight of land for days on end, as we have been, brought grave risks: pursuit by sea monsters, boiling in a tropical sea, even falling off the very edge of the world. For many guests aboard the Endeavour, on this remarkable month-long voyage following the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the immensity of the ocean on our little blue planet still commands respect and stirs the soul.
And in these empty spaces, our history has been written. In the north Atlantic, following a stepping stone route from Western Europe, via Iceland and Greenland, it was possible to make a transatlantic crossing without ever being too far from land. A band of Irish monks may have made such a journey as early as the sixth century. We know that the Vikings made it to North America at the end of the first millennium. For the first time in history two human populations met that had expanded around the globe in opposite directions from a point of origin that may have been in East Africa or in the Indus valley. It was movement of population that had taken twelve thousand years and five hundred generations to achieve – and it seems that the first mutual encounter was unfavorable. The Vikings returned home and it was another five hundred years before a permanent European settlement was established in the Americas.
It was Christopher Columbus's second voyage of settlement in 1493 that began the process that historians call the Columbian Exchange, the wholesale exchange of fauna and flora between the Old World and the New that transformed life on a global scale. Strange to think that, before 1492, none of the Mediterranean sailors sailing with Columbus had ever seen or tasted a tomato or that the native peoples of the Americas knew nothing of the horse. Most spectacular, was the scale of transfer of human population from Africa to the Americas, so that Americans of African descent today represent one quarter of the population of continental Africa. Together with a later, voluntary, migration of Europeans to the Americas, the result was to create two Europes and two Africas to either side of the Atlantic.
Our next island destination, the Cape Verde archipelago, will be an ideal place to reflect on all of this. Here, the descendants of Africans captured as slaves and subsequently intermarried with Portuguese traders, make a living growing maize and sweet potatoes, the traditional food of the native Americans. It suggests a surprising text for this voyage, that no island is entire of itself. It is our mutual dependence that impresses from the middle of the ocean.
