Praise for John Haywood:
"Haywood's lucid explanations of the cultures of the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians are vital to understanding the motivations for their movements.”
Ocean
A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
Description
A magisterial cultural history of the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus, ranging from the early shaping of the continents and the emergence of homo sapiens to the story of shipbuilding, navigation, maritime exploration, slavery, and nascent European imperialism.
A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.
John Haywood eloquently argues that the perception of Atlantic history beginning with the first voyage of the celebrated Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus 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 instead were learned over centuries and millennia in the Atlantic and its peripheral seas. The pre-Columbian history of the Atlantic is the story of how Europeans learned to master the oceans. This story is, therefore, key to understanding why it was Europeans, and not any of the world's other seafaring peoples, who “discovered” the world.
Informed by the author's extensive travels around the Atlantic Ocean, crossing Newfoundland's Grand Banks, the Sea of Darkness, and the weed-covered Sargasso Sea, and populated by a heterogeneous and multiethnic cast of seafarers, fishermen, monks, merchants, and dreamers, Ocean is an in-depth history of a neglected subject, fusing geology, geography, mythology, developing maritime technologies, and the early history of exploration to narrate an enthralling an story—one which lies at the very heart of Europe's modern history and its relationship with the rest of the world.
Reviews
"[A] valuable picture of human development and will be useful to academic and public libraries."
"The graphical format of this history of mankind allows one to view happenings in one part of the world and then see other events at the same time in different areas of the world. Unique and refreshing. Illustrations and maps peppered throughout make accessing the information enticing and easy."
"Finely researched and artfully produced. Haywood seamlessly combines history and geography to show not only population expansion but also cross-cultural contact and the growth of economic and social complexity. Libraries, schools, and everyone interested in the past will want this book for their shelves."