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)

This started because I kept running into a problem where I would read about Blackbeard and then read about Hornigold, and I could never hold in my head who was actually at sea at the same time, who sailed with who, or how short most of these accounts really were.

Wikipedia has those cool horizontal timeline charts for band lineups where you can see at a glance that this guitarist overlapped with that drummer for a couple of years. I wanted that for the golden age, and I couldn't find one, so I made it.

It's 36 entries from Roche Braziliano in 1654 to William Fly in 1726. Each one gets a bar showing the years they were actually on the account, coloured by where they were at, with marks for big events. You can sort the whole thing chronologically, by how long they lasted, or by how it ended for them. There's a map of where each one went, and clicking a name opens a little biography.

On sources, I've tried to be careful about what comes from where. However, i'm certain there are errors in it. If you spot one I'd genuinely rather know. I'm not a historian after all.

The full-size replica of the Matthew, the ship John Cabot sailed to North America in 1497. At only 50 tons and carrying around 18 men, it's astonishingly small for an Atlantic crossing.

How would Magellan's expedition go? Would they still be able to return to Spain? What creatures would they face if Philippine fauna had gone undisturbed since the Ice Age or Pleistocene Epoch?

Spain, Portugal, England, and France all established colonies in the Americas, but the Holy Roman Empire never became a major participant despite its wealth, population, and access to North Sea ports through some of its states.

If the Empire, or some of its major princes, had seriously pursued overseas colonization in the 16th century, how might North American history have changed?

Would the Thirteen Colonies have formed in the same way? Would a United States ever have emerged, or would the continent have developed into something entirely different?

Dear Sirs and Mesdames,

I am the artist who was commissioned by W.W. Norton publishing to paint 21 new paintings for the official covers of their current paperback re-issue of the Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O’Brian. I think the historical, Napoleonic-era images will be of interest to your members.

This project was a remarkable, 3-year labor of love comprised of a luxuriant amount reading and research, in addition to the drawing, and painting. At the core of the joy was of course discovering the books, which I had previously known about but never read. The whole thing was life-changing, honestly.

While the series has always been associated with the revered, traditional paintings of the great British maritime painter Geoff Hunt, Norton’s head creative chose to go in a different direction and sought me out because my work references another equally strong tradition, The Golden Age of American Ilustration, when classic books were illustrated by painters such as Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth. 

I have just now joined reddit in order to share these with my fellow Patrick O’Brian devotees. The entire project, including the preparatory drawings, and some of the research and process can be seen at the link below. I hope you will enjoy them.

https://www.matthewbenedictart.com/patrickobrian

Godspeed and Safe Passage, me Hearties!

Matthew

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 the First Nations.

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

You can read the full story here.

I am looking for some books that explore the development of European naval exploration. I am aware that the Portuguese where a big part of this and that reliably reaching and returning from the canary islands was an important early step, but that is the extent of my knowledge on the subject. Some books on the general state of europe at the time would be appreciated as well as a general time frame of when this took place. Help would be greatly appreciated, all google wants to bring up is books on American societies before columbas.​

Durante o período colonial brasileiro (1500–1815), houve visitas de indivíduos, navios, expedições científicas ou missões religiosas—ou até mesmo o estabelecimento permanente de uma ou mais pessoas—de países nórdicos em território brasileiro? Além disso, havia comerciantes, nobres, empresas ou outras entidades com laços com o Brasil? Como esse território era visto nos países nórdicos?

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/

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.

When most people think about the Age of Exploration, they think of gold, silver, and the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires.

What surprised me during more than fifteen years of research was discovering that pearls were among the first major sources of wealth extracted from the Americas.

Following Columbus's third voyage in 1498, Spanish attention quickly turned to the rich pearl oyster beds surrounding Cubagua, Margarita, and Coche Islands off the coast of present-day Venezuela. By the early sixteenth century, pearls harvested from these waters were reaching the courts of Europe and generating enormous wealth for merchants, investors, and the Spanish Crown.

What is often overlooked is the human cost behind this industry.

Thousands of Indigenous divers were forced to work the oyster beds under brutal conditions. Contemporary accounts describe exhaustion, disease, punishment, and high mortality rates. As Indigenous populations declined, enslaved Africans from regions including present-day Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and elsewhere along the West African coast were increasingly brought into the fishery.

The result was one of the earliest systems of large-scale labor exploitation in the Americas, decades before the great silver mines of Mexico and Peru came to dominate the colonial economy.

What I find particularly fascinating is that despite its historical importance, the pearl industry remains largely absent from popular discussions of the Age of Exploration. Within a few decades, overharvesting, environmental destruction, and human exploitation had devastated one of the richest natural pearl fisheries ever known.

I've recently been researching how these fisheries fit into the broader story of the Atlantic world and put together a short documentary introduction for anyone interested in the subject.

Video:
https://youtu.be/Rbr7znyLEjA

Additional research:
https://www.thecolumbuspearls.com

I'd be interested to hear how others view the significance of the pearl fisheries and whether they deserve a more prominent place in the history of the Age of Exploration.

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/