Apollo Ocean A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus.

Ocean is an ambitious history of the preColumbian Atlantic Ocean, a story that begins with the formation of the midAtlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, which provided a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonisation of the New World.John Haywood argues that the perception that Atlantic history begins with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator is a mistaken one, and that the seafaring and shipbuilding skills that enabled European global exploration and expansion did not arrive fully formed in the fifteenth century, but were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its marginal seas. The preColumbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans. It is, therefore, key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the worlds other seafaring peoples, who discovered the world.Ocean is informed by the authors extensive travels in and around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfoundlands Grand Banks, the Sea of Darkness and the weedcovered Sargasso Sea to make landfall at locations as diverse as Vinland, Greenland, the Faroes and the Cape Verde Islands. Populated by a heterogeneous and multiethnic cast of seafarers, fishermen, monks, merchants and dreamers, this is an indepth history of a neglected subject, fusing geology, geography, mythology, cosmology, developing maritime technologies and the early history of exploration to narrate an enthralling and intriguing story that lies at the very heart of Europes modern history and its relationship with the rest of the world. A history on a grand scale, Ocean offers the reader a feast of historical storytelling that will appeal to readers of David Abulafia, Simon Winchester and Michael Pye.