Columbus – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

Spy Lands –Who really discovered the coasts of America

By Karen Abrahamson | December 18, 2011

Image2 - cleaned copy — Kayaking the west coast of Vancouver Island, Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

I mentioned last week about spies and maps and government subterfuge as aspects of maps that we rarely think about. Municipal governments still fool residents with streets on maps that are planned, but haven’t been built. Map makers take liberties with place names and add imaginary towns and streets that reflect their biases for and against university football teams. But in the past spies were frequently involved in cartographic subterfuge.

For instance, most of us were schooled that Captain Cook was the first European to lay eyes on the north western coast of North America. However there is mounting evidence that the English privateer (government sanctioned pirate) Sir Francis Drake, not Cook, first saw the coast of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia between 1577 and 1580 – 160 years before Cook’s journey.

Why isn’t this known?

First of all because some historians are hard pressed to let go of old ideas, but second of all because Drake’s journey was likely suppressed and evidence of it hidden, because of disputes with the Spanish that were, later, going to erupt into war. Drake is confirmed to have travelled as far north as Mendocino, California, the farthest north the Spanish had been, but a 412 year old map commemorating Drakes circumnavigation of the globe shows details of the coast of British Columbia that no one could have known unless they had been there. Additionally, archeological evidence – 1571 British coins and equipment – have been found in Oregon and Victoria, B.C. gardens, so that Drake is believed to have travelled as far north as Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. Finally, Drake’s cousin confessed under torture to the Spanish, that a fabled North Pacific island, Nova Albion, had been discovered by Drake and claimed for England 29 years before Samuel Champlain founded Quebec and before there was a Virginia on any map. This is believed to have been Vancouver Island, kept secret.

A further example of cartographic spies, deals with those icons, Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. Columbus, we’re taught, discovered the Americas while looking for China. Cabot’s fame is due to his first North American landfall by a European. Or at least that’s what we’re taught. But in a 1498 letter that was penned just months after Cabot’s historic return from Newfoundland, a spy in England wrote to Columbus and talked about earlier voyages by men from Bristol to the same place Cabot had been and that these earlier voyages had been to an “Island of Brasil” and that Cabot’s landfall “is believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found”. The spy’s letter also mentions that these voyages from Bristol were well known to Columbus – something that is further supported because Columbus had spent time in Bristol and Iceland in the 1470s – almost 20 years before he managed to convince the Spanish monarchy to fund his explorations. Did Columbus use this knowledge to convince Isabella? Did he use it to calm his crew on his long crossing?

We may never know, and even if we do, will it matter? For Columbus IS an icon that history won’t forget, but what this shows is how secrets and spies permeate the European history of maps, so that who really ‘discovered’ the coasts of America may never be known. Of course, just talk to a First Nations/Native American person and they’ll tell you we’ve got it all wrong anyway. North America had been ‘discovered’ long before any European left home.

The World is Flat: An ode to Columbus and all erroneous beliefs

By Karen Abrahamson | October 8, 2011

The shapes of the world’s continents have changed ever since the time of the supercontinent, Pangaea. We’ve all seen the renditions of the continents shifting and South America unzipping from the edge of western Africa. Just looking at a map of the world it’s possible to see how the pieces of the earth fit together once. It may even be possible to conceive of how the continents might look millions of years in the future as the tectonic plates shift and move under and over each other. We think we know this now, but other ages of people thought they had the world’s shape figured out, too.

Contrary to popular belief, it didn’t take Columbus’s discovery of America to prove to the world’s thinkers that the earth wasn’t flat. Yes, in some parts of the world the belief was that the earth was a disc travelling on the back of a giant turtle, but back at the time of the Greeks and Egyptians and even before them, in China, great thinkers postulated that the world was round. They used logic and observation of the sun’s movement and shadows, as well as the way ships sink beneath the horizon to mathematically prove the earth’s general shape. What they didn’t know was the earth’s size. But that’s another story. They did, however, also theorize that the southern part of the earth were too hot for any human to inhabit. Happily for our friends south of the equator, they were wrong.

It was the Middle Ages that led to the belief that the world was flat. Maps became conveyers of religious dogma, as opposed to a representation of world. I’ll talk on this later, but as the world moved out of the Middle Ages into the Age of Discovery, the debate began about the shape of the solar system and whether it was terra centric (the sun and moon and planets revolving around the earth) or sol centric (the earth and all the other planets revolving around the sun). At the same time as these debates raged, people also debated the shape of the world’s continents. The prevailing belief seemed to be that Asia not only extended far to the east, but that it then hooked down and around the Indian Ocean to connect with the as-yet-undiscovered Cape of Africa, leaving the Indian Ocean as a land-locked sea.

What’s most interesting, is how human beliefs shaped the world around us. Think of the generations who grew up with these various beliefs. To them, the world WAS flat or the Indian Ocean WAS landlocked, or we really DID rely on a turtle to hold the whole thing up. That strength of belief colored all the beliefs of the early exploration of the east coast of whatever it was that Columbus discovered. first they believed it was the east coast of Asia. Then they believed it was a thin rind of a place, like a reef, that they could sail through. The maps show this. They show the ill-fated North West Passage, too – something that may finally exist if global warming continues its work.

In all of these cases it was the strength of their generation’s belief in what they’d drawn on their maps that kept explorers coming back to what became known as the Americas – and dying – again and again. When other beliefs gradually overtook the old ones, we gradually learned that what Columbus had really discovered was two new continents. Those layers of beliefs gradually reshaped the maps and thus the world we live in, much as my Cartos characters can believe and draw a new world into existence .

Which makes me wonder about the power of beliefs even today, when those who believe in a flat earth and those who believe in a round earth still wear away at each other like tectonic plates. Is it possible for such disparate beliefs to live side by side, or do these people actually inhabit two separate worlds?

And Columbus? He might have ‘proved’ that the earth was round, but he went to his grave believing that what he’d found was the backdoor to Asia, thus demonstrating that even an icon like Columbus could be blinded by his map of the world.