By chance, I am reading about sailing ships recently. It begins with an article in the New Yorker magazine, which features an article about the famous HMS Bounty Mutiny. I read an novel (one of a trilogy) about the Bounty Mutiny in Chinese long time ago, back the years when I was studying in Wuhan, China.
It is nice to revisit the famous story, quite interesting. Actually, I was quite fascinated by the enticement of the great sea long time ago. I read a lot of maritime stories and novels, first in Chinese, then in English after I learned enough English, about the voyages of Captain James Cook, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Henry Shackleton. However, I never have the chance to learn more about ships and navigation.
Recently, I take the initiative to familiarize myself with those nautical terms, the ships and the their great voyages. An encyclopedia seems a good starting point, so I turned to my Encyclopaedia Britannia, perusing articles on sails, sailing ships, and navigation methods, anything about the sea. Thus I learned a great deal about the sails, ranging from square sail, lateen sail, lugsail, to those advanced fore-and-aft sails; the vessels, from trireme, galley, galleon, bark, barkentine, brig, brigantine, carrack, caravel, schooner, corvette, sloop, ketch, wherry, xebec, dhow, all the way down to the Chinese junk. To understand rigging, I went through the square-rigged ships, fore-and-aft rigged ships, and full-rigged ships. The sailing ships are named by the number of masks and how they are rigged. Having equipped myself with those knowledge, I am eager to learn more about the great navigators and the their voyage.
Somehow I came across Daniel Joseph Boorstin's The Discoverer: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, a book I acquainted a long time ago, but I never have the chance to finish it. Several parts of the book are dealing with famous navigators, their sailing ships, great voyages, and discoveries.
During the middle ages, for the mariners in the Mediterranean, two tools proved valuable: textual descriptions of the coast, ports, called periplus. In the court of Darius the Great (550-486 BC), the Persian emperor, a certain Scylax wrote the first Periplus; and crude hand-drawn charts, called portolano. The great books of Ptolemy is not very helpful for the sailors. In 1375, a cartographer, Abraham Cresques, published Catalan Atlas, the most accurate map of its time. Jehuda Cresques, Abraham's son, worked for Henry the Navigator, after Jews were expelled from Spain.
Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), an interesting personage in history: he made no voyage himself, but he is the organizer, sponsor, and the initiator of a series of expeditions and voyages down to the African coast, trying to figure out a eastward passage to the lucrative India. He improved shipbuilding, designed carracks. Entrenched in Sagres, a promontory in west Iberian Peninsula, he commanded the vast seafaring and discovery enterprise, leading to the discovery of the sea route to India via Cape of Good Hope.
One of Henry's captain, Bartolomeu Dias (1450?-1500), once reached Cape of Good Hope, however, a mutinous crew forced him back fearing the danger of an unknown voyage. The glory went to Vasco da Gama (1460-1524), a great navigator, shrewd merchant, and a reckless pirate. In 1498 he reached Calicut, India. He captured the city in his later voyage, cold-bloodedly and mercilessly.
Ironically, the best Arab navigator and pilot, Ibn Majid, the author of Kitab al-Fawa'id, or Nautical Directory (1490), was Gama's pilot during his first trip to Calicut.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), a native of Genoa working for the Spanish Crown, reached America during his quest for Japan and China. Until his death, he still believed he what he discovered was some part of Asia.
The namesake of America, Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), never conspired to associate his name with the new continent. It is the work of Martin Waldseemuller (1470?-1518), a geographer and map-maker. In his map, he decided to name the new continent after Vespucci. Later on, he changed his mind. However, the newly invented printing press made the reversal impossible. Printing was the Internet of Middle Age, the first printed book, Gutenberg Bible, was published in 1454. It is Vespucci who discovered Columbus discovered a new continent.
Ferdinand Magellan (1480?-1521), the first to circumnavigate the globe. During 1519 to 1521, he sailed from Atlantic to South America, through the treacherous, williwaw-laden Magellan Strait, to the Pacific Ocean, recently discovered by Vasco Nunez de Balboa (1475-1517) in 1513. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines by the native people in 1521.
Finally, Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) and Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) systemized the great geographical discoveries, made great maps and atlas incorporating the newly gathered information, revised and corrected Ptolomy's geography. Ortelius made the first atlas in the world.
The famous Captain James Cook (1728-1779), tried to find the Antarctica, made great scientific discoveries. He is the first captain sailing to answer scientific questions instead of finding a new shipping route. He is the model for the Star Trek space ship captains, "To boldly go where no one has gone before", not for money and glory, but for the scientific discoveries.