akashiver | Random reading notes

In 1551 the "Company of Merchant Adventurers" was formed "for discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown." It sounds a lot more appealing than most of the clubs I joined as an undergrad.

In 1576 Sir Humphrey Gilbert argued for the existance of a Northwest Passage. He also argued that North America was in reality the lost island of Atlantis.

In 1714 the British givernment formed the Board of Longitude to help solve the problem of determining where a ship was on the globe. The subsequent invention of the sextant, chronometer and improved compasses allowed the calculation of both lattitude and longitude by the 1760s.

Since ancient times, geographers had believed in the existance of a southern continent called the Antipodes that theoretically should exist at the bottom of the world in opposition to the known world. According to tradition, this mysterious land was the real source of the Nile, which flowed beneath the earth's surface under a zome of scorching tropical seas to emerge in Africa. In the Middle Ages, Christians were taught to reject the concept of the Antipodes as being contrary to the word of God, who did not make rain to fall upward , trees to grow downward or men to stand upon their heads. Post-Marco Polo, however, people began to believe that the existance of a vast sourthern continent was needed to counterbalance the northern continents and prevent the world from toppling over.

(...into what? I wonder.)

At any rate, belief in the existance of this continent was so widespread that it was depicted on all the surviving maps we have of the globe after 1477 or so.

That's it for tonight's dose of randomness.