Great Expeditions: 50 Journeys that changed our world. Levison Wood
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Название: Great Expeditions: 50 Journeys that changed our world
Автор: Levison Wood
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008222611
isbn:
‘There was no lack of salmon in the river or lake, bigger salmon than they had ever seen.’
The Greenlanders’ Saga
Leif ’s brother, Thorvald, then made a trip back to Vinland and settled at the camp Leif had made. For the next two summers they explored the land, only towards the end meeting the native inhabitants. The first they met, they captured and killed and they were then attacked by larger numbers. All survived apart from Thorvald, who died of an arrow wound and was buried in Vinland. The remaining Vikings sailed away the following spring and did not return.
Evidence of the Viking expeditions
In 1960, at the tip of the Great Northern peninsula in the far northwest of Newfoundland, the remains of a Viking settlement was discovered at L’Anse aux Meadows. From their excavations, archaeologists have been able to recreate the turf huts, of typical Viking design, and to date the active life of the settlement from 990 to 1030, which links well with the account of the trips of Leif and Thorvald, as recorded in the Greenlanders’ Saga. Combined, there is sufficient evidence to establish that the Vikings were the first Europeans to reach North America.
Inside of a recreated long house.
Cabot comes in second
This discovery punctured the long-held belief that John Cabot was the first European to reach North America. Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) was born in Italy in 1450, probably in or near Genoa. Like his fellow Genoese, Christopher Columbus, Cabot considered that the best way to get to China and the Spice Islands would be by sailing west, and he became interested in a more northerly route than Columbus. Known to be living in Bristol by 1495, he received a Royal charter from Henry VII to claim any land discovered for England, and was commissioned by the merchants of Bristol. He set sail in a small boat, the Matthew, from Bristol, along with his crew of eighteen. On 24 June 1497, they made landfall on Newfoundland, probably at Cape Bonavista. He reported that ‘the natives of it go about dressed in skins of animals; in their wars they use bows and arrows, lances and darts, and clubs of wood, and slings. This land is very sterile. There are in it many white bears, and very large stags, like horses, and many other animals. And in like manner there are immense quantities of fish — soles, salmon, very large cods, and many other kinds of fish.’ He named the land ‘New Founde Lands’ and by tradition he also named one sheltered harbour St John’s, now the provincial capital, because he first landed on Newfoundland on St John’s Day.
He returned to Bristol, firmly believing that he had discovered a new route to China, and was enthusiastically welcome back to the Royal Court. He was quickly given permission to make another trip, with five boats. He left in spring 1498, but neither he nor his ships returned.
Thor Heyerdahl: The Kon-Tiki man
“One learns more from listening than speaking. And both the wind and the people who continue to live close to nature still have much to tell us which we cannot hear within university walls.
Thor Heyerdahl
WHEN
1947
ENDEAVOUR
Floating across the empty Pacific Ocean on a raft built using only materials available 1,000 years ago.
HARDSHIPS & DANGERS
Thor Heyerdahl and his crew were putting themselves utterly at the mercy of the capricious Pacific Ocean. They did not know if they would face storms, waves or would simply get lost without a trace.
LEGACY
The voyage of the Kon-Tiki spectacularly proved an anthropological point: that ancient societies could have sailed from South America westwards to colonize the islands of the southern Pacific Ocean.
Thor Heyerdahl (foreground) on Easter Island in 1986.
The story of one of modern history’s greatest achievements in exploration is rooted in a very personal tragedy. Bjarne Kroepelien, a well-to-do wine merchant from Norway, had a lifelong obsession with the islands of the southern Pacific Ocean. He travelled to the area in his twenties and fell in love with the daughter of a Tahitian tribal leader. The pair were married but their union was to end bitterly when Tuimata, his wife, was one of the victims of a Spanish Flu epidemic on the island in 1918. The heartbroken merchant returned to Oslo and the family business. He never again visited Tahiti but his love for the islands, their culture and their people lived on. Over the years Kroepelien amassed the world’s largest collection of Polynesian literature — more than 5,000 books in total.
His collection was to have a remarkable legacy — one that was the change the way anthropologists understood the spread of humankind. Thor Heyerdahl, a zoology student at the University of Oslo, gained access to Kroepelien’s archive and pored over the texts within. These studies led Heyerdahl to a radical theory about how the Polynesian islands were settled. The mainstream academic understanding was that the islands of the south Pacific had been settled by peoples travelling east by sea from Asia. Heyerdahl believed it would also have been possible for settlers to travel west from South America.
Exodus across the Pacific
It was Heyerdahl’s opinion that the famous stone moai statues of Easter Island bore a closer resemblance to the ancient people of South America than to the inhabitants of east Asia. He posited that an Easter Island myth about a battle between two feuding tribes could have been based on actual conflict between settlers from the two continents. Heyerdahl went further, claiming the South American migrants could have travelled further, all the way to the Polynesian islands in the South Pacific.
There was one particularly sizeable and obvious problem with Heyerdahl’s theory; the distance from South America to Easter Island was vast. The remote island was more than 3,700 km (2,300 miles) from Peru, the most likely departure point in Heyerdah’s view. The Polynesian island of Tahiti was a further 4,200 km (2,600 miles) distant. Any journey from the Peruvian coast would have involved months of travel across the Pacific Ocean. Modern maps showed the South Sea Islands as tiny pin pricks in the vastness of the planet’s biggest expanse of open water. Could the ancient travellers have found their way?
A theory that travellers from the east could have settled remote Easter Island inspired the Kon-Tiki expedition.
Putting an idea to the test
Heyerdahl decided there was only one way to find out. Following the end of the Second World War, he started planning his own voyage from the coast of Peru to the islands of Polynesia, using only materials and building techniques which would have been available more than one thousand years earlier. СКАЧАТЬ