Book 10: "Ulysses Found" by Ernle Bradford
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 12:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeUlysses met with no other ships west of Greece -- perhaps because there were none. In his encounters with the inhabitants of the lands and places which some scholars have called 'mythical' it is noticeable that all these people are landbound. The story of Ulysses is, it seems, the story of the first Greek sailor to explore the unknown Western Mediterranean. The reasons why so many of the places and events described have been over-laid with fantasy and myth is because even when Homer was writing, some three or four centuries after the events described, this part of the Mediterranean was still practically unexplored.
During WWII, Ernle Bradford spent four years as a sailor on a British destroyer based in the Mediterranean. Afterwards he spent many years cross-crossing the Med in a variety of small boats, and in this book he tracks the course of Odysseus's ten year voyage home after the Trojan War. His sailing experience made him realise that the Mediterranean as seen from a small boat, is an entirely different place than when seen from a large ship, and led him to him to develop his own theories about how far Odysseus and his men could have sailed or rowed in a day and their likely route and landing places. He came to believe that the geographical features and sailing directions mentioned in the Odyssey were accurate and based on real sea voyages (apart from the trip to the Pillars of Hercules and the Stream of Ocean) and he was able to match them to the descriptions in the Admiralty Pilots for the Mediterranean. Even though an earthquake in 1783 changed the contours of the sea bed in the Straits of Messina and weakened the savage whirlpools, as late as 1824 a British naval officer wrote that he had seen ships spun round by Charybdis, including a seventy-four gun ship .
Bradford points out that before invention of the magnetic compass, North, South, East and West were not exact directions, and he took this into account when thinking about the sailing directions mentioned in the Odyssey. The stars were in different positions then, and the North wasn't marked by the Pole Star, while in Classical times the Greeks had the concept of a Summer East and a Winter East, since the sun rises and sets in different positions at different times of the year. Even in the 1960's, in decked boats with compasses and charts, Mediterranean fisherman and traders were less likely to put out to sea in rough weather than northern European sailors, and liked to hug the coast and lie at anchor each night, so Odysseus and his men in their open boats would have been even more likely to do so.
There are so many interesting things in this book, from the concept of sea gates like Stromboli, to the deep sea creatures thrown up onto the beaches at spring tides by the up-welling of cold water off Messina.
An utterly fascinating non-fiction book published in 1964, that should interest Odyssey fans and sailing enthusiasts alike.
Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
During WWII, Ernle Bradford spent four years as a sailor on a British destroyer based in the Mediterranean. Afterwards he spent many years cross-crossing the Med in a variety of small boats, and in this book he tracks the course of Odysseus's ten year voyage home after the Trojan War. His sailing experience made him realise that the Mediterranean as seen from a small boat, is an entirely different place than when seen from a large ship, and led him to him to develop his own theories about how far Odysseus and his men could have sailed or rowed in a day and their likely route and landing places. He came to believe that the geographical features and sailing directions mentioned in the Odyssey were accurate and based on real sea voyages (apart from the trip to the Pillars of Hercules and the Stream of Ocean) and he was able to match them to the descriptions in the Admiralty Pilots for the Mediterranean. Even though an earthquake in 1783 changed the contours of the sea bed in the Straits of Messina and weakened the savage whirlpools, as late as 1824 a British naval officer wrote that he had seen ships spun round by Charybdis, including a seventy-four gun ship .
Bradford points out that before invention of the magnetic compass, North, South, East and West were not exact directions, and he took this into account when thinking about the sailing directions mentioned in the Odyssey. The stars were in different positions then, and the North wasn't marked by the Pole Star, while in Classical times the Greeks had the concept of a Summer East and a Winter East, since the sun rises and sets in different positions at different times of the year. Even in the 1960's, in decked boats with compasses and charts, Mediterranean fisherman and traders were less likely to put out to sea in rough weather than northern European sailors, and liked to hug the coast and lie at anchor each night, so Odysseus and his men in their open boats would have been even more likely to do so.
There are so many interesting things in this book, from the concept of sea gates like Stromboli, to the deep sea creatures thrown up onto the beaches at spring tides by the up-welling of cold water off Messina.
An utterly fascinating non-fiction book published in 1964, that should interest Odyssey fans and sailing enthusiasts alike.
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
