The Most Amazing Tour Du Monde

Map 1494

Pope Alexander VI, formerly known as Rodrigo Lanzol y de Borja ( Papacy:11 August 1492-18 August 1503), a secular pontif keen to settle territorial disputes, drew up the Treaty of Tordesillas, 7 June 1494, which shared up the lands outside Europe between Spain and Portugal by drawing an arbitrary meridian from the North to the South Pole running midway between the Cape Verdes (Portuguese) and Hispaniola=Haiti/Dom.Rep. (Spanish). Anything to the East of that line belonged to Portugal, anything West to the Castillians. Any land discovered to be ruled by a Christian leader would keep its independence. Nice touch.

Fair Sharing

It wasn’t easy to stick to this treatise because longitude had not been determined, yet, so this midline was rather flexible to interpretation and therefore the cause of much dispute. In fact the definitive midway line was modified to the above one I describe, after Pope Alexander VI had died; previously it was closer to the Cape Verdes, which would thereby also have allotted Brazil to the Spanish and we might never have had the samba (see map- click on link to enlarge). And so the dividing up always goes. Luck of the draw or God's shrewd game of chess? (Magellan apparently became hyper-religious after reaching the Pacific Ocean - but wouldn't that be just the experience to make anyone very spiritual!?) How do things get shared out fair and square in the end? The robes of Christ by the roll of the die, the world by the Fingerspitzen Gefühl of a Pope, or a conference in Potsdam; a box of jellybabies by the older sister who never claimed to be any good at counting.

The Victoria

The Breakthrough in Human Consciousness

Perhaps, 1522 was the most definitive year in history. Or around about then, maybe already it hit the sailors, before the vessle Victoria and her ravaged crew was guided up the Guadalquivir into Sevilla after having completed the first circumnavigation of the world. Maybe the sailors didn't quite know, though, what they had accomplished. It may have been too much to take in at the time.

This particular voyage in the age of discovery makes an amazing tale of all the good and bad in humanity, and it has has gripped my imagination since I learned of it (properly) in the past month. I am reading (listening to) the work with its telling title “Over the Edge of the World” by Laurence Bergreen, after “A World Lit Only by Fire” by William Manchester dedicated a large chapter to Magelllan’s life as a turning point in the consciousness of man. Finally the world was whole. It changed absolutely everything - albeit in a tempo that is only (or thankfully?) as fast as a non-digital and only marginally mechanical age can support.

Effigy of Ferdinand Magellan in the Monument of the Discoveries, in Lisbon, Portugal
Cosmology and geography were altered substantially. For example, America was no longer a part of India. But even more significantly the mind of man was changed. Or is change always the motor for discovery? Was man made ready by other works to see the world for what it really was. Were these discoveries the manifestation thereof, the brushstorkes on the canvas of the artful imagination? Of course, the Greeks already knew the world was round, by why did we remember this as and when we did; or why did we forget it (necessarily?) when we did?

How much more must there be left to discover if we feel as certain about our reality as the sophisticated Renaissance man was.... May history teach us that much!

These voyages of discovery illustrate the coming together of economical interests (notably the spice trade) and the adventurous questing spirit. Moden knights on buyoant schooners! Where did this sudden interest in cinnamon and pepper come from? Why did tobacco and damasks become so desirable to the Europeans? The influence of the Arabs was humongous, emporting all sorts of enrichment to our dark and dingy souls. As we entered a mini-iceage in the 16th Century, their sunfilled culture held much allure. We had already civilised ourselves much thanks to them in the age of the Crusades, emporting maths and medicine and reintroducing us to ancient Greek and Roman texts, and Hermetic works. We became scientific at last! Three cheers for the Muselmann!

Around the time of our greatest world discoveries we were actually, again, hankering for the East - believing the Americas to be the tail of the Indian continent, they reached the head of by the cumbersome voyage around the Cape of (seldom much ) Good Hope. But we went west - towards the land of the Hesperides.

The Hesperides in their Garden

This is the place of the setting sun, where Walhalla lies, death begins, and all our thinking became automated. We travelled into our heads, and are still lost in its Doldrums....

The four protagonists from , from “Journey to the West” by Wu Cheng’en; left to right: Sun Wukong, Tang Sanzang (on the White Dragon Horse), Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing

West is the direction in which our Consciousness had to travel to become individualised.

(Chinese) Monkey went West, too, in the 16th Century, to find Buddhist Sutras in India. Franco and Kath are still (very slowly) making their way around the world westwards (started in 2014). Wish they were on Steemit! I’ve been reading their blog a bit, picking up on entries by clicking a flag somewhere near that Tordesillas line. It is full of skill-sets that bamboozle me (organising the tillers, playing with luffs, rigging goose-sails, pulling at lazy guys, controlling spinnaker poles). I get seasick walking through puddles but there is something that fascinates me about travel by water. I realised that earlier this year, when I wrote my piece on men rowing across the Atlantic ocean (a totally neglected post!).

modern day circumnavigators

Navigation has to make the best school for the soul.

You are always on the go, but unlike in a car or on a train, or even on foot, you are forever on uncertain terrain, not the terra firma you were born to roam free. If God would have wanted you to travel the seas, surely he would have given you fins? We developed boat-building skills instead.

There is something so seemingly impossible, to my mind, about travelling on water for more than a ferry crossing over a narrow strait or a modest channel that these people weren’t even real for me until recently. I think I may have died a miserable death at sea as a mariner once upon a time. Or lost my sons to the sea in their fishing boats. Pirates do not spell romantic to me even if (especially if?) they are Johnny Depp. I steer clear of ports known for their naval ships. Recently, however, all sea farers (oh, but river-farers, thanks to Mr J. Conrad, no less) have taken on mythical proportions for me, which makes formerly obscure parts of history come alive anew for me. Never too old to add on another interest! (It is as if the longer red threads criss-crossing as strings on a telluric map may make themselves known to me now, against the cosmic one I've been studying.)

Toro del Oro, Sevilla

We are sailing, we are sailing

Home again

This brings me to ponder on how far we have come since lighthouses, pretty much all there was to navigate by besides the stars. Still, after your boat has capsized in the middle of the ocean, there won't be an awful lot more you can do than float belly up and take in those vast starry skies. The joy of a beacon upon the horizon suddenly comes alive for me. It makes my heart leap to imagine this pillar of hope after days or weeks of destitution out at sea. Or years circumnavigating.... Can you imagine coming home after having sailed around the world, one out of a remaining crew of 241 reduced to 18 bedraggled, undernourished, sickly men. No captain (Magellan) left (speared by natives), but with a heart brimming with stories about exotic lands, mad mutiny, starvation, leaky ships, wrecks and near drowning, awful diseases, and above all, utter forlornness. There had to be trauma! But no time for any of that. (How much health would you have left?)

Tower of Hercules, Coruña, Galicia

Travelling into the twilight by the light of man's markers. Sailing into the unknown. We can only warn for known dangers. The explorers are heroic by stepping into the unknown.

I have had a fascination with lighthouses for much longer, but I am not sure I ever previously consciously linked these life-savers to the heroic adventures to be had on the seas really. A plumber bleeding my radiator once noticed I had four lighthouses up on my bedroom walls. Very casually he added to his observation that Freud would have called them phallic constructions. I quickly steered him towards a cuppa waiting for him in the kitchen showing profuse intellectual interest in this man’s knowledge of Freud. Was he perhaps also familiar with Jung’s Archetypes, at all?

I discover today another bemused lady who has been told her book cover (featuring a lighthouse - maybe because it’s a collection of biographical stories on lighthouse keepers?) is deemed sexy: see here and I learn for an ill person a lighthouse means quick recovery and lasting health.

Perhaps, being such an Ivory Tower person, I am desperate for the unmistakeably horizontal that is sailing. I need to cross rooting down and looking up with onwards, forwards, towards. I wonder about the difference of the two views: the one from the tower with its many aspects and its varying sunrises and sunsets and the one the sailor keeps on sailing towards with the only fixed point the cor(e) of the earth.

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