u/FullyFocusedOnNought

As the man who ‘legalised’ England’s presence in Newfoundland, Sir Humphrey Gilbert could legitimately be seen as the man who founded the English (British) Empire.

In reality, however, Gilbert is more widely known for the circumstances of his death.

On the return journey from Newfoundland to England, Gilbert got into trouble in the Atlantic Ocean, close to the Azores. When the captain of the accompanying ship, the Golden Hind, Edward Hayes, offered to assist Sir Humphrey, he refused the offer, declaring  “We are as near to heaven by sea, as by land.”

Hayes claims that when Gilbert made this statement, he was reading Thomas More’s Utopia, which contains the text “He that hathe no grave is covered with the skye: and, the way to heaven out of all places is of like length and distance.”

Gilbert went down with his ship, but the manner of his death has remained a legend in maritime history and a symbol of British stoicism in the face of adversity.

(As Ben Lowings argues in a recent Age of Exploration article, however, the story may not be entirely reliable.)

Image: The Last Moments of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (illustration of the sinking of Squirrel, c. 1874)

The barque was originally built to sail the River Elbe in Germany, but was converted to an oceangoing cruising ship in the 1990s by the Dutch sailor and restorer Harry Smit. Since then, the Europa has given hundreds of people from around the world the chance to experience life on a sailing vessel and explore some of the most remote corners of the world.

Read more: https://theageofexploration.com/bark-europa-following-in-the-footsteps-of-the-great-explorers/

Images: Jordi Plana Morales, Bark Europa

The Dutch first settled in Batavia at the start of the 17th century. The settlement was built on the ruins of the local city of Jayakarta.

Batavia would function as a key centre of Dutch trade in the east for centuries. In 1949, however, Indonesia achieved full independence and the city was renamed to Jakarta.

The Tijgersgracht was considered the most beautiful canal in the city. Lined with coconut trees, it ran from the port through the settlement and connected to the Groote River. The canal was named after the Javenese tiger – far from a rare sight in the local area.

The illustration is by Jacob van Meurs and was featured in the 17th-century travel journal of Johan Nieuhof.

Brûlé was sent on his initial mission by Samuel de Champlain, who founded the garrison at Quebec and is often referred as the ‘Father of New France’.

Brûlé spent many years exploring the interior of the continent. In all, historians believe the Frenchman saw at least four of the Great Lakes in his journeys in North America – Lake Huron, Lake Superior, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

Throughout this period, Brûlé maintained (often sporadic) contact with Champlain and the French, at times assisting them in military conflicts with the Iroquois, the sworn enemy of the Wendat.

Yet while the Wendat (also known as the Huron) welcomed the French adventurer into their world, Champlain stated in his memoirs that they eventually murdered Brûlé, more than 20 years after his first visit to a Wendat settlement.

Some have claimed Brûlé was killed after betraying the Wendat to the Iroquois, while others believe he may have become embroiled in a romantic dispute – Brûlé was a notorious womaniser. In another version of the story, he was never actually killed at all and lived on happily in another part of the Great Lakes region.

Today, Brûlé is known as one of the first coureur des bois, or ‘runner of the forest’ – independent Frenchmen who travelled in the interior of North America and helped facilitate trade and military relations with Native Americans.

Image: Huron Hunters Camping at the Big Rock of Lake Lagon, by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1862

You can read the full story here.

Parkinson, who was approximately 26 years of old at the time of his death, was a talented artist who made a number of sketches of the flora and fauna that the British sailors encountered on their voyage. He also took an interest in the indigenous people of the various places they landed at, making several detailed illustrations of the Maori and also the people of Tahiti.

Parkinson contracted dysentery at Princes' Island, near Java, and died at sea on the journey towards Cape Town.

The Maori are the indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand.

Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean, lying between 370 and 530 miles off the coast of mainland Africa.

Four men could lay claim to discovering all or part of the archipelago:

António de Noli: The first governor of Cape Verde and named in a Portuguese royal charter as the man who discovered the first five islands in 1460.

Diogo Gomes: Stated in his memoirs that he travelled to Cape Verde with de Noli and was the first to land on Santiago, one of the main islands.

Alvise Cadamosto: A prolific writer, Cadamosto claimed to have sighted some of the islands of the archipelago in 1456, four years before de Noli.

Diogo Afonso: Widely regarded as the discoverer of five islands in the western part of the archipelago.

Generally speaking, the Portuguese have tended to favour the claims of Gomes, the Genoese de Noli and the Venetians Cadamosto.

Although most people believe Cape Verde was completely uninhabited before the 15th century, there is also another theory that some Africans had already settled there before the arrival of the Europeans. This idea, however, comes from later writings of the 18th century.

Cape Verde was a hub of the transatlantic slave trade for hundreds of years, and many people from West Africa were forced to live there. After more than 500 years of Portuguese rule, the archipelago became an independent nation in 1975. Since then, it has become one of the most developed countries in Africa and has a stable democratic system.

Image: The island of Santiago today. Martin Mergili, distributed via Imaggeo.

Full story on The Age of Exploration website here: https://theageofexploration.com/who-actually-discovered-the-cape-verde-islands/

A couple of weeks ago the guy in charge of another sub-Reddit posted on here that the Age of Exploration website is written by AI.

This is quite annoying. When I first started working on this idea last year I had no idea if anyone at all would be interested in any of it. Since then, I I have spent hundreds of hours working on the website, often very late at night, and write most of the articles myself with my own hand. I also have a handful of contributors who put their own time and considerable effort into their work. I have set up a Patreon page, but if this ever makes any kind of decent income it certainly won't be for a few years yet. In the meantime, I am doing this for free just because I happen to find this period of history interesting and would like to share some stories and have other people share theirs. I am really glad to see that some other people also find it kind of intriguing.

Criticism of any of the posts on here or the articles is absolutely fine – I noticed that Redditors are pretty sharp-eyed, and every single time I write something stupid or meaningless, particularly in a headline, someone will point it out. Of course I don't enjoy reading this, exactly, but it is usually spot on and helps me to learn more and improve, so it's also useful too.

But please understand that we are humans writing humanly, with all that this entails.

This is kind of a pledge:

Every single word I post on the sub and also everything you find on the website was written by a human, and every image is either a piece of human art or a photo taken by a human of real stuff.

Also, everyone is welcome to post on the sub too, but if they use AI images/videos/text, it will be removed.

You can read the full policy on the website here, but it's basically the same stuff said in a slightly different way.

Leif Erikson reached the shores of North America 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

Yet while Erikson's journey to the New World was a tremendous feat of seafaring, the Norse only stayed in North America for a limited period before returning to Greenland. The Norse struggled to establish a foothold in unfamiliar territory, and the maximum population is estimated at around 50 people.

Columbus's journey, on the other, completely changed the world through trade, slavery, immigration and the transatlantic exchange of people, disease, flora and fauna.

As navigators, you could argue they were equals. In terms of influence, however, Columbus and Erikson cannot be compared.

Jonathan Williamson of The Viking Herald discusses this point in more depth on our website, here.

Today known as Banggi Island, Cimbonbon is located just off the northern tip of Borneo. As Pigafetta noted, the Europeans were completely bewildered by the creatures, the likes of which they had never seen before:

“trees . . . which produce leaves which are alive when they fall and walk. . . . They have no blood, but if one touches them, they run away… I kept one of them for nine days in a box. When I opened the box, the leaf went round and round it.”
Antonio Pigafetta, Report on the First Voyage Around the World

Today, these creatures are known as phyllium, a species of stick insect whose flat, broad back resembles a leaf, complete with scars and stems.

Images: Phyllium on a leaf/Pigafetta's map of Borneo

You can read a few more facts about the Magellan-Elcano voyage on our free Patreon post here.

The wreck was discovered at a depth of 600 metres in the Skagerrak Strait, which connects the North Sea and the Kattegat Sea. 

The finding of what is thought to be Chinese porcelain is said to be the first discovery of this kind ever made in Northern Europe.

The ship, which has been dubbed "the Porcelain Shipwreck", was found by the watchmaker Espen Saastad, who immediately notified the authorities. The Norwegian Maritime Museum is is now leading the investigations of the wreck, which have also revealed chandeliers, glassware and boxes that appear to contain tea, herbs and medicine.

Image: Chinese porcelain from the shipwreck. Image: Sindre Kinnerød/Flash studio

Full article: https://theageofexploration.com/the-porcelain-wreck-18th-century-ship-reveals-amazing-chinese-cargo/

The convicts were part of the group of people who mutinied against the officers and threw them overboard in the West Atlantic in 1683. The mutineers tried to return to Denmark but were blown off course and ended up running aground on a Swedish island. The ship eventually sank to the seabed, where it has remained ever since.

A group of researchers from Bohusläns Museum, the National Museum of Denmark and the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum has been investigating the wreck. Although most of the timbers are still hidden under the sediment, there are many bricks above the surface. The bricks served as ballast and were also intended to be used to build Danish-style houses in the Caribbean colony of St Thomas. After, the ship would likely have been used to collect and transport slaves from West Africa.

Photos: The bricks of the shipwreck, timbers in the second photo. Credit: Staffan Lundblad, Bohusläns Museum / National Museum of Denmark

Read more here: https://theageofexploration.com/bricks-and-people-exploring-the-havmanden-shipwrecks-unusual-cargo/

The cannons were brought to the settlement of Rey Don Felipe in 1584, but abandoned when the colony collapsed three years later. They were rediscovered by archeologists in 2019.

You can find some more info and photos of the cannons on our Patreon page here (free to access).

The study was carried out by researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and Oslo University Hospital. They investigated the remains of 20 men buried at the Likneset burial site in the Svalbard archipelago, which lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Of those 20 skeletons, 19 presented signs of scurvy.

The analysis also found that many of the men, who hailed from throughout Norway and also the Netherlands, had also suffered from various ailments in their childhood too. These issues were then likely exacerbated by the poor diet and hard living they experienced in the High Arctic.

Full report here.

His website is called Map Myths and this is the link to the Arctic map if anyone is interested!

https://mapmyths.com/arctic-fog/

The English – and later the British – spent hundreds of years trying to locate and then navigate through the almost mythical North-West Passage. Several large-scale expeditions, including those of Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson and John Franklin, came up against an all-too familiar obstacle – the immovable ice.

In the end, Amundsen succeeded by taking a path that few of the English had considered – he spent time learning the habits and skills of the Inuit, who had survived in the harsh Arctic climate for many hundreds of years. The Norwegian survived two winters in the frozen north, with plenty of assistance from the Netsilik Inuit.

Amundsen would later use those same skills to beat the British to the South Pole, too.

Image: Painting of HMS Terror in the Arctic Regions, by William Smyth, 1837.

You can read a brief history of the search for the North-West Passage here.

Frobisher originally took Kalicho as a hostage after five Englishmen who had disappeared in the same area the previous winter. The English also took an unrelated Inuit woman and her infant, who they named Arnaq and Nutaaq.

When an attempt to exchange the three Inuit for the missing Englishmen failed, they were taken back to England.

The Inuit became minor celebrities after landing at the port of Bristol. Portraits of Kalicho and Arnaq were presented to Queen Elizabeth I and hung in Hampton Court Palace.

Frobisher hoped to train Kalicho as an interpreter to help on later voyages. Unfortunately, Kalicho passed away in Bristol on 8 November 1577. A postmortem suggested that the Inuit man had died due to complications of a rib injury, likely sustained in his capture at Baffin Bay.

The image above was drawn by John White, who later helped to establish the English colony of Roanoke in North America.

EDIT: When I say 'picked up', I should have written 'kidnapped' or at least 'captured', given that Kalicho was taken from his homeland and spirited away in violent circumstances.

The elephant became something of a celebrity during his stay in Rome – the image above shows a depiction of Hanno drawn by the artist Raphael, while he also had several encounters with the Medici.

When Hanno died in 1516, the pope was said to be besides himself with grief.

Full story on Age of Exploration Patreon page (free access): https://www.patreon.com/posts/present-fit-for-157548241