The Boundless Sea by Abulafia

Ref: David Abulafia (2019). The Boundless Sea. Oxford University Press.

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Summary­

• Discovery is not generally a sudden process; awareness of new land spreads thinly but does not necessarily lead to further action, as the example of the Norse arrival in North America shows: the crucial change occurs when this new knowledge takes its place in a wider world view.

• European colonization of the lands claimed by Spain and its rivals was not an orderly imposition of authority, though Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats and soldiers abounded, but a haphazard movement of merchants, religious dissidents, criminals fleeing justice, impoverished peasants and artisans, and slaves.

• The classic ports of past times have been displaced by container ports, many of which are not centers of trade inhabited by a colorful variety of people from many backgrounds, but processing plants in which machinery, not men, do the heavy work and no one sees the cargoes that have often been brought from far away and are sealed inside their big boxes.

• A harsh winter or a boiling summer could suddenly deplete resources to dangerous levels as the seasons changed. From this point of view, living by seas and river mouths was a sensible strategy; what mattered was variety, rather than reliance on a staple foodstuff. The more diverse the habitat, the easier it was to survive.

• The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that 80% of world trade by volume (nearly 10B tons) and 70% by value is conducted by sea.

• The Koreans, Malays and Indonesians prove to have been the real pioneers in crossing the open sea.

• The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa did not venture out to sea, and long-distance sea routes down the coast of west Africa were first developed by Europeans – by the Portuguese in the latter 15c.

• Roman Trade: Linked the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea to the Roman Empire via Egypt.

  • Greco-Roman navigators very rarely ventured beyond Malaya.

• China-India Trade: SCS Ports ® Coastal Vietnam ® Funan ® Isthmus of Kra (the narrow neck of land that links the Malay Peninsula to Asia ® (10d by land) S. Thailand ® Bay of Bengal ® NE India. 

  • A trip from India to China and back was a 3y affair.

• Hanseatic Trade: From the eastern end of the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, from Egypt and Syria to Venice, Genoa and Barcelona, from there out through the Strait to Atlantic waters all the way to Bruges, and from Bruges to Lübeck, Danzig and Riga, goods were conveyed stage by stage.

• Indian Ocean Trade: India was the interchange point between what at first sight appear to be two trading networks, or even three: from Egypt via Aden to the Malabar Coast, and from the Malabar Coast to Malaya and Indonesia, with a further extension to Quanzhou and other Chinese ports.

• Eurasian Trade: A single line of communication linking Alexandria in the Mediterranean to China, along which silk, spices, porcelain, metalwork and also religious ideas were transmitted, along with all those humdrum materials – wheat, rice, dates, and so on – in which the sheikh of Qusayr, among many others, mainly dealt.

Boundless Sea is split into Five Parts:

1. Oldest Ocean: The Pacific, 176K BCE- 1350.

2. Middle Ocean: The Indian and its Neighbors, 4500 BCE- 1500.

3. Young Ocean: The Atlantic, 22K BCE- 1500.

4. Oceans in Conversation, 1492-1900.

5. Oceans Contained, 1850-2000.

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Pacific Ocean

• The Pacific currents consist of four main trans-Pacific movements: a southern current lying away from all the islands; the South Equatorial Current heading westwards with a slight southward inclination; and above the Equator two contrary currents that separate Hawai’i from the rest of the Polynesian world.

• Australia

  • The Duyfken, or ‘Little Dove’, is the first of the Dutch ships known to have arrived in Australian waters. 20m long, this was what the Dutch called a jacht, or yacht, and she would have carried <20 sailors. After a successful trip to the East Indies under the patronage of the VOC, during which she had engaged in battle with a Portuguese flotilla off the island of Bantam in December 1601.

  • Reports came back of the desolate land (most of the ships visited the bleak, dry edges of Western Australia).

  • ‘A dry cursed earth without foliage or grass’.

  • The continent became become known as ‘New Holland’.

• Japan (Wa)

  • Amaterasu: The Japanese sun goddess that all Emperors are supposedly descended from.  

  • Script: The texts that Buddhist monks studied were in Chinese, and the creation of a workable Japanese script took time; when it did come into being, it made use of a great many Chinese characters, while also using syllabic signs better suited to the phonetics of Japanese. Until then, Chinese was the language of administration, and Chinese books on astronomy, divination, medicine, mathematics, music, history, religion and poetry were eagerly devoured by civil servants, monks and scholars in Japan.

  • Japanese admiration for Chinese culture was not matched by Chinese admiration for Japanese culture. The Japanese could not escape from being classed as barbarians by those they sought to emulate;

  • The Japanese attitude to the open sea can be summed up in Ennin’s terse comment: ‘we saw the ocean stretching far and mysterious to the east and south.’ It was not an inviting place.

  • Ainus: The original inhabitants of N. Japan.

• Philippines

  • The early Philippines were treated as part of the viceroyalty of New Spain…an extension of Mexico.

• Maritime Route: The journey (from New Spain) lasted 66 days, the return took 6 months.

Ryukyus

o   Chuzan Kingdom: An autonomous island trading nation centered on Okinawa.

o   Kanji: Japanese influence grew on the Ryukyus, marked by the arrival of a writing system based on the syllabic signs of Japanese script. However, the Ryukyuan’s did not adopt the additional and complex Chinese characters that had become locked into Japanese script, and relied on the plain syllables only.

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South China Sea (Zhang Hai)

• Major SCS Trading Ports

  • Guangzhou & Hanoi: Derived wealth as collection points, rather than centers of production.

  • Funan: For centuries, the main intermediary between China and India.

  • Oc-èo: A Malay fishing harbor at the top of the Gulf of Siam.

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Spice Islands

• The Spice Islands: A small group of islands to the NE of Indonesia between Celebes and New Guinea, including Ambon, Buru, Halmahera, Seram, Ternate, Tidore, and the Aru and Kai Island groups (Royal Museum Greenwich).

  • Neira: The nutmeg capital of the Moluccas.

• Major Spice Islands Ports

  • Java: Built upon its rivalry with Śri Vijaya. The rulers and merchants of both kingdoms aimed to supply high-grade spices to the Chinese to the north and the Indians, and little-known peoples beyond them, to the west.

  • Melaka: Founded (according to legend) by a refugee prince from Temasek (Singapura).

    • Melaka had originally been the pirate kingdom of Parameśvara.

  • Singapore (Temasek, Singapura):  Assumed to have begun in the early 19c, when Sir Stamford Raffles chose it from a shortlist as the site for a British trading station commanding the entrance to the Strait of Malacca.

    • Sri Tri Buana went on land and saw a strange animal bigger than a he-goat that had a red body, a white breast and a black head. Mystified by this, the rajah was told that it was some sort of lion, though the description hardly matched that of a lion, and it has been suggested that the author might have been thinking of an orangutan instead. Whatever the animal was, it was considered a good augury, and Sri Tri Buana decided to build a city on that site, which he named ‘Town of the Lion’, Singapura.

    • Singapore seems to have started life as a pirate base and then to have transformed itself into an honest trading settlement.

  • Sumatra

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Indian Ocean

• Madagascar: Settled from Indonesia (not Africa). The first settlers spoke a language close to Malay, for which the closest relative dialect spoken in Borneo.

  • Lemur: A very early primate, found nowhere else in the world.

• Monsoon: Seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with annual latitudinal oscillation of the ITCZ between its limits to the N. and S. of the equator. Usually ‘monsoon’ is used to refer to the rainy phase of a seasonally changing patter, although there is also a dry phase. The origin of the monsoons lies in the high air temperatures created in the Asian landmass during the summer; cooler air is drawn NE across the ocean. And then in winter it is much the opposite, as the landmass cools sharply but the ocean retains its warmth. Between Jun-Oct, winds blow favorably for shipping bound from the SW of the ocean towards Indonesia.        

  • Sailors had to await the slackening of the winds in late Aug before essaying routes into the Indian Ocean.  

• Major Indian Ocean Trading Ports

  • Kollam: The major interchange point in SW India linking the trade of the E. and the W. Indian Ocean.

  • Zanzibar: Gateway to the produce of SE Africa.

• Parameśvara: The pirate kingdom of Parameśvara, for that is what Melaka had originally been, had been transformed within a couple of generations into an emporium that linked the Indian Ocean to the Spice Islands and to Ming China.

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Red Sea

• Major Red Sea Trading Ports

  • Ayla (Aqaba–Eilat).

  • Aden: A town sunk in the crater of an extinct volcano that was well situated to watch comings and goings through the strait of Bab-al-Mandeb (BAM).

    • Rasulid: An early Yemeni Kingdom Centered on Aden.

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Mediterranean Sea

• Major Mediterranean Trading Ports

  • Kalep: ‘The great rock’; Gibraltar.

  • Massalia (modern Marseilles): Founded by migrants and merchants from Phokaia in Asia Minor. They had, according to rather dubious accounts, fled from the conquering army of the Persian Great King, and then from a colony they had established in Corsica, out of which the Etruscans and Carthaginians flushed them in a great naval battle in 541 BCE.

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Atlantic Ocean

• There were many factors driving people across the Atlantic: poverty at home, the wish to practice one’s faith without interference, the search for wealth, as rumors of gold continued to spread, notwithstanding Frobisher’s fiasco with fool’s gold.

• Britain

  • At the start of the 20c, especially when Liverpool is brought into the calculations, the dominance of Great Britain at sea was impossible to challenge. It had the largest and most effective navy; it had the largest and most successful merchant marine; it was home to extremely prestigious passenger lines, notwithstanding the growth of the Holland–Amerika Line and German firm HAPAG, which was larger than any other shipping company anywhere in the world on the eve of the First World War, boasting a million-ton fleet.

• Portugal

  • The main aim of the Portuguese was to intimidate local Muslim rulers, so that they had free passage through their waters; they needed stopping points where ships could be careened and leaks could be plugged; and above all they hoped to blockade the Red Sea, cutting off the supply routes that brought the spices of the Indies to Alexandria. There was one place along this coast that really did attract them: Sofala, in modern Mozambique, which was a terminal point for the gold that was brought from the African interior towards the coast. By controlling the coast of Mozambique, the Portuguese would be able to block Arab access to Sofala, while the region was within surprisingly easy sailing distance of India, once the monsoon winds were blowing in the right direction. constructing Portuguese forts at Sofala and Kilwa.

  • Portuguese methods were rooted in traditional medieval practices: they created trading bases, the nodal points of their Asian trading world being Hormuz, Goa, Melaka and Macau, which were backed up by coastal forts and by the Portuguese fleets that moved across the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea. The Spaniards, on the other hand, did conquer entire territories, as happened in the Philippines, and as had already been happening in the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru. Their interest in commercial connections across the oceans grew as the silver mines of Peru and Mexico delivered vast amounts of bullion to Manila and Seville, and their conquistadors had been attracted by stories of the gold of the Aztecs and Incas. So the two Iberian empires had very different profiles, one more sea-based, the other more land-based.

• Iceland

  • Money: In early Iceland, consisted of pieces of woven cloth.

  • Livestock: Sheep were Iceland’s silver mines.

  • Reykjavík (‘Smoke Inlet’): Iceland’s Capital; named after the steam rising from its hot springs.  

  • Politics: The political structure of Iceland, built around the principle of local autonomy under powerful gǫðar, expressed a conscious rejection of royal interference; the islanders were trying to create an idealized society, based on the Norway they would have liked to inhabit, and perhaps imagined that their forebears had inhabited before royal power began to intrude into the fjords. Even so, they learned that an annual assembly and a common system of law was necessary to ensure a degree of order among communities riven by feuding and competition for territory.

    • Þing: Iceland’s annual parliament.

  • Ancestry: About two thirds of modern male Icelanders appear to be of Norse descent, and one third of Celtic descent; but when one looks at the matrilineal line the proportions are reversed. This confirms how very substantial the Celtic element was, represented by female slaves whose children by free parents were accepted into Icelandic society, as well as by the Celtic wives of Vikings from the Scottish isles and Ireland. A similar picture can be drawn in both the Faroes and the Western Isles of Scotland (but not in Orkney and Shetland, where matrilineal and patrilineal lines are to an equal extent of Norse origin, suggesting that entire families migrated from Norway, not just warrior males).

  • Maritime Routes: The journey from Norway to the east coast of Iceland was estimated at seven days’ sailing, and from western Iceland to the Norse settlements in Greenland took four days, while from Iceland to Ireland was a five-day voyage. By the 13c, Norse ships had discovered lands even further north than Iceland, reaching Jan Mayen Island and Spitsbergen (which lay four days’ travel north of Iceland).

• Greenland

  • Maritime Routes: The E. coast of Greenland was a very hostile environment; it took a single day to reach it from the nearest point in Iceland.

  • Greenland settlements:

    • Eastern Settlement: Consisted of ~200 farms and a cathedral at Gardar, following the Christianization of the Norse settlers.

    • Western Settlement: Consisted of ~90 farms.

  • Exploration: Greenlanders might go as far as Disko Island (70oN), in search of walrus, polar bears and narwhal, whose spikes were often believed in Europe to be unicorn’s horns.

  • Lifestyle: The settlers were rich in cheese and butter, and raised cattle for meat, as well as hunting reindeer, whales and seals, which they turned into meat or fat, as well as local fish (notably cod) and Arctic hares. The milky drink known as skýr was a favorite food.

    • Livestock: The mainstay of the Greenland settlers was their flocks.

  • Politics: For a long time, Greenland was not a dependency of Iceland; its system of government was closely modelled on that of Iceland, with a Þing that brought together the leading inhabitants and that passed laws under the direction of its Law-Speaker.

  • Collapse: Theories include the Black Death or other disease, famine and malnutrition, climate change, Inuit attacks, a European preference for elephant ivory, sheer lack of interest in sending supplies from Europe, however nothing quite explains the evidence.

    • The most convincing demographic explanation for the extinction of the Greenland colonies is a slow but steady trickle of emigration, as the inhabitants, particularly young males, went to search for a more profitable livelihood in Iceland or Norway.

• Azores: Named the ‘Hawk Islands (Açores)’ by the Portuguese who saw Hawks hovering above the uninhabited islands. Later, the Azores were particularly favored by the English.

  • Livestock: Rabbits were introduced to Porto Santo by Europeans; they gobbled up the vegetation and turned the island into a semi-desert; it has never recovered.

  • Following the discovery of the Azores, the story grew that the Portuguese had reached the legendary ‘Isle of Brazil’ that was said to lie out in the Atlantic, or possibly the ‘Isle of the Seven Cities’, inhabited by refugees from the Muslim conquest of Spain more than 700 years earlier.

  • Terceira (Third Island): On the third island to be settled, James of Bruges established a dominion around the little beach of Praia da Vitória in the NE, building an elegant church with a Gothic gateway and stone-vaulted side chapels, out of materials that were brought all the way from Europe. Henry sent him a charter urging him to settle the island, ‘which had never before been settled by anyone in the world’, with good Catholics, and in the wake of this so many Flemings arrived that the whole group of islands was often called the ‘Flemish Isles’ rather than the Azores.

    • Angra: A small port city on Terceira; ‘one of the nodal points of Atlantic maritime commerce’.

• Canary Islands: Settled by Islanders of Berber origin, who had arrived long before Islam swept into N. Africa, lost the art of navigation, and were left isolated in their (to all intents) Stone Age existence on all 7 major islands, which had little to no contact amongst themselves. The most famous group were the warlike Guanches of Tenerife, whose massive volcano, Mount Teide, was visible from afar and was even mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy.

• Cape Verde Islands: An island off the coast of Guinea, a key entrepôt between Africa and the rest of the world. After their discovery, the islands were placed under the command of Antonio da Noli, as Captain-General, who, during the Castile-Portugal War of 1486-1487, abandoned his loyalty to the Portuguese King and recognized Castile as his overlords.

  • Europe sent red cloth of Portugal, metal bracelets, buttons, Venetian glass beads; the New World sent silver coins; the Indies sent coral, cloves and cotton, though these were often re-exported through Lisbon. All these goods passed through the Cape Verde Islands, reinforcing their role as a key entrepôt.

  • Slavery: The king permitted Cape Verde islanders to trade freely on the Guinea coast opposite, with the result that slave-trading and slave-raiding became their specialty. As the coast of W. Africa became a major source of black slaves, the Cape Verde Islands began to be used as a way station for slaves exported from Africa to Europe (and, in the 16c, to Brazil and the Caribbean).

    • Taking the 17c as a whole, 28K slaves are known to have passed through the Cape Verde Islands.

• Madeira Island: Became the meeting point for ships traveling to and from Portugal, the Netherlands, England, N. America, the W. Indies, and Brazil.

• Mogador Island: A small island off the coast of Atlantic Morocco; the gateway to the produce of large tracts of W. Africa.

• São Tomé Island.

• South Atlantic Ocean: St. Helena, Ascension Island, & Tristan de Cunha were uninhabited by humans or by mammals until the arrival of the Europeans.  

• Sugar Ports: Madeira, the Canaries, and São Tomé.

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Caribbean Sea

• Pre-Columbian Caribbean trade: A maritime highway ran all the way from Cuba to Trinidad and the South American mainland. Inter-island trade was conducted using the dugout canoes.

• Caribbean Peoples: On European discovery, the peoples of the Caribbean have generally divided into two groups by European observers, the warlike, cannibalistic Caribs and the more peaceful inhabitants of the large islands, especially Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, some of whom have come to be known as the ‘Taínos’, meaning ‘noble people’ in the principal language of these islands.

  • Carib: Derived from a mythical island of Caribe said to be inhabited solely by men (another island was supposedly inhabited solely by women).

• American Gold: Some Europeans believed that the hot sun generated gold in hot latitudes.

• Major Caribbean Trading Ports

  • St Thomas: Home to the Danes, Dutch, German, English, and Portuguese settlers. There were so many Dutch that the islanders mainly used their language.

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Atlantic Slave Trade

• The controversial question of how the Portuguese obtained the thousands of slaves they were exporting. Modern politics dominate discussion, and admitting that black rulers sold slaves to white merchants has not come easily to historians of the slave trade. The idea that these rulers sold their own people is certainly an oversimplification. The Serers did not enslave fellow Serers. War captives were another matter, and the intense struggles for power on the frontier between the savannah and the forest made sure that there were plenty of such captives. Further south, in Kongo and Angola, the situation was more complicated, and at the start of the 16c the Portuguese leaned on local rulers to ensure that they delivered large numbers of slaves, even from their own population. The truth is that the slave trade could only come into being because plenty of different people collaborated: back in Portugal, Prince Henry and then the Crown; merchants of various origins, including Spaniards and Genoese as well as Portuguese; settlers living in the Cape Verde Islands; lançados living in west Africa; local African rulers; and even parents who imagined that selling their sons and daughters to the Portuguese would offer them new opportunities in rich lands far away. Payment often came in the form of manilhas, brass bracelets that could be worn or melted down to satisfy the craving of the African elite for copper and brass goods, for which they generally depended on imported raw materials.

• The ability to obtain slaves depended on the willingness of local African kings to supply them; many were the subjects of rival kings and had been captured in war, while others were enslaved for debt.

• Many captives died during the arduous trek across country to the coast.

• As Portuguese expeditions reached further S. and E., they made contact with local rulers who were happy to sell them slaves from the Gulf of Benin and from the areas they knew as Kongo and Angola, a little to the N. of the present-day country of Angola.

• Most captains, with an eye on profit rather than humane treatment, wanted to deliver as large and healthy a human cargo as possible. Therefore, they did not make the conditions so absolutely dreadful that their captives died en masse; some time was allowed on deck and the slaves were generally fed well enough to keep them alive; if the conditions below deck were intolerable, disease would spread, infecting the crew as well.

• The harsh conditions – the searing heat, the uncleared jungle, the heavy manual work involved in sugar production, along with diseases such as malaria – killed many of the settlers, whatever their origin; and it was for that reason that black slaves began to be imported to work the sugar estates.

• Although war captives were enslaved, slavery in much of W. Africa had many similarities to the serfdom of medieval Europe: slaves were occasionally sold, for instance to buy war horses; but the main task of slaves was to cultivate the land on behalf of their masters.

• Ships plied back and forth between São Tomé and Elmina, carrying up to 120 slaves on each 4w voyage to Elmina; a rough calculation would suggest that somewhere around 3K slaves were coming through Elmina each year.

• Denmark exported African slaves to each of their three Caribbean islands.

• In Barbados in 1652, with an annual flow of roughly 1500-3000 into the island. It cost up to £8 to bring a servant across the Atlantic, which in mid 17c was a cheaper option than buying slaves, the price for which hovered somewhere around £35 – although indentured servants were not slaves and were treated much better than black slaves.

• The slave trading stations along the W. African coast were held by the Portuguese, later joined by the Dutch and the Danes.

• The infrastructure for the slave trade was in place now that the Portuguese had established their bases in W. Africa. Elmina in Ghana became a center for the trade in gold and slaves 10y before Columbus reached the New World. War captives were sent down to Elmina and trading stations on the west coast of Africa by the African allies of the Portuguese – noble POWs, peasant farmers, women and children. Elmina itself had only limited holding facilities; but the Cape Verde Islands were the perfect base for a transatlantic slave trade, a collection point that lay astride one of the obvious routes to the Caribbean.

• The transit trade to the Americas began in earnest in 1510. After that, the islands’ slaves fell into three categories: ‘trade slaves’, destined for the slave market in Portugal or, increasingly, America; ‘work slaves’, for sugar and other plantations on the Cape Verde Islands; and domestic slaves, bought to serve in settler households, who were certainly the most fortunate.

• Labour supply remained a problem because African slaves rarely lived much longer than 7y before overwork and disease took their toll. The answer was to increase the number of imported slaves; some of the largest estates had a workforce of 500 slaves, and many had 200.

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Baltic Sea

• The Baltic Sea: Began as a freshwater lake and was only joined to the salt sea as water inundated the land bridge between Modern Denmark and Sweden.

• Sweden

  • Kanton: A village in Sweden established in the hope that the Swedes could develop their own silk industry.

  • What brought the Swedish expeditions to an end was a combination of factors: a reduction in the heavy tax on tea imposed by the British government, which created a free-for-all in the tea trade; competition from new rivals, the Americans; bad financial management around 1800; the accumulation of vast amounts of unsold tea.

• Denmark

  • Maritime trade was the foundation of the Danish kingdom’s prosperity.

  • Helsingør Royal Castle: The gateway to the Baltic.

  • Tranquebar: Denmark’s main colony in SE India.   

Major Baltic Ports

• Gotland: The great emporium where Russian goods such as furs and wax were received, having travelled part of the way by river, through Lake Ladoga and up the Neva into the Baltic, and then across what could be dangerous waters to Gotland itself.

• Marienburg: ‘The fortress of St. Mary’; headquarters of the Teutonic Knights.

• Middleburg: Originally a Portuguese base in Flanders, close to the modern Belgian–Dutch frontier.

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North Sea

• Major North Sea Ports

  • Rotterdam: Played a well-situated entrepôt perfectly situated at the mouth of the long and complex river system of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt that reaches deep into Germany, France and Switzerland.

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English Channel

• The English Channel was regularly crossed by Bronze Age boats, so that Brittany and Normandy (or Armorica) and S. England (Wessex) were in close and constant contact, without losing their cultural individuality, made evident, for instance, in different burial rites.

• The Channel was crossed by several routes, including a route from Brittany to SW England and one from the mouth of the Seine NE to the Strait of Dover.

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Canals

Panama Canal

• Travelling by way of Cape Horn, the journey from NY to San Fran would cover 13K miles, and it could take several months. By way of Panama, the journey covered only 5K miles.

• France was to be granted a 99y lease on the canal, while Colombia would reap a 5% profit on gross revenue from the canal. His clear preference was for a sea level canal, which would mean cutting right through the mountains, and one idea was to run the ships through a massive tunnel. Then there would be the literally overwhelming problem of the rush of water as the canal met the River Chagres, which flowed into the Caribbean close to Colón, and in full flood would sweep away anything that stood in its way. But the superhuman 19c engineers of the generation of Brunel assumed they could achieve anything.

• Enthusiasm for the scheme ensured that capital could be raised, reaching 700M francs by 1883, by which time 10K workers needed to be paid, a figure that doubled within 15 months.

• The collapse of the Canal Company was the largest financial crash in the entire 19c.

• Hard work on the ground identified malaria and yellow fever as insect-borne diseases, and a massive effort to eradicate mosquitoes and other carriers of disease by thorough fumigation and by the removal of tainted water had impressive results; simple acts like removing ornamental trees that were growing in water-filled pots destroyed the breeding ground of the insects.

• The work of the Panama Canal was being carried out at the expense of the American government, at a cost of $352M, 4x the cost of the Suez Canal.

Suez Canal

• The route from Britain to the Far East became more than 3K miles shorter in distance and 10-12d  shorter in time.

• Ever deeper in debt, spending more on servicing his debts (roughly £5M per annum) than he was receiving from the canal, the khedive, to give him the grand title conferred by the Ottoman sultan, made the reluctant decision to sell his shares, upon which Benjamin Disraeli stole a march on his French rivals and bought up 44% of the canal for £4M in 1875. He understood perfectly the importance of the canal in assuring quick access to British India, and assured Queen Victoria that ‘it is vital to Your Majesty’s authority and power at this critical moment, that the Canal should belong to England’.

• Britain expanded its power and influence in the Mediterranean, but always with an eye on its route to India, along which its colonies of Gibraltar, Malta and eventually Cyprus became stepping stones.

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World Wars

WWI

• British demand for American wheat ‘exploded’ at the time of the First World War.

• Although WWI massively disrupted Britain’s overseas trade, the attacks by U-boats on British shipping had less effect than the continuing command of the seas by British fleets, which left Germany struggling to obtain the goods it needed for its war effort; Germany was in effect subject to a maritime blockade; and Britain, a country whose ability to supply itself depended even more heavily on access to the sea, continued to rule the waves.

• Germany lost half its merchant navy during the war, it lost much of the rest under the draconian terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

• Britain lost 37% of its merchant fleet, a gross tonnage of at least 7-9M tons.

WWII

• After the fall of France, the Germans commandeered most of the French merchant navy.

• The axis destroyed ~21M tons of Allied merchant shipping during WWII, with about 15M tons the victim of U-boat attacks- nearly 4,800 ships.

• Globally, the post-WWII years saw a remarkable bounce back to prosperity. During the war English company P&O had lost just over half of its pre-war fleet of 371 ships, of 2,200,000 tons, but by 1949 it was already operating as many cargo ships as in 1939; as for passenger ships, it owned fewer, but they were larger.

Vietnam War

• During the Vietnam War. McLean became a regular supplier of the American army, arguing that containers were perfect for the delivery of vital supplies that otherwise were seeping from the ports of Vietnam into the hands of the Viet Cong. He also showed that the containers could be put to many uses, for example as offices and storage bunkers.

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Religion

Islam

• Islamic law forbids the direct payment of interest.

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Misc Quotes

“Leave your homeland in search of prosperity; depart! Travelling has five benefits: dispelling grief, earning livelihood, seeking knowledge, good manners and accompanying the praiseworthy. If it were said that in travelling there is humiliation and hardship, desert raid and overcoming difficulties, then certainly the death of the young man is better than his life in degradation between the slanderer and the envious.”

“They eat with their fingers instead of with chopsticks such as we use. They show their feelings without any self-control. They cannot understand the meaning of written characters. They are people who spend their lives roving hither and yon. They have no fixed abode and barter things which they have for those they do not, but withal they are a harmless people.”-A Japanese Chronicler on first meeting the Europeans.

“After twenty years of bitter war between the two kingdoms treaties of peace cannot remove from the hearts of men so great a foundation of hatred and ill-will.”-Unk on the Portuguese-Castillian War (Early 15c).

“A person who sees an injustice and does nothing is without courage.”-Chang Pogo.

“The generalization of the consumption of luxury items, as those who rose up the social ladder became somewhat contemptuous of the simple life their grandparents had led.”

“One indication that markets are integrated is when they have prices that are correlated with each other.”-Kevin O’Rourke, Economic Historian.

“The board of the Sarawak Steamship Company, with no ships left out of its tiny pre-war fleet, began its meeting on 13 December 1945 by solemnly confirming the minutes of its session on 4 December 1941, as if all the misery in between had never occurred.”

“Its (Opium) obnoxious odour ascends, irritating heaven and frightening the spirits.”-Lin Zexu (Chinese Imperial Commissioner).

“It is possible to trace both matrilineal and patrilineal ancestry (through analysis of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes respectively).”

“11 reasons why one might have travelled in prehistoric Europe: to obtain goods; to sell goods; for social meetings; out of sheer curiosity or to acquire exotic information; to a holy place as a pilgrim; to learn or train; to find work; as a mercenary; to visit friends and relatives; as an emissary; and, in his view one of the most important and most easily forgotten reasons, to find a spouse.”-Colin Renfrew.

“The people of Bergen have taken to drink (wine); many have lost their lives, some their limbs, some are damaged for their entire life, others have suffered disgrace, have been wounded or beaten, and all this comes from too much drink.”

“Forþan cnyssaðnu heortan geþohtas þæt ic hean streamas . . . Now come thoughts knocking my heart, of the high waves, clashing salt-crests, I am to cross again. Mind-lust maddens, moves as I breathe soul to set out, seek out the way to a far folk-land flood-beyond. For no man is so mood-proud, so thoroughly equipped, so quick to do, so strong in his youth, or with so staunch a lord that before seafaring he does not fear a little whither the Lord shall lead him in the end.”-Beowulf?

“One way of measuring which are the largest maritime nations is to calculate deadweight tonnage (dwt) for every thousand inhabitants. In 2000 Norway and Greece were at the top of the scale, with a figure of over 12,000 dwt; the world average was a mere 121 dwt.”

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People

• Ahaziah (?-841 BCE): 6th King of Judah, the rival N. Kingdom of Israel, which came into existence after the death of Solomon.

• Hippalos (1c BCE): Greek Navigator and Merchant who discovered the mechanics of the Indian Ocean’s SW Monsoon and captained the Greek Explorer ‘Eudoxus of Cyzicus’ (Hippalus).

• Titus Caesar Vespasianus (39-81): Roman Emperor from 79-81 and general charged with suppressing the Jewish revolt in Palestine. Forces under Titus besieged, captured, and destroyed Jerusalem in 70. Titus gained notoriety during is fathers rule serving as prefect of the Praetorian Guard and for carrying on a controversial relationship with the Jewish Queen Berenice. Titus is best known for completing the Colosseum and leading Rome through two disasters- the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 and the fire of Rome in 80.

• Chang Pogo (Jang Bogo) (787-841): Korean Pirate lord and national hero in S. Korea who effectively controlled the Yellow Sea (West Sea) and dominated trade between Silla, Heian Japan, and Tang China for decades. His Korean name was Kangp’a and he began his career as a soldier in the service of the Tang Empire before returning to his native land in 828. When he was living in Tang China, he had witnessed the wholesale import of Korean slaves by Chinese traders, and, with the approval of the king of Silla, he used Wando as a base for attacking the slavers.

• Dicuil (Dicuilus) (Late 8c-?): Irish Monk and Geographer; a keen cosmographer who wrote his “On the Measurement of the Globe of the Earth” in the early 9c at the court of the Frankish emperor, Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son.

• Eirík the Red (Erik Thorvaldsson) (950-1003): Norse Explorer, described in the Icelandic Saga as having founded the first settlement in Greenland. Eirík and his father had been outlawed from Norway and arrived in Iceland in the vain hope of obtaining the sort of broad estates that earlier Norse settlers had acquired. But by the time they reached the island the best land had long been occupied by the gǫðar and their followers. Eirík had killed one man in Norway, and before long he was sucked into feuds in Iceland. By 983 he was an outlaw there too; the sentence was for three years, but if he appeared in public any of his foes could attempt to kill him with impunity. Leaving Iceland was the obvious option and, since he required land, Eirík chose not the Norse lands in the British Isles but the far-off ice-bound land that Gunnbjorn had sighted- Greenland.

• Leif Eiríksson (970-1019/25): Son of Eirík the Red and Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to have set foot on continental N. America. According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at Vinland. Leif has been described as ‘a tremendous sailor, and the first skipper reported to have made direct voyages between Greenland, Scotland, Norway, and back again’.

• Þorfinn Karlsefni Thódarson (980/5-?): 11c Icelandic explorer who defended his territory in Caithness with ‘five well-manned longships’, described in the saga as ‘a considerable force’. Unfortunately, the king of the Scots, Karl Hundason (possibly the king who is also known as Macbeth), came upon his fleet with 11 longships, and their navies engaged. Þorfinn followed his banner on to the deck of King Karl’s longship – Karl escaped, but most of his crew were killed. Around the year 1010, he followed Leif Ericksson’s route to Vinland in a short-lived attempt to establish a permanent settlement with his wife Gudrid and their followers.

• Cnut (990-1035): King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018, and King of Norway from 1028 until his death in 1035. The three kingdoms united under Cnut’s rule are referred to together as the N. Sea Empire.

• Magnus Barelegs (Barefoot, Magnus III) (1073-1103): Norwegian King Magnus III from 1093-1103; Magnus III was one of a series of Norwegian kings who transformed the predatory and diffuse raiding of the Vikings into a coordinated project. Magnus reign was marked by aggressive military campaigns and conquest, particularly in the Norse-dominated parts of the British Isles, where he extended his rule to the Kingdom if the Isles and Dublin.

• Zheng He (1371-1431/5): Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat, fleet admiral, and court eunuch during China’s early Mig Dynasty. He was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor and commanded 7 expeditionary treasure voyages to SE Asia, S. Asia, W. Asia, and E. Africa between 1405-1433. The admiral (though he did not actually hold such a title) was born a Muslim in 1371. As a boy, Zheng He was taken prisoner after his father was killed resisting the Ming invasion of Yunnan. He was castrated and sent to the Chinese imperial court; and there he rose among the ranks of the court eunuchs, whose closeness to the emperor was often a great source of irritation to the bureaucrats who expected to gain their ruler’s ear. He became head of the Directorate of Palace Servants, a government office heavily involved in building projects, and these, like shipbuilding, required the use of enormous quantities of wood. It was his experience in organizing construction rather than his experience as a naval commander, which was non-existent, that made him a very suitable choice to take charge of the emperor’s fleet.

• Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460): Duke of Viseu; Portuguese Captain and Explorer, regarded as the main initiator of what would become the “Age of Discovery.” Henry was the 4th child of the Portuguese King John I, who founded the House of Aviz.

• Gil Eanes (1395-?): 15c Portuguese Navigator and Explorer.

• Mehmet II (Mehmed the Conqueror) (1431-1481): Ottoman Sultan who ruled from 1444-1446 and later from Feb, 1451- May, 1481. Mehmed defeated the crusade led by John Hunyadi and led Ottoman forces in the siege and conquer of Constantinople. Mehmed continued his conquests in Anatolia with its reunification and conquests into Europe as far as Bosnia.

• Diogo de Azambuja (1431-1518): Portuguese Noble and Explorer.

• Bartomeu (Bartholomew) Dias (1450-1500): Portuguese Mariner and Explorer. In 1488, Dias became the first European navigator to round the Southern Tip of Africa, demonstrating that the Ptolemaic maps were incorrect- Africa did not connect with a great southern continent, effectively establishing a sea route between Europe and Asia.

• Kemal Reis (1451-1511): Ottoman and Turkish Privateer and Admiral. Kemal was of the most successful Barbary corsairs of his day, raiding the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, Spain and France.

• Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1521): Italian Merchant, Explorer, and Navigator from the Rep. of Florence, from who’s name the term “America” is derived. Between 1497-1504, Vespucci participated in at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery, first on behalf of Spain (1499-1500) and then for Portugal (1501-1502). In 1503 and 1505, two booklets were published under his name, containing colorful descriptions of these explorations other alleged voyages. Both publications were extremely popular and widely read across much of Europe. In 1501 during his Portuguese expedition, Vespucci claimed to have understood that Brazil was part of a continent new to Europeans which he called “The New World.” The claim inspired Martin Waldseemüller to recognize Vespucci’s accomplishments in 1507 by applying the latinized form “America” for the first time to a map showing the New World. Other cartographers followed suit, and by 1532 the name America was permanently affixed to the newly discovered continents.

  • A small coterie of scholars interested in geography gathered in the little town of Saint-Dié among the hills of Lorraine, under the patronage of their duke, René II, titular king of Naples. They reprinted one of Vespucci’s most popular pamphlets and added to it a massive world map by Martin Waldseemüller, published in 1507, which portrayed the New World as a separate pair of continents to the linked-up continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. A small part of the southern continent was labelled AMERICA in honour of Amerigo Vespucci.

  • Vespucci was commanded to explore 300 leagues of the coast each year, and the Portuguese decided to set up a small fort, subject to a sliding scale of royal taxation, from zero in the first year to one quarter in the third year. In 1503–4, a fort and factory were built at Cabo Frio close to modern Rio de Janeiro.

• Christopher Columbus (1451-1506): Italian explorer and navigator who completed 4 voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, opening the way for widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas. His expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean, Central and S. America.

  • Columbus shared with King Manuel (and with Ferdinand and Isabella) the messianic expectation that the discovery of a new route to the Indies would fund a massive attack on Islam that would culminate in the reconquest of Jerusalem by the greatest crusade of all time, in which, it was fervently hoped, various Christian kings of the East would also take part – Prester John was never far from the thinking of these new-style crusade strategists. Ideally, Christian navies would force open the Red Sea and clear the way to the Mediterranean – the spice route, but also the route to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

  • Columbus made his sailors swear that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland, subject to a penalty of 10,000 maravedís and excision of the culprit’s tongue, he was unconsciously expressing his own uncertainty about where on earth he had arrived.

• Diogo Cão (1452-1486): Portuguese Explorer and one of the most notable navigators of the Age of Discovery. Cão made two voyages sailing along the W. coast of Africa in the 1480s, exploring the Congo River and the coasts of the present-day Angola and Namibia. Cão had shown that it was possible to press on beyond the new Portuguese bases in Elmina and São Tomé, and to find a welcome in lands untouched by Islam that should be the gateway to the Indian Ocean.

• Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515): 1st Duke of Goa. A Portuguese General, Admiral, and Statesmen, who served as viceroy of Portuguese India from 1509-1515, during which time he expanded Portuguese influence across the Indian Ocean. Albuquerque advanced the three-fold Portuguese grand scheme of combating Islam, spreading Christianity, and securing the trade of spices by establishing a Portuguese Asian Empire. Albuquerque conquered Goa, was the first European of the Renaissance to raid the Persian Gulf, and he led the first voyage by a European fleet into the Red Sea. Albuquerque is considered “probably the greatest naval commander of the age.”

• Vicente Yáñez Pinzón (1462-1514): Spanish Navigator and Explorer, the youngest of the Pinzón brothers. Along with his brother, Martine Alonso Pinzón, who captained the Pinta, he sailed with Christopher Columbus on the first voyage to the New World, as captain of the Nina.

• Hojeda (1466-1515): Spanish Explorer, Governor, and Conquistador. Ojeda navigated with Amerigo Vespucci and traveled through much of Central and South America.

• Juan Núñez de Balboa (1471-1519): Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador. Balboa is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have seen or reached the Pacific from the New World.

• Juan Ponce de León (1474-1521): Spanish Explorer and conquistador who led the first official expedition to Florida and served as the first governor of Puerto Rico. By 1500, Leon was a top military official in the colonial government of Hispaniola, where he helped crush a rebellion of the native Taino people. He was authorized to explore Puerto Rico in 1508 and was appointed as first governor of Puerto Rico in 1509. After a long court battle, Diego Colon replaced Leon as governor of Puerto Rico and Leon left to explore more of the Caribbean. In 1513, Leon led the first known European expedition to La Florida, which he named during his first voyage to the area. He landed somewhere along Florida’s E. coast, charted the Atlantic down to the FL Keys, and returned to Spain in 1514 where he was knighted by King Ferdinand and reinstated as governor of Puerto Rico. In 1521, Leon returned to SW FL with the first large scale attempt to establish a Spanish Colony in the Continental US, however the native Calusa people fiercely resisted the incursion.

  • Controversial is the idea that Ponce de León was sent by the ageing king of Aragon to search for the ‘Fountain of Youth’ to restore his virility and offer him the chance to father a child by his second wife, Germaine de Foix, giving him an heir in Aragon (though not Castile, which would pass to Juana the Mad’s son, the future Habsburg emperor Charles V) – better Aragon without Castile than a Habsburg Spain. However, there is no strong evidence to support this claim. 

• Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) (1480-1521): Portuguese Captain and Explorer in the service of Spain best known for having planned and led the 1519 Spanish Expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route and achieving the first European navigation from the Atlantic to Asia. Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in 1521 after sailing across the Pacific Ocean.

  • Magellan was killed in the Philippines at a point 124oE, and did not enter the Indian Ocean. (He had, however, sailed as far east as 128oE earlier in his career, so that he went round the world in separate journeys).

• Giovanni da Verrazano (1485-1528): Italian Explorer of N. America in the service of King Francis I of France. He is renowned as the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of N. America between FL and New Brunswick in 1524, including NY Bay and Narragansett Bay. Verrazano’s name is now commemorated in a bridge linking Brooklyn to Staten Island, although the aim of his expedition was not to explore the coast of North America but to find a way to Asia.

• Hernán Cortés (1485-1547): Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire, bringing large portions of modern Mexico under the King of Castile in the early 16c. Cortés was part of the generation of Spanish explorers and conquistadors who began the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

• Juan Sebastián Elcano (1486-1526): Spanish Navigator, ship-owner, and Explorer of Basque origin; best known for having completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in the ship Victoria on the Magellan Expedition to the Spice Islands.

• Süleyman I (Suleiman the Magnificent) (1494-1566): 10th and longest reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1520 until his death in 1566. Under his administration, the Ottoman Empire ruled over >25M people.

• Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (1499-1543): Portuguese Captain and explorer in the service of Spain, who discovered California.

• Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596): English Explorer, Sea Captain, Privateer, Slave Trader, Naval Officer, and Politician; best known for his circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, 1577-1580.

• Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-1659): Dutch Captain, Explorer, and Merchant, best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644 in the service of the VOC. He was the first European to reach New Zealand and the islands of Fiji and Tasmania. Tasman was a 40yo Calvinist who set out from Batavia on a wide sweep of southern latitudes in 1642. He enjoyed his drink; later in his career he was deprived of his command after he hanged a troublesome sailor while he was drunk, not bothering to go through the due process of a trial. He came in sight of Tasmania, not realizing that it is a large island lying off the coast of Australia, and sailed around the bottom, demonstrating that this was not, alas, part of the great southern continent.

• Jakob Kettler (1610-1682): Duke Jakob (of Courland, Kurland) was a grandson of the last master of the Teutonic Order, Gotthard Kettler. Jakob established forts in the Gambia River (1651) and purchased Tobago from English Lord Warwick (1654), and participated in the Transatlantic Triangular Trade.

• Christopher Myngs (1625-1666): English Vice Admiral and Privateer.

• Frederick Philipse (1626-1702): First Lord of the Manor of Phillipseborough and patriarch of the Philipse family; a Dutch immigrant to N. American of Bohemian Heritage. Philipse arrived in America as early as 1653, marrying Margaret Hardenbrook de Vries in 1662 and amassing a fortune in league with slavers, pirates, and other undesirables. Beginning in 1672, Philipse and some partners started acquiring land and in what was to become lower Westchester County, NY but was subsequently banned from government office for conducting a slave trade in NY. On his death, Philipse was one of the greatest landholders in the Province of NY; his tract became the present-day Putnam County, NY.

  • Philipse supported Baldridge on St Mary’s Island, off the NE coast of Madagascar, sending him supplies in return for Malagasy slaves. Philipse and Baldridge had bought a winning ticket: once the base on St Mary’s was up and running, with hundreds of people living in the settlement, all the pirate vessels active in the western Indian Ocean began to call in there for supplies. Baldridge did particularly good business by selling on rum and beer at an appreciable mark-up.

• Henry Morgan (1635-1688): English Privateer, plantation owners, and later, Lt. Governor of Jamaica. From his base in Port Royal, Jamaica, he raided settlements and shipping against the Spanish. With prize money from raids, he purchased three large sugar plantations. Famous for raiding Panama and other Spanish settlements/ships. Morgan is a good example of the pirate who, on close examination, does not look much like a pirate. It has been pointed out that he stayed married to his wife for two decades; that he never led an expedition without obtaining a letter of marque from the Jamaican governor; that he won the strong approval of the English Crown despite the destruction of Panama; and he even became lieutenant-governor of Jamaica; he is known to have joined only one expedition, in 1661, whose members were accused of piracy.

• Vitrus Jonassen (Ivan Ivanovich) Bering (1681-1741): Danish Cartographer, Explorer in Russian service, and a Russian Naval Officer; known as a leader of two Russian expeditions- the 1st Kamchatka Expedition and the Great N. Expedition, exploring the NE Coast of the Asian continent and from there the W. coast on the N. American continent. The Bering strait, Bering Sea, Bering Island, Bering Glacier, and Vitus Lake were all named in his honor.

• John Harrison (1693-1776): Self-educated English Carpenter and Clockmaker who invented the Marine Chronometer, a long sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea. Harrison’s solution revolutionized navigation and greatly increased the safety of long-distance sea travel. His chronometers were used during Cook’s 2nd and 3rd Voyages.

• Tupaia (1725-1770): Tahitian Polynesian Navigator and Arioi (a kind of Priest), originally from the island of Ra’iatea in the Society Islands. Tupaia was a highly skilled navigator, priest and local nobleman, to come on board, and Tupaia accompanied Cook around the Polynesian islands, even drawing a famous map of large tracts of the Pacific from memory. Tupaia knew the names of 74 islands, and his map covered a vast area of the Pacific roughly equal in size to Europe (including Russia-in-Europe). Most importantly, he explained the complex wind system of the Pacific.

• Cook (1728-1779): British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768-1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia. Cook achieved the first recorded European contact with the E. coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook carefully identified areas along the coast of Australia that had been neglected ever since the Dutch had arrived in that continent. He established that Aotearoa was not a spur sticking out of a vast Antarctic continent, but two large islands inhabited by a substantial Māori population.

  • Cook’s Voyages: https://www.bl.uk/the-voyages-of-captain-james-cook/timeline

• Robert Gray (1755-1806): American explorer and captain; known for his achievements in connection with two trading voyages to the N. Pacific Coast of N. America between 1790-1793, which pioneered the American maritime fur trade in that region. In 1790, Gray completed the first American circumnavigation of the world.

• Kamehameha I (1758-1819): Conqueror and ruler of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Kamehameha placed himself under the British Crown, for he saw that this would not weaken but rather strengthen his authority so far from London. At the start of the 19c he decided that he could make a profitable deal with the Russians in Alaska, who were always short of supplies. The Hawai’ian king sent a letter to Alexander Baranov, who was running Russian operations in Alaska, suggesting that Kamehameha could solve his difficulties by sending a consignment each year from Hawai’i. Later, Kamehameha allowed the Russians to build a trading base on O’ahu. Kamehameha was careful not to put all his eggs in one basket. As well as the British and the Russians, he had to deal with US shipping. By 1800 the Americans, not the British, were the most frequent visitors to his islands.

  • Kamehameha I encouraged sandalwood production at the expense of food production. This resulted in occasional famines, while supplies of sandalwood in Hawai’i became so depleted that he had to issue orders that young trees were subject to taboo, until they had grown sufficiently. These measures were revolutionary: the subsistence economy of the islands was being transformed into a commercial economy, placing heavy demands on a native labour force that had traditionally lived easily off the natural produce of the land.

• Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (1781-1826): British Statesmen who served as Lt. Gov of the British East Indies between 1811-1816 and Lt. Gov of Bencoolen between 1818-1824. Raffles is best known for his founding of modern Singapore and the Straits Settlements.

• Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858): US Commodore who commanded ships in several wars including the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West. Perry is considered the “Father of the Steam Navy” in the US.

• Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914): US Naval Officer and Historian who wrote the 1890 book “The Influence of Sea-Power upon History, 1660–1783. Mahan’s aim was to reveal the importance for the US of an active naval policy at a time when isolationism had long been the order of the day, and when even American merchant fleets were, he said, playing only a modest role in world trade. Mahan’s approach was founded upon a particular view of international relations as a great game in which nations competed for power and influence, expressing their power through control of the sea routes and using their power to promote trade.

• Haakon Wallem (1870-1951): A giant Norwegian born in Bergen who arrived in the Russian port of Vladivostok in 1896, made his way to China, and then established himself in Shanghai, buying his first ship, the Oscar II, in 1905. Wallem hit the jackpot during the Russian–Japanese War, because freight rates shot upwards, and also because the Japanese were so grateful for the unspecified and mysterious help he had given them that they awarded him a prize of ¥100,000

  • He showed extraordinary resilience, keeping his company afloat in what were increasingly difficult times: he survived revolution in China and the loss of his first ship, becoming not just a prominent shipowner but a leading shipbroker, buying vessels for clients, and managing to carry on business during the First World War, during which Norway remained neutral.

• Malcolm Purcell McLean (1913-2001): American businessman credited with the invention of the modern intermodal shipping container, which revolutionized transport and international trade. McLean had been frustrated by the cumbersome way that goods brought from the American hinterland had to be unloaded by longshoremen and then carefully replaced in the hold of a ship, a process that then had to be repeated back-to-front when the ship reached its destination.

  • He started on land: he owned a trucking company with >600 trucks by 1954, and in the 1950s he worked hard to cut costs and to undercut his competitors. A constant innovator, he built an automated terminal in NC, introduced diesel engines and redesigned his trucks so that they had crenellated sides, to reduce wind drag.

• Kenneth Nelson (20c): The Wallem office in Hong Kong closed, and several of its staff were captured by the Japanese. The chief accountant, Kenneth Nelson, was a lucky survivor: he was placed on board a ship carrying more than 1,800 prisoners, but the Japanese had not painted Red Cross markings on the boat, and it was torpedoed by the Allies. Nelson broke out of the sinking ship through the gash left by the torpedo, swimming ashore only to find that he was in Japanese-occupied territory. He was sent back to Hong Kong, escaped from prison there, was shot by a Japanese patrol, but still managed to find his way to his favorite bar, where he ordered his favorite drink with the extra request: ‘Make it a double!’

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Cultures & Kingdoms

• Sumer (4500-1900 BCE): The earliest known civilization in the historical region of S. Mesopotamia (S. Central- Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. It is one of the cradles of civilization in the world, along with Ancient Egypt, Elam, the Caral-Supe, Mesoamerica, the Indus Valley Civilization, and Ancient China.

  • Dilmun: A fictional paradise where Ziusudra resides, known as Uti-napishtim in Babylonia. Ziusudra was the survivor of the Great Deluge that swept away the rest of mankind in a version of the Flood. In the Sumerian version, Ziusudra was sent by the Gods to Dilmun, which was found to be ‘where the sun rises,’ and was granted the eternal life that others, such as Gilgamesh, had sought. Bilgames (as the Sumerians called Gilgamesh) even sought out Ziusudra in ‘the land of the living’; but in the end Bilgames too was fated to follow his great friend Enkidu down into the gloomy Netherworld where disconsolate souls flitted about but there was nothing to enjoy.

    • Bahrain: A major center of Dilmun became clear as more and more sites along the Arabian coast were identified. Potentially created as a vast isle of the dead, a cemetery island.

    • Dilmun was an intermediary between the cities of Sumer and those of the Indus, a place where goods were exchanged and where merchants both from Sumer.

  • The description of the boat Ziusudra or Atrahasis built during the great flood that destroyed the rest of mankind and was described on Sumerian and Babylonian tablets (and later in the book of Genesis). The boat was supposedly a gigantic version of a round hide-covered boat; the hides were plastered with bitumen and animal fat on to a frame made of miles and miles of wickerwork, within which a wooden three-story structure housed the animals and the hero and his family.

  • Abyss: ‘Abzu’- Sumerian; the great freshwater deeps on which the world was said to float, with the seabed forming a barrier between saltwater and the waters of the abzu which welled up and fed the springs of life on earth.

    • Enki: The God of the abzu; both patron of the oldest of the Sumerian cities, Eridu, and a frequent visitor to Dilmun. And one can see why he would wish to go there and escape the chatter of humans, which had driven the gods to such distraction that they unleashed the flood waters on the earth. 

• Phoenicians (2500-64 BCE): An Ancient Thalassocratic Civilization originating in the Levant region of the E. Med, primarily located in Modern Lebanon. The Phoenicians came to prominence in the mid-12c BCE, following the decline of most influential cultures in the Late Bronze Age collapse. They were renowned as skilled traders and mariners, becoming the dominant commercial power for much of classic antiquity. The Phoenicians developed an expansive maritime trade network that last over a millennium, helping facilitate the exchange of cultures, ideas, and knowledge between major cradles of civilization such as Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.

• Akkadians (2334-2154 BCE): The first empire of Mesopotamia following the long-lived civilization of Sumer. It was centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region. The Empire united Akkadian and Sumerian speakers under one rule and exercised influence over Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia.

• Babylonians (1895-539 BCE): An ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia. A small Amorite-ruled state emerged in 1894 BCE, which contained the minor administrative town of Babylon. It was a small provincial town during the Akkadian Empire, but greatly expanded during the reign of Hammurabi in the first half of the 18c BCE and became a major capital city. It was often involved in rivalry with the older state of Assyria to the N. and Elam to the E. in Ancient Iran. Babylon briefly became the major power ijn the region after Hammurabi (1792-1752 BCE) created a short-lived empire, succeeding the earlier Akkadian Empire, Third Dynasty of Ur, and Old Assyrian Empire. The Babylonian Empire rapidly fell apart after the death of Hammurabi and reverted to a small kingdom.

• Polynesians (1800 BCE- 1500): Indigenous peoples of Polynesia (poly- ‘many’, nesoi- ‘islands’). Only in the millennium after about 300 did settlement expand N. and S., and much further W., into areas of varied climate and resources, as far as Hawai’i in the N. and New Zealand in the south.

  • Aotearoa: A name attributed to Hine-te-aparangi, the wife of Kupe, the first Polynesian navigator to reach the North Island of New Zealand.

  • Kuy: The Tahitian god of war.

  • E hoki Kupe?: ‘Will Kupe return?’; a phrase used in Aotearoa as a polite but firm refusal.

  • Polynesian Navigation: Land could be detected through the flight of birds such as terns coming out to sea to feed. Their range from land was known; the direction they came in the morning and returned at night was the best possible clue to where land lay. Other signs included cloud formations, which might change color, reflecting the land that lay underneath (coral atolls would cast an opal tinge on the cloud above). Phosphorescent patches in the sea were a further sign that land was near. Increasing amounts of flotsam generally suggested land. The very smell of the sea air would help guide a sailor to a known haven. It was important to compensate for currents and wind, making use of the sun by day and the stars by night to adjust course as appropriate. One of the most extraordinary methods of navigation was what might be called the Polynesian Theory of Relativity, a system known in the Carolina Islands as etak. Here, the assumption was that the boat remained still and the rest of the world moved. Judgements therefore had to be made about how the position of the islands altered in relation to the boat – a relationship not just between the boat and its destination, but between the destination and another island in the vicinity; the method depended on placing this third point accurately in relation to the stars. This involved some powerful mental geometry, not to mention an astonishingly detailed, carefully memorized, mobile map of the heavens.

  • Captain Cook and the natural historian Joseph Banks explored immense tracts of the Pacific in the years around 1770, and they were intrigued to find that the languages spoken in Hawai’i, Tahiti and New Zealand were mutually comprehensible and that what are now called ‘Oceanic’ languages were spoken across the whole north–south span of Polynesia. Later research showed that these languages were related to the language now spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia, and even to the Malagasy language of Madagascar, all forming a large ‘Austronesian’ group of languages.

• Hyksos (1650-1550 BCE): The Kings of the 15th Dynasty of Egypt from their seat of power in the city of Avaris in the Nile Delta, from where they ruled over Lower and Middle Egypt up to Cusae. The Hyksos period marks the first in which Egypt was ruled by foreign rulers and they introduced several technological innovations including the horse and chariot, the sickle sword, and possibly the composite bow.

• Lapita (1600-500 BCE): A Neolithic Austronesian people who spread across vast tracts of Melanesia via seaborne migration including the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa, and probably Taiwan, where the language of the indigenous population is related to those spoken across Oceania. By around 1000 BCE, the Lapita reached the limits of their expansion, and had created a series of networks across about 4,500 km of the Pacific, in a great arc from New Guinea to Tonga.

  • The trade winds cross the Lapita area of settlement from SE-NW.

• Etruscans (900-27 BCE): Developed by a people of Etruria in ancient Italy with a common language and culture who formed a federation of city-states that peak around 750 BCE. Assimilation began in the late 4c as a result of the Roman- Etruscan Wars; it accelerates with the grant of Roman citizenship in 90 BCE, and became complete in 27 BCE when the Etruscans’ territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.

• Carthaginians (Punic’s, Western Phoenicians) (814-146 BCE): A Semitic people in the W. Med who migrated from Tyre, Phoenicia, to N. Africa during the early Iron Age. The largest Punic settlement was Ancient Carthage (modern Tunis), but there were ~300 others along the N. African Coast.

• Scythians: An ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people who migrated from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe (modern Ukraine/S. Russia) from ~7-3c BCE.

• Seleucid (312-63 BCE): A Greek state in W. Asia that existed during the Hellenistic period from 312-63 BCE. The Seleucid empire was founded by the Macedonian General Seleucus I Nicator, following the division of the Macedonian Empire. The Seleucid Empire ruled over the Mesopotamian region of Babylonia. Seleucus I began expanding his dominions to include the Near Eastern territories that encompass modern day Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, all of which had been under Macedonian control after the fall of the former Persian Achaemenid Empire. At the Seleucid Empires height, it consisted of territory that covered Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, and modern Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and parts of Turkmenistan.

• Chola (300s BCE- 1279): Tamil Thalassocratic Empire of S. India and the longest ruling dynasty in world history. The heartland of the Cholas was the fertile valley of the Kaveri River. The Chola unified peninsular India, south of the Tungabhadra, and held as one state for three centuries between 907-1215.

• Qin (221-206 BCE): The first dynasty of Imperial China. Named for its heartland in Qin state, the Qin dynasty arose as a fief of the Western Zhou and endured for over 5 centuries until 221 BCE, when it founded its brief empire which lasts only 15 years.

• Han (202 BCE- 9, 25-220): An Imperial Dynasty of China, established by Liu Bang and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin Dynasty and a warring interregnum known as the Chu-Han contention (206-202 BCE), and it was succeeded by the Three Kingdoms period (220-280). The Dynasty was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty (9-23) established by usurping regent Wang Mang, and is thus separated into two periods- the W. Han (202-9) and the E. Han (25-220). The Han dynasty is considered a golden age in Chinese history, and it has influenced the identity of the Chinese civilization ever since.

• Śri Vijaya (650-1377): A great maritime trading kingdom that flourished for 700y as a mid-point between China and India, with its capital at Palembang on Sumatra. Śri Vijaya was neither an empire or a centralized state, but the focal point of a trading network with offshoots around the Southern edges of the SCS and as far W. as Kedah in Malaysia. Śri Vijaya functioned both as an entrepôt where the goods of India and China could be exchanged by visiting merchants, and as a place to which to turn in search of the spices and perfumes that were native to Indonesia and Malaya.

  • Srivijaya was an important center for the expansion of Buddhism from the 7-12c and the first polity to dominate much of W. Maritime SE Asia.

  • Sindbad the Sailor came from Śri Vijaya.

• Umayyad (661-750): The 2nd of 4 major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. The Caliphate was ruled by the Umayyad Dynasty. The Umayyads continued the Muslim conquests, incorporating Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb, and Hispania (Al-Andalus) under Islamic rule. The Dynasty was overthrown by a rebellion led by the Abbasids in 750. Survivors of the dynasty established themselves in Cordoba.

• Venetians (Rep. of Venice, La Serenissima, Stato de mar) (697-1797): A sovereign state and maritime republic in parts of present- day Italy. Venice incorporated numerous overseas possessions in modern Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Greece, Albania, and Cyprus, and grew into a trading power during the Middle Ages and strengthened during the Renaissance.

• Abbasid (750-1258, 1261-1517): The Third Caliphate to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Abbasid’s were founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad’s uncle, Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttalib, who ruled as caliphs for most of the caliphate from their capital in Baghdad.

• Carolingian Empire (800-888): A Frankish noble family named after Charlemagne, grandson of Mayor Charles Martel that ruled W. and Central Europe during the Early Middle Ages. It was ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, which had ruled as kings of the Franks, since 751 and as Kings of the Lombards in Italy from 774. The Carolingian Empire is considered the first phase in the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

• Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171): Ismaili Shi’a Caliphate spanning much of N. Africa and ranging from the Atlantic Ocean in the W. to the Red Sea in the East, ultimately making Egypt their capital. The Fatimids, a dynasty of Arab origin, trace their ancestry to Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and her husband ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, the first Shi’a imam. The Fatimids originated during the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatamids conquered Tunisia and established the city of “al-Mahdiyya”.

• Almoravid Dynasty (1050s-1147): A Berber Muslim Dynasty centered in the territory of present-day Morocco with its capital at Marrakesh. It established an empire in the 11c that stretched over the W. Maghreb and Al-Andalus, starting in the 1050s and lasting until its fall to the Almohads in 1147. The Dynasty emerged from a coalition of the Lamtuna, Gudala, and Massufa, nomadic Berber tribes living in modern Mauritania and the W. Sahara.

• Ottoman Empire (‘Turkish Empire’) (1299-1922): Controlled much of SE Europe, W. Asia, and N. Africa between the 14c and 20c. The Empire was founded in 1299 in NW Anatolia in the town of Sögüt by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. After 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe and, with the conquest of the Balkans, the Ottoman Beylik was transformed into a transcontinental empire.

  • The languages of high culture in the Ottoman world were Arabic and Persian.

  • The Ottoman sultan was considered a world ruler, with ideas derived from Byzantine conceptions of the ruler as Roman emperor, from Turkish ideas of the ruler as Great Khan and from Muslim ideas of the ruler as caliph.

• Hanseatic League (1356-1862): One of a great many city-leagues that were emerging in the fragmented territories of the German Empire. A confederation of merchants from towns along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, and across great swathes of the N. German hinterland. A general term for a group of men, such as an armed troop or a group of merchants; in the 13c the term Hansa (Hanse) was applied to different bodies of merchants, German or Flemish, from a variety of regions, for instance the Westphalian towns that gravitated around Cologne, or the Baltic towns that were presided over by the great city of Lübeck. By the 14c it had become a major naval power, able to defeat rivals for control of the waters where its members traded.

  • 15c: The Netherlands and England challenged the ascendancy of the Hansa.

• Ryukyu (1429-1879): An autonomous kingdom centered on Okinawa and ruled as tributary kingdom of Ming China who unified the Ryukyu Islands to end the Sanzan period.

• Frisians: An obstinate land (Frisia), unwelcoming to conquerors, in which King Hygelac had met his death. This region had earlier been the home of Angles and other peoples who had invaded what became England, and the Frisian language remains the closest Germanic language to modern English. The inhabitants, up to and beyond their conversion from paganism, were regarded as ‘ferocious’ and lived largely free of outside interference until the Frankish ‘Mayor of the Palace’ (and to all intents the ruler of the Merovingian kingdom), Charles Martel, launched an ambitious campaign against that ‘most fearsome race’, the Frisians.

• Saxons: A group of Germanic peoples whose name was given in the Early Middle Ages to a large country (Saxonia) near the N. Sea coast of N. Germania. In the late Roman Empire, the name was used to refer to Germanic coastal raiders, and as a name similar to the later “Viking.” Their origins are believed to be in or near the German N. Sea coast where they appear later, in Carolingian times. In Merovingian times, continental Saxons had been associated with the activity and settlements on the coast of what later became Normandy. During the 8c and 9c, the Saxons were in continual conflict with the Franks, whose kingdom was ruled by the Carolingian dynasty. After 33y of conquest due to military campaigns led by the lord king and emperor Charlemagne beginning in 772 and ending around 804, the Franks defeated the Saxons, forcing them to convert to Christianity and seized the territory of Old Saxony, annexing it into the Carolingian domain.

  • In contrast, the English Saxons (Anglo-Saxons) became a single nation bringing together migrant Germanic peoples (Frisians, Jutes, Angles, and assimilated Celtic Briton populations). The term Anglo-Saxon combined the names of the Angles and the Saxons, came into use by the 8c to distinguish the Germanic inhabitants of Britain from the continental Saxons.

• Franks (‘Free People’): A group of Germanic peoples whose name was first mentioned in 3c Roman sources, and associated with tribes between the Lower Rhine and the Ems River, on the edge of the Roman Empire. Later the term was associated with Romanized Germanic dynasties within the collapsing W. Roman Empire, who eventually commanded the whole region between the rivers Loire and Rhine. They imposed power over many other post-Roman kingdoms and Germanic peoples. Beginning with Charlemagne in 800, Frankish rulers were given recognition by the Catholic church as successors to the old rulers of the W. Roman Empire.

• Celts: The peoples called Keltoi by the ancient Greeks, and Galli by the ancient Romans; the assumption is that the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures in central Europe were essentially ‘Celtic’ in character.

• Omani Empire: Consisted of a string of pearls stretched across a vast expanse of the W. Indian Ocean. By the mid 19c, the most valuable of these pearls was the small island of Zanzibar, which produced namely cloves, ivory, and slaves.

  • The worst form of Omani trade was the treatment of African boys in a Coptic monastery on Mount Jebel-Eter in Sudan that specialized in castration. Clamped to a table, the victims had their penis and scrotum removed in one quick swipe, leaving ‘a large, gaping sore that does not heal kindly’, all the more so since there was little attempt to staunch the flow of blood. The boys were then buried in packed sand to keep them immobile; ‘it is estimated 35,000 little Africans are annually sacrificed to produce the Soudanese average quota of its 3,800 eunuchs.’ Even if the assumption that mortality approached 90% is an exaggeration (and it is impossible to say), demand for eunuchs in princely courts around the Indian Ocean did not slacken.

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Terminology

• Aleuts: Broadly similar to that of the Inuit of N. Canada and Greenland- a life heavily dependent on the resources of the sea, which provided them with food (fish), oil for lighting their homes (seal blubber), clothing (cormorant skins) and even warm overcoats (stretched seal intestines).

• Ambergris: Whale vomit; has long been an expensive ingredient in perfumes, and which could be found washed up on the shore in fatty lumps.

• Armorica (Latin): The ancient name for Brittany; ‘dwellers by the sea’.

• Bakufu: The Japanese military elite.

• Batavia (Netherlands- Latin).

• Birka: Sweden’s oldest town which lay on a small island in Lake Mälaren, the large island-studded lake that extends westwards from present-day Stockholm.

• Bronze: Cu smelted with Sn.

• Casbah: The royal quarter.

• Cash: Derived from the Portuguese word ‘Caixa’, ‘cash-box’ (the Chinese word was wén).

• Ceylon (Ancient Taprobané): Modern Sri Lanka.

• Clinker-Built Ships: River ships constructed by overlapping strakes before they insert a relatively light frame which was bonded to the hull by rivets or nails.

• Conference System: An agreement among competing shipping firms that they would set the same freight rate on outward cargoes.

• CSCL Globe: The largest container ship in the world (as of 2017); Chinese owned.

• Dorset: Named after a small island off Baffin Island.

• East Indies: A catch-all that described the entire Indian Ocean and the W. Pacific.

• Egg: The symbol of resurrection.

• El Dorado: The City of Gold; Spanish explorers including Juan de la Cosa, met people along the coast of South America who occasionally had gold. Rumors reached the Europeans of a great temple with gold-plated idols, suggesting that the real riches lay a little further inland. These rumors coalesced into the story of El Dorado, the kingdom awash with gold.

• Ell (ǫln): Adopted as the standard measurement of cloth; it is said to have been based on the length of the arm of King Henry I of England, from his elbow to his fingertips. Two ells made a yard.

  • A piece of cloth measuring two ells by six counted as a ‘legal ounce’ of silver.

• Eskimo: Originally a native American word meaning, ‘raw-meat eater’; now used as a blanket description for Arctic natives including the Dorset and Inuit people.  

• Færeyjar: The Faroe Islands, ‘sheep island’.

• Frankincense and Myrrh: Gum-resins that contain volatile oils- up to 17% in the case of fresh myrrh. Myrrh was used for anointing, while frankincense was used for burning. These were not the only products that the Egyptians brought back from their expeditions, which also included gold and wild animals, dead and alive. For all of these, they turned southwards to the land of Punt, ‘the god’s land’.

• Gaul: An ancient region in Europe that corresponds to modern France, Belgium, S. Netherlands, SW Germany, and N. Italy.

• Glottochronology: The science of dating the moments when languages began to diverge into dialects that gradually became mutually incomprehensible, to the point where they can be described as separate languages.

• Herrings: Held a special place in the diet of European Christians, as far away as Catalonia: when Lent arrived, they provided the perfect substitute for forbidden meat.

• Historia (Greek): ‘Enquiry’.

• Ice Age: The recent massive accumulation of ice far beyond the poles that decreased sea levels by over 35m, exposing the floor of much of the N. Sea known as Doggerland (now the Dogger Bank).

• Incense (‘ntyw’): Egyptian pharaohs burned incense before the Egyptian gods, to accompany animal sacrifices, and these ceremonies were especially lavish when a new temple was inaugurated, or when the ruler returned in triumph from war. Incense was burned during the elaborate ceremonies that sent off dead pharaohs to the Next World, and it was used extensively for embalming the dead, at which the Egyptians were the unrivalled masters.

• India: Originally used to describe any lands along the shores of the Indian Ocean, including east Africa.

• Inuit: ‘Human beings’ (aka Neo-Eskimo).

• Kaupang (‘Trade Center’): The first town to emerge in Norway.

• Kiev: The principality also known as ‘Rus’. 

• Liners: A term that expressly meant that they followed a regular line according to a timetable; and in time this term would become attached to the big ocean-going steamships of the great international shipping lines.

• Lingua Franca: The mix of languages with a base in Spanish and Italian that was used on the seaways of the Mediterranean to communicate with merchants and slaves.

• Longya-men (‘Dragons Tooth Strait’): The dangerous, narrow passage off the southern tip of Singapore, separating a small skerry from the main island.

• Lotus Sutra: A lengthy lecture by the Buddha on the theme of eternal bliss.

• Maersk: Danish owned, the largest container shipping company in the world operating 600 ships with a combined capacity well over 3,000,000 TEU.

• Mandate from Heaven: The insistence of the Chinese on their superiority as a moral force-  Confucian ideas blended with those of Yong-le’s Mongol predecessors.

• Manila Galleon Trade: Paid for with enormous quantities of Peruvian, and to a lesser extent Mexican, silver shipped out from Acapulco on the annual galleon voyage. One estimate for the quantity of American silver mined between 1500-1800 is 150K tons; only some of this was carried west on the Manila galleons.

• Maritime Law of Lübeck: A common legal standard, ensured that commercial disputes would be solved by similar means in places far apart.

• Mesolithic: Middle Stone Age.

• Middens: Mounds of food debris.

• Mizrahi (‘Eastern’): Jews from Baghdad.

• Murex Shellfish: The source of purple dye after which the Greeks had named them Phoinikes.

• Norway (‘Northern Road’).

• One Belt, One Road: A Chinese global infrastructure project re-creating the overland silk route by rail, as well as long-distance sea routes between China and Asia, Africa and Europe. Eventually, the project will give China increasing control over the movement of the industrial goods it now produces in such vast quantities.

• Paleolithic: Old Stone Age.

• Pidgin English: A standard way for foreigners and the Chinese to communicate.

• Pirate: A person who attacks or robs ships at sea.

  • Buccaneer (Pirate): Boucan- French, derived from the grill on which they would smoke large slabs of meat. Tied red cloths around their heads, wielded cutlasses and drank plenty of rum, and that they preferred a rather democratic system of command according to which the ship’s captain lived and slept among his men, and decisions were made by consultation.

  • Corsair (Pirate): From Corso- Journey; reserved for the Barbary corsairs who infested the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic waters.

  • Privateer (Pirate): Came into use in the English language following the seizure of Jamaica.

  • Wakō (Pirate): Japanese pirates.

• Punt (‘Pwene’): ‘Gods Land’ (Egyptian).

• Quipus: Incan proto-writing.

• Scurvy: Vitamin C deficiency. The discovery that lemons or limes kept scurvy at bay was the result of trial and error between 1746 and 1795, when the Royal Navy began to include lemons or limes in the diet of British sailors, and only the identification of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the early twentieth century explained how and why limes worked so well.

• Sĕjarah Mĕlayu (Malay Annals): The Malay Genealogical Tree; an important chronicle of the early history of Malaya.

• Shahadah: A Muslim declaration of faith.

• Shitik: ‘Sewn Boat’.

• Slash-and-Burn Cultivation: The clearance of forest, the planting of the soil, and the cultivation of another patch of cleared forest after the original piece of land had been exhausted of nutrients.

• St Elmo’s Fire: A common electric effect during storms at sea.

• Sugar: First cultivated in Borneo.

• Swan Hellenic: A specialist cruiseliner specializing in both human and natural history and expecting passengers to listen to what could be either exciting or boring lectures.

• Tartessos (Greek): The lands of SW Iberia, said to be rich in Ag and visited by the Phoenicians.

• Tianfei: The sea goddess also known in local dialect as Mazu, was said to have been the daughter of a humble fisherman; she was born in ad 960 and possessed the power of prophecy.

• Venezuela: ‘Little Venice’; first coined by Hojeda during his voyage along the southern shores of the Caribbean when they saw natives lived in villages built above the water, just like in Venice.  

• Vidi: ‘I have Seen’ (Latin); the origin of the modern sign ✓.

• Viking: ‘Men of Vik’, the inlets from which raids were launched, whether the majestic steep-sided fjords of Norway or the low-lying creeks of Denmark and southern Sweden.

  • Víkingr: Used in Scandinavia to mean a pirate; these people went í víking, that is, raiding across the sea, and were celebrated for doing so on the runestones that commemorated their life.

• Wealhas (‘Foreigners’): British slave workers under Roman Britannia; applied by Germanic speakers to any number of outsiders, notably the inhabitants of what became known as Wales.

• Yavana: Greek, Roman or someone from the Roman Empire.

• Yellow Gate (The Department of Eunuchs).

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Chronology

• Jan, 2018: The Chinese State Council announces it will conduct a trial voyage along a ‘Polar Silk Route’, corresponding to the NE passage.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 2017: A Russian tanker ship sails the NE passage from Norway to S. Korea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 2010: Launch of the Allure of the Seas, the largest cruise ship afloat. Operated by Royal Caribbean Lines, the ship can house 7,148 passengers at peak capacity.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1977-1986: The Love Boat TV show airs across the world, casting the cruise industry in a rose-colored romantic light.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1974: The SS Canberra is built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast at a cost of £16M. P&O originally planned to sail her on passenger routes linking Great Britain to Australia, but the competition from air travel had begun to bite, and she became a cruise liner.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1967: The Israeli Army decisively defeats the Egyptian army and reoccupies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1966: Rise of the Modern Cruise Industry after Arison, an Israeli chancer, acquires control of a Norwegian ship, moves it to Miami and gradually builds up a fleet under the name ‘Norwegian Caribbean Lines’; most of the ships were adapted ferry boats that used the lower deck for a RORO cargo service between Miami and Jamaica. Arison had space on all his ships together for ~3K passengers, but he advertised across the US, making Miami the cruise capital of the USA.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1965: Aborigines are first allowed to vote in all Australian states and territories.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1965: Singapore attains Independence following expulsion from the Malaysian Federation.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1960: Eying McLeans operations, the Hawaiian Citizen with space for 356 containers, begins operating between San Francisco and Honolulu.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1960: The UN sends a team to Singapore led by Dutch economist Albert Winsemius. Unimpressed by the port facilities, the team recommended Singapore learn how to handle a new type of cargo, the container. Singapore put the ideas in place, turning the city into a commercial and financial middleman.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1958: The Boeing 707, built in Seattle, begins to provide regular transatlantic services for Pan-American Airways; it was soon followed by the Comet 4, operated by BOAC.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1958: The American Standards Association sets the length of containers at multiples of 10’ with the standard trailer equivalent unit (TEU) being 20’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1958: Oman cedes the trading station at Gwadar to Pakistan for 5.5B rupees.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Nov, 1956: Closure of the Suez Canal following the disastrous Anglo-French attempt to restore European control over the canal following its nationalization by the Egyptian government.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1956: Publication of “Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific” by Andrew Sharp, presented to the Polynesian Society.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 1956: Launch of the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company by McLean. The company loaded the Ideal-X cargo ship with 58x Al boxes taken off truck trailers. McLean had to order the boxes (x200) and redesigned the cranes to lift the containers in one quick motion from shore to ship. The cost of loading the Ideal-X was 1/37 the cost of traditional loading. With a sister ship, the Ideal-X provided a weekly service between New Jersey and Houston, which soon increased to a service every four days, as additional ships were acquired.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • McLean’s devised an efficient way of conveying goods: instead of trailers, the ships should carry the detached bodies of the trailers. This meant that these large boxes could be taken to the side of the ship, lifted on board, stacked on top of one another and locked in place. His company analyzed the cost of sending beer from Newark, New Jersey, to Miami. Traditional handling at both ends would cost $8 per ton, whereas container handling would cost 50c.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • McLean’s company was later renamed Sea–Land Service, and extended its range to the Pacific including Alaska and, within 10y, Rotterdam, with 226 boxes aboard. By the 1980s McLean’s operations spanned the world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1955: P&O first orders oil tankers.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1954: France relinquishes control of Pondicherry to India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1952: The Comet aircraft, the first passenger jet based on British technology, begins operating. The Comet is later withdrawn.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Nov, 1942: Operation Torch; the allies land in N. Africa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 15 Feb, 1942: The Japanese take British Singapore.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 25 Dec, 1941: The Japanese take British Hong Kong.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 10 Jul- 31 Oct, 1940: The Battle of Britain; German air raids target, among others, the shipping industries and shipbuilding centers at the Ports of London, Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Dec, 1939: The German Luftwaffe begins attacking British shipping.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1939: 78 ships are destroyed by German mines (~250K tons).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 26 Aug, 1939: Britain issues orders permitting the Admiralty ‘to adopt compulsory control of movements of merchant shipping’, initially in the North Sea, Baltic, Mediterranean and Atlantic. The Germans are prepared; they had already sent the pocket-battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland to the Atlantic, and had positioned 39 U-Boats (out of 57) around the coasts of the UK. A lethal U-boat attack on a British liner on the very first day of the war made the British government realize that the Germans were not planning to abide by any rules of war protecting non-combatants.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1937: Crash of the Hindenburg after setting fire in mid-air.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1936: RMS Queen Mary (Hull #534) sets sail after its parent company, Cunard, merges with White Star.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1930s: Pan American Airways, a pan-continental airline begins operating with routes linking the US and Panama, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 29 Oct, 1932: The SS Normandie is launched by French shipping company CGT.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1930: The Plimsoll line is adopted as an international standard.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1929: The USG amends the 1923 immigration decree, greatly favoring migrants from the UK but slashing the numbers from the newly constituted Irish Free State and from Germany.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1923: The USG amends the 1921 immigration decree, changing the census of 1910 to that of 1890.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1921: The USG decree that immigration will be limited to 3% of the number of each national group living in the USA at the time of the census of 1910.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1920s: Transport containers are first used when American railroad companies experiment with steel containers that could be transferred back and forth between lorries and freight cars, using powerful forklift trucks.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Feb- May, 1917: 2.5M tons of shipping are sent to the bottom of the sea during WWI.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1917: Denmark sells Puerto Rico and what becomes the American Virgin Islands to the USA.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• May, 1915: The sinking of the Lusitania; ~1000 people die off the coast of Ireland, many of them Americans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1914: Holt’s Blue Funnel Line based in Liverpool dominates the shipping of British textiles to E. Asia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Nov, 1906: Teddy Roosevelt becomes the first US president to leave the country while in office, when he sails to Panama aboard the American battleship, the USS Louisiana.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1905: Re-creation of the Norwegian kingdom.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1904-1905: The Russo-Japanese War; Japan defeats Russia and gain control of Port Arthur and Sakhalin Island, to the N, of Hokkaido. Russia loses much of its fleet.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1901: Assassination of POTUS McKinley; Teddy Roosevelt becomes POTUS.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1898: The Spanish- American War; the US goes to war with Spain in defence of Cuban revolutionaries seeking independence. The casus belli is an explosion that destroys the battleship USS Maine while anchored in Havana harbor, killing ~300 sailors. Even though the reason for the explosion remains a mystery, this was enough to energize President McKinley. The outcome of the short conflict, which Spain was bound to lose, was that the US occupied Cuba for several years and then imposed a treaty that seriously limited the new republic’s sovereign powers. As a result of the war, the US acquires Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Hawai’i, and Guam, marking a significant change in American foreign policy and the beginning of a process of empire-building that would culminate in the acquisition of the Panama Canal zone.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • The USS Oregon had been sent from San Francisco to join the fray in the Atlantic when news arrived of the destruction of the Maine in Havana. The painfully slow voyage round Cape Horn to FL, took 67d. What more needed to be said in defence of a canal through Central America?.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • May, 1898: The US occupy the Philippines following the defeat of the Spanish navy in Manila Bay.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Jan, 1898: The Orient Company opens operating a Caribbean ‘Pleasure Cruise’, in which customers spend 60d afloat while the ship ports at Madeira, Tenerife and Bermuda; the Orient also ran cruises to the Norwegian fjords.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1897: German Admiral von Tirpitz declares ‘For Germany at the moment the greatest enemy at sea is England.’ Tirpitz was determined to build a German fleet that would outclass the British.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1894: The Manchester Ship Canal opens.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1890: The Influence of Sea-Power upon History, 1660–1783, is published by Captain, later Admiral, James Mahan. His aim was to reveal the importance for the US of an active naval policy at a time when isolationism had long been the order of the day, and when even American merchant fleets were, he said, playing only a modest role in world trade. Mahan’s approach was founded upon a particular view of international relations as a great game in which nations competed for power and influence, expressing their power through control of the sea routes and using their power to promote trade.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1885: After being cast in France, the pieces of the Statue of Liberty are carried to New York aboard a French steamship.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1876: The British government pass the Merchant Shipping Act requiring a series of lines to be painted on ships to show the maximum loading point.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1876: The French send explorers into Panama, led by the youthful Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse, a relative of the French emperors.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1870: Ships are transiting from Singapore to Marseilles by way of the Suez in ~29d.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1868: Abolition of the Japanese Shogunate and the creation of the emperor-centered Meiji regime, who chooses to ‘emulate and catch up with the West’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1 Jan, 1867: A British Merchant Company based in China operated by Butterfield and Swire, opens in Shanghai, specializing in tea and raw American cotton.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1866: The Steamship London enroute Melbourne sinks near Plymouth with the loss of 270 people (out of 220 passengers and 69 crew). It carried far too much heavy cargo, as much as 1,200 tons of Fe and 500 tons of coal, so that her deck stood only 1m above the surface of the water – in calm conditions.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1866: Alfred Holt announces the launch of his steamship company, with three sister ships, the Agamemnon, the Ajax and the Achilles, each over 2,000 tons.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1861: Harland and his deputy, Gustav Wolff, establish a company whose massive gantries include the RMS Titanic, RMS Olympic and RMS Britannic; the largest ships ever built, requiring brand new dockyards. Even when disaster struck the Titanic, this did not hamper business at Harland and Wolff.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1858: Edward Harland acquires a shipyard in Belfast.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1858: The first transatlantic cable is laid, although it soon broke, and only in the 1860s were cables laid that worked reasonably well. On the first day of operation, Queen Victoria and the American president exchange messages.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1858: The US and Japan sign a commercial treaty, permitting Americans to trade through Yokohama, near Edo.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1856: A series of trade agreements between Morocco and Britain culminate in a treaty that abolishes or lowers many taxes, setting a standard for future British trade agreements elsewhere in the world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1856: The 2nd Opium War begins after Chinese troops mug the Captain of a British schooner out of Hong Kong. The British raid Hong Kong, forcing the Chinese to make a humiliating peace that gives the British access to more treaty ports, as well as the right to trade inland; and it brought part of Kowloon under British rule, the beginning of a gradual extension of British rule over the southern tip of the Chinese mainland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Feb, 1855: The Panama Canal Railway opens linking the Pacific to the Atlantic; the first trans-oceanic railway in the world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1854: The Convention of Kanagawa is signed, opening up trade with Japan (Wiki).

• 1854-1865: The price of tea in Japan doubles, silk triples, while staple foodstuffs including rice, increase dramatically as foreign goods begins competing with domestic products in Japan.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1853-1854: The US Naval expeditions of American Commander Perry to Japan; the ‘Black (Coal belching) Ships’ of American Commander Perry first arrive in Edo Bay, looking to trade with the Japanese. Perry travelled most of the way on a steam-powered paddleboat that took him around the bottom of Africa to Macau, Shanghai and the Ryukyu Islands, before he brazenly forced his way into Edo Bay (now as Tokyo Bay), parading his ironclad steamboats and his firepower and flatly refusing to follow Japanese instructions: as far as the Japanese were concerned, there was a single place, Nagasaki, where foreigners could trade. Although he managed to secure a treaty on a second visit, in 1854, the agreement focused on consular representation for stranded sailors rather than trade, and powerful interests at court remained very hostile to the idea of opening up the imperial ports. In the short term, the main effect of Commander Perry’s visit was that the Dutch argued for more generous terms of trade through their base at Deshima, and the Russians and the British obtained similar rights to the Americans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 30 Mar, 1850: Denmark sells all its Danish Gold Cast Territorial Settlements and forts to Britain, which are incorporated into the British Gold Coast.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1849: British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston accepts that tension with the US had risen to a dangerous point and negotiates a deal with the US under which neither side would try to gain exclusive rights over a canal across Central America. But the effect of this agreement was that neither side was really able to move ahead with its own project. That did not prevent an American businessman, William Aspinwall of NY, from buying the right to build a railway (and possibly a canal) between Panama City and the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1848: The US, keen to keep the British, French, and Dutch out of Central America, make a treaty with New Granada, granting the Americans the right to send troops to Panama if other foreign forces began to interfere.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1848: Gold is discovered at Sutter’s Mill, CA; the state had just been acquired from Mexico.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1848: The US acquire CA from Mexico. American interest in the Pacific grows further; a transcontinental railway was still a dream, and it was far easier to send Asian goods to NY by way of Mexico or the isthmus of Panama than across the Rocky Mountains and through the large expanses inhabited by native Americans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1846: The boundary between Canada and the USA is fixed.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1845: Sir John Franklin leads his ill-fated expedition into the ice floes of N. Canada.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1842: The Hindostan begins servicing the route between Suez and British India, offering hot and cold showers and sailing through Monsoon showers.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1842: The 1st Opium War begins after Chinese Canton Commissioner Lin Zexu confiscates 20K cases of opium and imprisons foreign merchants in their factories in Canton. In response, the British capture port after port along the Cost of China- Amoy, Ningbo, even Shanghai. British naval power proved unstoppable. The War ends with the Treaty of Nanking, in which perpetual British rule over a brand-new settlement on Victoria Island was recognized.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 29 Jan, 1841: British Captain Charles Elliot plants the British flag at Hong Kong. The British encourage Chinese Settlers in Hong Kong.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1840: Samuel Cunard’s British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company is established in Liverpool, with four ships linking England to New York, Boston and Halifax.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Early 19c: Rise of Singapore, when Sir Stamford Raffles chose it from a shortlist as the site for a British trading station commanding the entrance to the Strait of Malacca.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1830s: Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin becomes the self-appointed apostle of a new world order in which East and West would join in a single ‘nuptial bed’, consummating their marriage ‘by the piercing of a canal through the isthmus of Suez’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1833: The EIC loses its monopoly on the trade of the East; since Parliament decided that the key to Britain’s prosperity lay in free trade; the EIC turns to the trade in opium. The source of opium was, to start off with, Southern Arabia, but the poppy fields of Bengal were much closer and lay under the control of the EIC, which was happy to send out the goods through Calcutta.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1831: Rise of the Canton system under the Chinese emperor. Foreign merchants were not to reside permanently in Canton; they were not to bring women into the factories; they were not to take trips in sedan chairs; they could only communicate with the government through the Hong merchants.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1824: The Sultan of Johor cedes sovereignty of Singapore to Britain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1824: The ‘Straits Settlements’ is signed by the British and the Dutch; Britain takes Malaya and the Netherlands keeps the East Indies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1822: The Sultan of Oman signs a treaty with British Captain Fairfax Moresby; the Omanis promised to cease selling slaves to the W. Europeans or in India, as part of the British crusade against slave-trading across the world. This has the unexpected result of stimulating the Omani trade in E. African slaves, as other sources of supply dried up, for there were still swathes of territory where slaves could be bought and sold, in their tens of thousands, including the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1820: Spain loses control of its colonies in Northern S. America, resulting in the creation of ‘Gran Colombia’ (New Granada), which includes the narrow neck of Panama as well as modern day Columbia and several neighbors.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1819: Death of Hawaiian King Kamehameha I. His son, Kamehameha II, continues expanding.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1819: The British sign a treaty with the Sultan of Johor, Hussein, allowing the British to create a base on a small piece of land they had leased at Singapore.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1816: The East Indies are returned to the Dutch.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1816: Tristan Island is occupied by the British.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1816: The Portuguese government agrees to readmit those living openly as Jews.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1815: Melaka is returned to the Dutch following the end of the Napoleonic Wars.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1811: German geographer Alexander von Humboldt declares there is no suitable alternative to Lake Nicaragua for carving a canal across Central America.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1811: Raffles is appointed Lt. Gov of Java. Raffles manages to convince the governor-general of India, Lord Hastings, that a base is needed close to the Malacca Strait. Raffles understood that the prosperity of Singapore depended on its role as an entrepôt through which goods flowed and where they were exchanged.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1807: The British Parliament bans the slave trade.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1806: Mogador is established as a Jewish quarter.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1804-1806: Russia’s first circumnavigates the globe; the Nadezhda, with Russian Ambassador Rezanov aboard, sets sails from Kamchatka for Japan. In Sep, 1804, the Nadezhda anchors at Deshima, only to be berated by the Japanese for poaching on the territory. The ships load tea, nankeen cloth and porcelain and head Westwards, through the East Indies and round the Cape of Good Hope, with one ship calling in at St Helena. The two ships were back in Kronstadt in August 1806, after a voyage lasting just over 3y. The profits were meager.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1800: Great Britain becomes Morocco’s biggest trading partner.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1800-1832: Three Hawaiian trading vessels traverse the route from the American NW to China regularly, though most of the Hawai’ian ships set out for Vanuatu or other island groups, to pick up sandalwood, hogs and pearls that could be fed into the networks of not just Polynesia but the wider Pacific.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1799: Russia establishes a settlement at Sitka on the Alaskan coast. When they arrive, the Russians are horrified to discover that Sitka had been sacked by the Tlingits, the native population. The Russia–America Company had made a fundamental error: by settling on the Alaskan coast and displacing the Tlingits, the Russians had created what a contemporary observer called ‘an unalterable enmity against the Russians’. The Tlingits had been living off the resources of the coastline, including not just its fish but its sea otters, whose furs the Russians were now trying to monopolize.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1797: The ‘United American Company’ is formed (changed to the Russia-American Company in 1799) under ‘imperial protection’, with the full approval of Tsar Paul I. The basic model is that of the many East India Companies that the Russians knew well from contact with their Baltic and North Sea neighbors.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1795: The Dutch cede Melaka to the British.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1792-1803: Hawai’i King Kamehameha II builds a fleet in European style.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1792: The Danish government ban the slave trade (with a 10y delay before implementation).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Oct, 1790: The Nootka Convention is signed as a peace agreement between Britain and Spain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1789: Hawai’i King Kamehameha II captures the crews of two American vessels in search of supplies including their ships, the Eleanor and a schooner.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Aug, 1788: The Lady Washington reaches the shores of North America and started trading with the native Americans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1787-1790: Captain Gray sells his furs in Canton and decides to continue round the world, returning to the US via the Cape of Good Hope; the first American captain to circumnavigate the globe.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1787: British Captain John Meares sails to Kaua’i and agrees to take one islander, a prince named Kaiana, to China. Kaiana impressed the British by his build (he was 6.5’ tall) and was showered with presents by the English merchants in Canton, the most valuable in many ways being firearms. Kaiana deploys the weapons to his advantage on his return to Hawai’i aboard another British ship; he learned that a coup had taken place on Kaua’i, so he placed himself at the service of the king of the main island, Hawai’i. King Kamehameha II had grand ambitions of his own: he had brought Hawai’i Island under his single rule, and now he aimed to conquer all the lesser islands.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1784: The Great Siege of Gibraltar; the Spanish and French fail to capture Gibraltar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Feb, 1784: A vessel sails from NY for London carrying ‘the definitive articles of peace’ between the US and Great Britain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Feb, 1784- May, 1785: The US’ first trade ship to China, the ‘Empress of China’, sails from NY. When the Empress reaches the Sunda Strait leading into the SCS, the Americans find a French ship at anchor whose crew is delighted to hear stories about the American Revolution, which France had supported. The French ship, the Triton, agrees to accompany the Empress to Macau and Canton, showing the way and helping to fend off any attacks. In Macau the Portuguese welcome the new arrivals, even though they had never seen their flag before. The Americans had little to fear: as they made their way up the tangled waterways of the Pearl River towards Canton in August 1784 they were greeted not just by the French, the Dutch and the Danes but by the British. Everything seemed to suggest that they were just more Englishmen, though eventually the Chinese called them ‘New People’ and later still ‘Flowery-Flag Devils’, since they thought the stars on the American flag were flowers. When the Empress arrives back in NY, it brings her investors a profit of at least 25%.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1780s: Exploration of the American NW for otter furs expands, opening up Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska. Furs from as far away as Alaska help fuel the maritime links between the early US and China. The fur trade of the US was truly global, stretching in both directions towards China, around both southern capes. The profits from this trade, and from the China trade more generally, fueled the recovery of the American economy and the prosperity of great business houses.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1780s: Great Britain continues to block trade between the US and its own valuable possessions in the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1783: The British recognize the independence of the USA.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1776-1780: British Captain James Cooks 3rd Voyage aboard the Resolution and Discovery with instructions to discover the NW passage connecting the Pacific to the N. Atlantic (British Library). The British Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 to the crew that would find this route. Cook’s voyage included testing of John Harrison’s chronometer; a clock that was to prove accurate enough to make it possible to measure longitude.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 14 Feb, 1779: Death of Captain James Cook, along with 4 marines, following a dispute over a stolen boat in which some 16 Hawaiian’s die (British Library). After being forced back to Hawai’I by bad weather (or a broken mast), Cook re-entered the bay and found he was not welcome; the Hawai’ians began to steal from the British ships, and even sneaked away with the cutter attached to the Discovery, leaving Cook’s main vessel without a lifeboat. Cook went on land, hoping to make peace with the increasingly fractious crowd of islanders, but guns and daggers were drawn and Cook was clubbed to death – not, however, at anyone’s orders, for this was a fracas that had got badly out of control. The grief of the British crew was compounded by disgust when Cook’s body was returned, in the form of de-boned hunks of flesh.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Nov, 1778: Cook returns to the Hawaiian Islands after a fruitless search for the NW passage. The King turned up to greet Cook on the main island, Hawai’i, and offered the captain feathered headdresses and a magnificent cloak. This was a sign of exceptional respect: a royal cloak required 400,000 tiny red and yellow feathers, taken from 80,000 birds. One of the crew reported that ‘we live now in the greatest Luxury, and as to the Choice & number of fine women there is hardly one among us that may not vie with the grand Turk himself’. Yet the gifts of food placed a strain on the Hawai’ian economy, a subsistence economy that was not well suited to the extra demand generated by Cook’s ships. After the British ships left the king placed a taboo on the land around the bay where Cook had anchored; this was normal practice when the land was exhausted and needed to revive, rather like the biblical sabbatical year.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Feb- Oct, 1778: Cook sails in search of a NW passage.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Jan, 1778: Cook sails past O’ahu and anchors in Kaua’i. As in Tahiti, the Hawaiian’s saw the British as gods who lived far beyond the horizon. Women offered themselves to the sailors, fresh food was given, and Cook sailed off after a couple weeks in search of the NW passage.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Dec, 1773: The Boston Tea Party; 342 chests of tea are dumped into Boston Harbor, part of the culmination of a long series of protests against British taxation of tea, and the monopoly exercised by British firms in the tea trade. In the weeks before the Tea Party, British ships loaded with 2,000 chests of tea, or approximately 90,000 pounds of tea, had arrived in North America, where consumption of honestly acquired tea amounted to about 200,000 pounds of tea a year by 1770.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1773: Britain passes the Tea Act, which assigned a monopoly on tea exports to America to the EIC at a time when the EIC was in increasing financial difficulty, and facing increasing competition on the routes to the East; it urgently needed help from the British government. Boston and the other coastal ports had become caught up in maneuvers whose main aim was not to squeeze the American colonies, but to save the East India Company.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1772-1775: British Captain James Cooks 2nd Voyage aboard the Resolution and Adventure to search for the Great Southern Continent, becoming the first ships to cross the Antarctic Circle (British Library). Cook’s voyage included testing of John Harrison’s chronometer; a clock that was to prove accurate enough to make it possible to measure longitude.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1769: Lutheran minister Niels Egede from the N. of Norway records a legend he had heard in Greenland which told of Inuit who came to trade with the Norse settlers, and of how one day three small boats arrived carrying men who attacked the Norsemen, though they managed to fend them off; meanwhile the Inuit fled in terror.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1768-1771: British Captain James Cooks 1st Voyage aboard the Endeavor with secret instructions from the British Government to search for land and commercial opportunities in the Pacific (British Library).

• Jun, 1767: “Tahiti is Serendipity”; The Dolphin led by English Captain Samuel Wallis arrives in Tahiti.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1767: Ayutthaya is sacked by the Burmese.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1765: The British found a settlement on W. Falkland to match the French settlement on E. Falkland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1764: The French found a settlement on E. Falkland, but later agree to hand over the islands to Spain, which sends two priests ‘who, beholding their settlement, were overwhelmed with grief’. As a result of these claims, the two islands were known to sailors as the ‘English Maloon’ and the ‘Spanish Maloon’, a corruption of their Spanish name, Las Malvinas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1764: Mogador is founded by the Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah, with the intention of making it into the prime center of trade with Europe. Mogador’s advantage was that there was a straight run across country to Marrakesh, which vied with Fez for the role of capital of Morocco, and which was the gateway through which much of the trans-Sahara caravan traffic passed.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1762: The British in Bombay purchase African slaves from an Indian merchant in Muscat to be sent to the New EIC base in Sumatra for 10K rupees.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1760s: Russian Empress Catherine II begins encouraging free trade.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1751: The Danes receive generous concessions along the Atlantic coast of Morocco giving them a monopoly on foreign trade.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1744: An Omani governor begins operating from Zanzibar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1735: The French explore the possibility of carving a canal through Central America. After 5y of exploration, a French astronomer recommends a passage upriver through Nicaragua, then across Lake Nicaragua itself.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1733: The Danish purchase the island of Sainte-Croix from France.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1732: The United East India Company evolves into the Danish Asiatic Company, under direct Danish Royal Control.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1731: The king of Sweden grants the newly formed Swedish East India Company, based in Gothenburg, a monopoly on trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope, primarily to Guangzhou. By selling Swedish goods in Spain, the Swedes acquire the American silver that the Chinese crave.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1730: Harrison constructs his first chronometer (Wiki).

• 1729: Bering’s 2nd expedition is unsuccessful in locating a NW passage.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1728: Bering sails into the Strait separating Russia and Alaska that bears his name, though he was unsure whether he had identified a passageway into the Arctic Ocean, or simply a large inlet set into a continuing coastline that linked Asia to America.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1727: The Ostend Company crashes thanks to the hostility of the Dutch, who hate the idea of an economic renaissance in Flanders when their own world trade had passed its peak. The Austrians agreed to wind up the Ostend Company as a condition for British and Dutch recognition of the claims of Maria Theresa as heir to the Habsburg throne.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1725: Russian Czar Peter the Great orders Vitus Bering, a Danish Captain in his service, to build boats in Kamchatka and ‘to sail on these boats along the shore which runs to the N. and which (since its limits are unknown) seems to be a part of the American coast’. The aim was ‘to determine where it joins with America’, and if possible, to visit a European settlement along the American coast.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1715: S. Netherlands is transferred from Spanish to Austrian Habsburg rule.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1714: Fedor Stepanovich Saltykov, expert on maritime affairs and influential adviser of Peter the Great, writes a series of Propozitsii (‘Propositions’), which he sent to the tsar in St Petersburg. Saltykov had travelled in Siberia with his father, and he was clear in his mind that an opportunity now existed to create a Russian empire in the Far East. He imagined that it would be possible to build a fleet of ships near the mouth of the Ob and Yenisei Rivers, which debouch into the Arctic Sea in central Siberia, and then to send the ships around Siberia looking for islands that could be brought under Russian sovereignty.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 22 Oct, 1707: The Scilly Naval Disaster; 4 British warships are lost off the Isles of Scilly in severe weather resulting in the deaths of ~1400-2000 Sailors (Wiki).

• 27 May, 1703: Czar Peter the Great makes St. Petersburg the new Russian capital after winning access to the Baltic Sea through his victories in the Great Northern War.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1698: Oman captures the Portuguese base at Mombasa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1698: An Armenian khwaja, or merchant, named Israel di Sarhat, arranges for the English EIC to receive a rent farm in SW Bengal; this eventually became the site of Calcutta (Kolkata).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1697: Malagasy Rebellion; while Baldridge is away from St. Mary’s, the islander’s rebel, tearing down the fort and killing ~30 pirates. Baldridge abandons St. Marys.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • William Kidd, a famous Scottish pirate who was later to hang for his crimes, thought that Baldridge was making excuses for his own mistreatment of the Malagasy inhabitants of his little town, since he would inveigle men, women and children on to his ship, before taking them captive and selling them as slaves to the Dutch in Mauritius and the French in Réunion (then known as Île Bourbon), the two Mascarene islands to the east of Madagascar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1695: The Scottish (Darian) Company of the Indies is chartered; it was responsible for the disastrous Darien Scheme that pumped its funds into a failed colony on the Panama isthmus.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1694: Ships suitable for whaling are first constructed in Nantucket. Other New England towns follow.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1690s: Atlasov discovers the Kamchatka Peninsula that reaches southwards, towards Japan; Kamchatka becomes a source of furs and other tribute by 1697, after Atlasov had mapped it out and wrote a detailed description of its inhabitants. He also won the admiration of Peter the Great for his description of Japan.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 7 Jun, 1692: An earthquake strikes Port Royal bringing down the tower of the Anglican church, swallowing people and structures hole. A vast tidal wave followed, sweeping away people, buildings, and objects, including the town cemetery, so that decayed corpses were seen floating on the water alongside the drowned. > 90% of the buildings of Port Royal were destroyed and ~2K lives lost with ~2K more in the days that followed, as disease spread among the survivors. From then on, the British govern the island from Kingston.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1692: 93 conspirators are executed after an attempted slave revolt to seize Bridgetown and take control over the island and over the ships in its harbor is foiled by authorities.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1688: The English EIC enters into an agreement with the New Julfans, in the hope that the Armenians would send their silks to London around the Cape of Good Hope, rather than using a route through Turkey and the Mediterranean, in return for which Armenians are encouraged to settle in English forts and trading stations in India, ‘as if they were Englishmen born’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1684: The first attempt to colonize the island of Tristan takes place when the English ship Society is dispatched there with orders to conduct a harbor survey; the ship’s captain left a boar and two sows and a letter in a bottle, later deemed sufficient evidence to establish an English claim to the territory.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1675: Denmark (with Dutch support) goes to war with French King Louis XIV. The French raid St. Thomas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1672: The Danish West India Company receives its royal charter with an eye on the unoccupied island of St. Thomas, which the English had briefly abandoned. They sail a ship there from Bergen which arrives in May.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1671: The British Parliament pass ‘An Act to Prevent the Delivery up of Merchant Shipps, and for the Increase of Good and Serviceable Shipping’, which includes clauses dealing with the distribution of ‘Prize Money as in cases of Privateers’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1671: Henry Morgan leads an attack against the Spanish in Panama, marching his men across the isthmus, raving the small fishing village of Panama (‘the place where many fish are taken’), and seizing booty. This raid occurred just as Spain and England make peace, so he was sent back to England, notionally in disgrace, but the king could not resist the opportunity to grant him a knighthood. And before long he was back in Jamaica, concentrating on the suppression rather than the promotion of buccaneering. A new settlement is created on the site of modern-day Panama City.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1671: Spain and England make their peace and privateering comes to an official end.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1670s-1680s: Decline of privateering; overt piracy is suppressed.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1668: Oman sacks the Portuguese trading station at Diu, India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1668: Henry Morgan leads a raid on the surprisingly ill-defended silver station of Porto Bello seizing ~250K pieces of eight, merchandise, and slaves. Ordinary crew members might expect to receive around one thousandth of the haul of silver, which was enough to lead a comfortable life, or to spend their loot over many months in the bars and whorehouses of Port Royal.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1667: The Dutch trade the Island of Manhattan to the English in exchange for the Moluccan Island of Run.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1665: The French establish a settlement at Saint-Domingue, the lineal ancestor of modern Haiti.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1662: Christopher Myngs leads a foolhardy attack on Santiago, Cuba, which lay just across the water from Jamaica, a well-defended target. He manages to scatter the Spaniards, march his men into the heart of the city and leave them there for five days of wanton pillaging. His crew includes the young Welsh privateer, Henry Morgan, who would terrorize the Spaniards even more effectively in the coming decades.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1661: The Danish establish fort Christiansborg in the region of Accra.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1661: Oman raids the Portuguese base at Mombasa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1659: Christopher Myngs captains a fleet that sacks four Spanish towns in the Caribbean, returning to Port Royal with 1.5M pieces of eight.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1659: The Danish Glückstadt company establishes a fort at Frederiksborg in Ghana, with the assent of the local king of the Fetu people.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1658: The Danish lose the region of Scania, modern Sweden.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1656: Richard Cromwell grants the EIC a charter giving it authority to ‘settle, fotifie, and plant’ the island of St. Helena. The EIC thought of St. Helena as a base from which to launch expeditions towards the far-distant Moluccan Island of run, which they still dreamed of recovering from the Dutch right up to the exchange agreement of 1667 that sacrificed Run for Manhattan.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1655-1671: The British and Spanish license piracy against eachothers shipping in the Caribbean. The term ‘pirata’ by the Spaniards, who eagerly dismiss all their foes in the Caribbean as enemies of mankind.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1655: Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, deploys 60 ships with 8K men, led by Admiral Sir William Penn and General Robert Venable’s, respectively, against Hispaniola’s capital, Santo Domingo. British forces included a genuine riff-raff of criminals and vagabonds’, and the campaign was seriously mishandled due to discord between the two leaders. Rather than take Santo Domingo, the British land troops at Kingston Bay and take the Spanish forts in the city. From there, they are able to interfere with shipping across the Caribbean and they slowly begin populating the islands with Scottish Highlanders while expelling the Spanish. Jamaica was thrown open to settlers of all religions and nations, Protestants, Quakers, Catholics alike; and, just as Amsterdam and Livorno.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Venables was disgraced and briefly locked up in the Tower of London on his return to England, while Penn fled from the wrath of Cromwell to Ireland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1655: The British acquire Barbados.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1652: Oman raids the Portuguese base at Zanzibar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1651: Duke Jakob of Courland (Kurland) establishes a fort in the Gambia River and purchases Tobago from English Lord Warwick three years later (1654) and begins participating in the Transatlantic Triangular Trade.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1651: The British pass the Navigation Act requiring the American colonies to acquire their eastern goods through London, to which the goods were brought by the EIC, helping to keep the Company in business. However, in America, it increases the cost of goods, since the Americans were dealing through middlemen who expected their share of the proceeds.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 17c: ~380K Englishmen and women migrate to the Americas; a majority, 200K, head for the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 17-18c: Consumption of tobacco, tea and coffee skyrockets.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 17c: The islands of New Zealand are first depicted on Dutch maps, patriotically named after the Dutch province of Zeeland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1648: The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years War.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1645: The Cheng Hoon Teng Temple opens in Melaka, the oldest surviving Chinese temple in Malaysia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1644: Rise of the Qing Empire, on the collapse of the Ming dynasty.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1643: The Swedish invade Jutland, which distracts the Danes from their hostility to the United Provinces. The Dutch decide that the time had come to face the Danes, and send an imposing fleet of 48 naval vessels plus 300 merchant vessels into the Baltic past Helsingør Castle, where the king had taken up residence. King Christian was hardly in a position to stop them, and before long the Dutch had made an agreement with him that offered lower tolls on shipping passing through the Sound.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1642: Abel Tasman’s expedition of the Southern Latitudes. Tasman sets out from Batavia on a wide sweep of the Southern latitudes, coming in sight of Tasmania, not realizing that it is a large island lying off the coast of Australia, and sails around the bottom. In Dec, 1642, Tasman’s expedition reaches the N. tip of the S. Island of Aotearoa (New Zealand). As the Dutch ships arrive, two Māori canoes draw near; the Māori warriors on board kept challenging the Dutch, calling out to them and blowing on shell trumpets; the Dutch responded in kind, shouting, blowing their own trumpets and attempting to scare the Māoris by firing a cannon. The next morning a Māori catamaran set out to investigate the Dutch ships. Before long eight Māori boats were circling the ships. The first catamaran carried 13 naked men; covered in tattoos and clearly very hostile. The Dutch try to send a small boat to shore, but one of the Māori canoes headed straight for the Dutch boat, ramming it; the Māori crew tussled with the Dutch sailors, clubbing and killing 4 Dutchmen, and carrying off their bodies. The Dutch would have assumed that the bodies were taken to be eaten, which is not impossible. The bay where these events happened was given the name ‘Murderers’ Bay’ by an irate Tasman, (now- Golden Bay). This bloody reception had the effect the Māoris had hoped for: the strange visitors in their massive boats left and headed N., not bothering to explore Aotearoa in any depth.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1641: The Dutch take Melaka from the Portuguese.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1641: The Dutch establish a small trading station at Nagasaki.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1641-1853: Dutch merchants based in Nagasaki are the only European merchants present on the soil of Japan, and even then they were based on the offshore island of Deshima, where they aren’t even permitted to hold church services.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1640: The Portuguese rebel against the Habsburgs, re-establishing a national monarchy in Portugal and renewing their independence from Spain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1639: The Portuguese are expelled from Japan. An embassy set out the next year from Macau, hoping to restore ties, but the uncompromising attitude of the authorities was made absolutely clear when most of the diplomats were beheaded. Until then, the Portuguese had enjoyed an active trade in Japanese silk; problems arose when Portuguese Jesuit missionaries began to proselytize actively in southern Japan, and the shoguns decided that not just they but converted Japanese were a political threat.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1638: The Spanish are banned from Japanese soil, under pain of death.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1638-1639: The king of Denmark increases the toll levied on ships passing through the narrows at Helsingør. The Danes enter into an understanding with Spain, Protestant and Catholic working together to suffocate the Dutch.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1638: The Dutch support the Japanese shogun against rebels, including many Japanese Christians, backed by the Portuguese, and, since the defeat of the rebels culminated in the massacre of maybe 37K victims, the Dutch were for ever after blamed for their cynical betrayal of their fellow believers. In the end, the stand-off was resolved when the Dutch were ordered to go and occupy the former Portuguese base at Deshima.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1636: The Portuguese are cleared out of Japan, apart from their trading station at Nagasaki on Deshima Island. At the same time the Japanese are banned from sending ships overseas. The penalty for doing so was execution.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1634: The Dutch gain control of Curaçao.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1632: England takes charge of Antigua and Montserrat. Meanwhile the French occupy Guadeloupe and Martinique.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1630-1654: Brazil is seized by the Dutch.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1629: A Japanese ship is seized by a Spanish captain off Siam. In response, the Japanese seize a Portuguese ship at Nagasaki, drawing the Portuguese (then still subjects of King Philip) into the quarrel.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1628: The Spanish Treasure Fleet (the Silver Fleet), carrying 11M guilders of Silver and 8M guilders of Brazilian sugar (~8M guilders worth) from Mexico to Spain, is captured by Dutch West India Captain Piet Heyn.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1626: The General Commercial Company for Asia, Africa, America, and Magellanica (the Southern Continent) is chartered by Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus. Operating from Gothenburg, the company was modeled on the VOC.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 30 Apr, 1625: A combined Spanish and Portuguese force consisting of 52 ships and 12,500 men recapture Salvador (then the Brazilian capital) from the Dutch (Wiki).

• 1625: England acquires Barbados, after Captain John Powell arrives there and plants the English flag in what had once been a flourishing native settlement, but was now empty of people.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Early 17c: The Malay Annals are written, rich in stories about 15c Singapore and Melaka (Malacca).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1624: A Danish expedition obtains 9600 kg of cloves.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1624: The English settle on St Kitts, at the price of having to fight a war with the Caribs for mastery over the island, which is given over to tobacco plantations.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1624: The Japanese are ordered to stop trading in Manila; Japanese foreign trade becomes concentrated in Nagasaki and Hirado.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1623: The ‘Massacre of Amboyna’; A group of innocent traders based at the English factory in Amboyna are arrested, tortured, and executed, on the specious grounds that they had been conspiring with Japanese mercenaries, who met the same fate, to take over the island.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1623: Dutch raids on the Caribbean islands disrupt the trade of Cuba.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1621: The town of Gothenburg is founded as a Swedish base on the N. Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1621: Dutch conflict with Spain renews; as the conflict deepens, the Dutch found themselves short of herrings – no salt, no herrings.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1620: The English attempt to secure the tiny island of Pula Run; Puloway & Puloroon, the latter being the spice Islands of Ai and Run. This sets off a battle for control of Run in which the Dutch shamelessly fall all the nutmeg trees on what was the nutmeg island par excellence. The main English defender, Nathaniel Courthope, is shot and killed, and the Dutch take charge of the island, expelling the native population for good measure; negotiations about its future dragged on for 47y, until the Dutch and English governments finally agreed that the Dutch could keep Run if the English were allowed to hold on to Manhattan Island far away in North America, which they had seized from the Dutch three years earlier.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1619: Death of Jourdain in a skirmish with the Dutch out in the East Indies, in what has been called a ‘flagrant disregard’ of yet another Anglo-Dutch truce.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1619: Jens Munk expedition of the NW passage with a frigate and a sloop hoping to open a route to China. Munk sails in the direction of Baffin Island and Hudson Bay. He, with two other members of the crew of 64, survive the terrible conditions.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Dec, 1618: The first Danish trading voyages to the East (Ceylon) are carried out by Dutch entrepreneurs Jan de Wilem, from Amsterdam, and Herman Rosenkrantz, from Rotterdam, closely modeling their Danish East India Company on the VOC.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1616: VOC ship the ‘Eendracht’, captained by Dirk Hartog, makes landfall in Australia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1616: The Japanese government bans foreigners, including the Dutch and English.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1616: Danish King Christian IV issues the first license for Danish voyages to the East, led by Dutch entrepreneurs Jan de Wilem, from Amsterdam, and Herman Rosenkrantz, from Rotterdam.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1614: Christianity is banned in Japan by Shogun Ieyasu. By then hundreds of thousands of Japanese had already accepted the faith, mainly in Kyushu. The daimyo were expected to conform and to abandon Christianity for Buddhism. Over the next quarter of a century, horrific persecutions took place.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1613: The Witte Leeuw (White Lion), a Dutch East Indiaman, attacks Portuguese ships off St Helena. This proved to be an act of hubris: a cannon exploded on board, and the powder room then blew up, leading to the loss of a hundred tons of pepper and a large cargo of fine Chinese porcelain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1613: The first English vessel arrives in Japan, aiming to setup trading stations on the island of Kyushu.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1613-1620: An official Japanese party travels to Europe, by way of Mexico.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1611: Mutiny during Henry Hudson’s expedition to explore the Hudson Bay. The crew places him, his son and a handful of crew members in a small boat, and cut them adrift in James Bay, the Southernmost part of Hudson Bay. It is unlikely that the captain and his friends survived; they were given neither food nor warm clothing.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1611: The Sultan of Johor’s Singapore settlement is razed.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1611: Dutch navigator Hendrik Brouwer becomes the first to sail 4000 miles directly across the Indian Ocean from S. Africa (as opposed to following the Indian Coastline), through the Sunda Strait to Batavia (Jakarta).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1609: A peace agreement leads to a 12y truce between the Dutch and Spanish.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1609: The first Dutch vessel arrives in Japan to establish a trading station on the island of Kyushu.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1609-1612: An English ship caught in a hurricane while bound for VA collides with rocks off Bermuda; of the 600 aboard, no one drowns but some of the sailors and passengers decide to stay there and return home once their ship had been repaired; since wild pigs infested the island, having survived an earlier shipwreck, the group remained there for 3 years, becoming the first English colony to make use of African slave labor.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1609: Dutch scholar and lawyer Hugo Grotius argues learnedly and forcefully that the seas were free spaces where all had the right to come and go. No one, Grotius argued on the basis of classical and biblical sources, had the right to forbid free passage, and refusal to do so had justified wars. Grotius’s tract on the free seas became a standard point of reference in what later developed into international law.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 16 Jun, 1608: A Dutch fleet led by van Caerden with 7 ships and aided by a contingent of 26 boats and many Ternatese soldiers anchor in Tidore to defeat the Spanish but withdraw after ~20d and attack the island of  Makian (www.colonialvoyage.com).

• 1607: The Jacobean colony at Jamestown is founded in Virginia, giving the English their first permanent foothold in N. America, over a century after Cabot’s first voyage, but only a year after a legal ban on the right to emigrate was abolished.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• May, 1607: A Dutch fleet led by Cornelis Matelief and reinforced by Ternatese rebels attempt to take Tidore Islan, the source of cloves, nutmeg, and mace, are repulsed by Spanish Defenders (www.colonialvoyage.com).

• May, 1606: The Spanish reach Vanuatu finding a suitable port that could function as the HQ of a Spanish settlement, choosing the name Vera Cruz for the harbor and giving the name Austrialia del Espiritú Santo to the island.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1606: The Dutch blockade Lisbon, preventing Philip III from sending out his spice fleet that year.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1605: The Dutch defeat the Portuguese, gaining control of the Melaka island of Amboyna. The Dutch planned to penetrate right into the Spice Islands and gain control of them, rather than relying on local merchants to bring them to bases on Sumatra, Java or other, more accessible places.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Oct, 1603: The Chinese in Manila rise in revolt, burn the outskirts of the city and kill Spanish soldiers, including the governor. The rebels even massacre fellow Chinese who were not interested in joining the rebellion.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1603: A Dutch ship despoils a Portuguese carrack, the Santa Catarina, in the strait near Singapore, carrying off  its cargo of bullion and Chinese goods to Amsterdam, where it sells for more than 3M guilders. The Portuguese appear to have been betrayed by the king of Johor (the S. tip of the Malay peninsula), who told the Dutch that the carrack was on its way and unprotected.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 20 Mar, 1602: Formation of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) as the official arm of the government of the United Provinces in the East Indies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1601: Lancaster’s 2nd expedition to the E. Indies; Lancaster insists each sailor is to be fed three spoonfulls of lemon juice every day, but only aboard his flagship; on the accompanying ships scurvy is rampant. By the time his four ships reached Southern Africa, Lancaster had lost >100 men to disease, equaling the complement of one ship.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1600: The Dutch first arrive in the Indian Ocean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1600: Dutch voyage of De Liefde piloted by William Adams, the Englishman who later won the trust of the Japanese shogun.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• >1600: Brazil becomes the dominant source of high-quality sugar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1600: The Dutch attempt to capture São Tomé.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• May, 1599: Fray Jerónimo first builds a church in Edo.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1597: Publication of “The Grand Director the Three Treasures Goes Down to the Western Ocean” by Mao-deng, about the Ming Voyages- covering the seven massive expeditions sent out from China between 1405-1434.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1597: Rise of Ieyasu as Japanese Shogun.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1597-1598: The Second Japanese conquest of Korea; following the defeat of the Korean navy at sea, Japanese Shogun Hideyoshi orders his army to ‘mow down everyone universally, without discriminating between young and old, men and women, the clergy and the laity – high-ranking soldiers on the battlefield, that goes without saying, but also the hill folk, down to the poorest and meanest – and send their heads to Japan’. The Japanese get as far as Seoul, engaging with both Korean and Chinese armies. They establish bases along the Korean coast, but fail to achieve the breakthrough they sought.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1598: Death of Korean Admiral Yi Sun, in battle at sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Sep, 1597: The Battle of Myongnyang; 13 fortified ‘Turtle ships’ with strengthened sides and spiked roofs, under Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin holds back the entire Japanese fleet of over 200 ships. The Korean ships emerged unscathed, but the Japanese lost thirty-one ships.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1597: Japanese Shogun Hideyoshi unleashes a brutal persecution of Japanese Christians, resulting in mass crucifixions of men, women, and children, in and around Nagasaki.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1595: A ‘Long-Distance company’ (later the Dutch West India Company- WIC) is established in Amsterdam to create small settlements in the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• End 16c: King Philip III renews the ban on trade between his Iberian kingdoms and Holland, with the result that the number of visits to Lisbon plummets. The Spanish embargo meant the near impossibly of loading Portuguese or Spanish salt. Without salt, there would be no edible herrings. It had to be the right type of salt – French supplies often contained manganese, which turned the herrings black and damaged their flavour. There was plenty of salt on the island of Sal in the Cape Verde archipelago, Portuguese colonies, it is true, but the inhabitants, such as they were, were quite willing to shift it. Better still, the Dutch thought, might be the seizure of some of these islands. The Dutch attempt to capture the Cape Verde Islands. The lesson of the conflict with Spain was that the Dutch would have to extend their ambitions a long way beyond either the Baltic of the Mediterranean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 25 Oct, 1593: Assassination of Spanish governor Gomez Perez Dasmariñas and Spanish members of his crew by Chinese oarsmen aboard his galley, La Capitana, while anchored at Caca Island, Batangas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1593: The Portuguese King bans Spanish visits to Macau.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1592-1593: The First Japanese conquest of Korea; The Japanese invade Korea with an army of 300K, taking Seoul and Pyongyang, though a Ming army flushes them out of Pyongyang and they are unable to hold Seoul after the Chinese threaten to unleash an army of 400K against them: ‘Stay here in Seoul and you will be slaughtered.’-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1591: English explorer James Lancaster attempts to reach the E. Indies by the Portuguese Route, round the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean. Lancaster fails to penetrate beyond Penang in western Malaya. Lancaster’s one great prize was ‘the ship of the captain of Malacca’, a Portuguese vessel travelling from Goa to Melaka, loaded with Canary wine, palm wine, velvets, taffeta, an ‘abundance of playing cardes’ and Venetian glass.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1591-1592: John Davis’ expedition into the Pacific by way of Magellan Strait, hoping to resolve the problem of the NW Passage ‘on the backe syde’ by following Drake’s route up the American coast until he found the way through.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1590s: Dutch sailors transport German Moselle and French wines along the north German shore.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1590s: Dutch Navigator Willem Barentsz sails into Arctic waters, mapping out parts of the sea that now bears his name, as well as the islands of Novaya Zemlya on its Eastern edge. In 1596–7 he and his crew had to endure a harsh winter immured in a wooden house built from driftwood and parts of their ship. The ship itself was trapped in ice, forcing them to travel in open boats from Novaya Zemlya to the Kola Peninsula. Barentsz died enroute.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1588: Defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English Navy.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1587: Fearing that the Jesuits were the secret vanguard of a Portuguese takeover of their islands, Japanese Shogun Nobunaga orders Portuguese priests to leave Japan.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1586-1588: Thomas Cavendish (Candish) circumnavigates the glove. Cavendish returned home with the spoils of an entire Manila galleon, including 122,000 gold pesos, a rich store of silk and spices and two Japanese boys who could read their own language.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1585: The Spanish capture Antwerp after besieging the city for nearly a year, leading to Amsterdam’s rise as the major port in the region.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1585: Francis Drake arrives in Santiago, ravaging its capital, Ribeira Grande. The Habsburg rulers of Portugal react by building the Fort of São Felipe.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1585: King Philip II imposes an embargo on Dutch shipping bound for Spain and his newly acquired kingdom of Portugal.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1581: An Ottoman fleet attacks Portuguese Melaka in the East Indies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1580: The Muscovy Company attempts a NE Passage, penetrating a little way beyond Novaya Zemlya before the ice of the Kara Sea forces them back.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1580s: Walter Raleigh’s attempts to create a colony at Roanoke on the coast of North Carolina ends with the mysterious disappearance of its settler population.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1580s: John Davis expedition to find a NW passage; following in the wake of Frobisher, Davis heads into the strait now named after him between Greenland and Baffin Island.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Late 16c: The Azores becomes the strategic center of a network of trade routes; ships arriving from South America and round the Cape from India gathered at Angra on Terceira, before proceeding in convoy to Portugal, in order to escape predators such as the English pirates who lurked in those waters.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 4 Aug, 1578: The Battle of the Three Kings (Battle of Alcáer Quibir); Moroccan forces defeat Portuguese forces near the town of Ksar-el-Kebir and Larache. Portuguese King Sebastian disappears in action, assumed killed. Phillip II of Spain assumes the throne of Portugal.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1578: Frobisher’s expedition to find a NW passage with 11 ships and 400 men upon the entrance to Hudson Bay.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1577-1580: Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigates the globe aboard the Pelican (later renamed the ‘Golden Hind’), planned in part as a sustained assault on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coastline of the Americas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1576: Spanish troops in Flanders besiege Antwerp in revolt at not being paid for services by Spanish King Philip II.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Jun, 1575: A Spanish expedition from Manila sets out for China to persuade the Ming emperor that Spanish friars should be allowed to preach the faith in China and to build a trading base on the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan, which the Chinese were quite happy to permit.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1574: The Sultan of Johor, the S. most kingdom in Malaya, establishes a Shahbandar, overseer, of customs at Singapore.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1574: Chinese pirates aboard 70 large junks under the command of Lin Feng (Limahon), overrun large parts of Manila, and are only beaten back with great difficulty after Spanish reinforcements arrive by sea under the command of Juan de Salcedo, the grandson of Legázpi. Once Limahon and his men had been chased away from Manila, the Spanish ships caught up with the pirates and annihilated their fleet.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1572: The Great Revolt of the Netherlands follows the persecution of Protestants by Netherlands governor Duke of Alva. From then on, the Dutch ‘Sea-Beggars’, privateers licensed by the House of Orange, blockade the River Scheldt, forcing Antwerp to find other export routes and scoring victories against Spanish shipping.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1571: The Portuguese choose Nagasaki (‘Long Cape’) as their port of preference for trade with Japan. The area had been a fishing village under landowner Omura Sumitada who was sympathetic to Christians when a Jesuit priest turned up there in ~1569, built a church, and converted the entire population, including Omura.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1571: Manila is formally established as the capital of the Spanish Philippine colony.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1571: The Ottomans are defeated at Lepanto.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1571: Rise of Havana within the Spanish Indies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1571: Legazpi establishes a permanent settlement in Manila, founding the fortress of Intramuros, and declaring Manila the HQ of the Spanish government in the W. Pacific Ocean (Wiki).

• 1570: The Spanish capture Manila (Wiki).

• 1570: Abraham Ortelius publishes a world map calling Mercator’s ‘Southern Land not yet known’ (Terra Australis Nondum Cognita).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1569: Mercator publishes a new version of his very influential world map.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1567: The Ming Emperor permits Chinese merchants to trade abroad.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1565: The first Manila galleons tie the Western Pacific (and, beyond that, China) to Mexico and, ultimately, the Atlantic trade networks.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1564: The Legázpi Expedition is commissioned by Philippi II, marking the beginning of the Manila Galleon Trade. Urdaneta and Miguel López de Legázpi set out from Navidad on Mexico’s Pacific coast. On their return from the Philippines, Arellano discovers the East wind, and a route back from the Philippines. Scurvy took the lives of several men (16 died en route out of a crew >200).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1558-1563: Spice prices nearly triple in Old Castile, with cloves and cinnamon particularly badly affected.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1557: Macau (Macao) is founded by the Portuguese. It becomes the conduit for trade between Japan and the wider world in the latter 16c. The Portuguese introduce to the Chinese- lettuce, watercress, bell peppers, new types of beans, and various fruits from the Americans including papaya and guava.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1557: Muscovy Company Commander Anthony Jenkinson proves to be an indomitable explorer of central Asia, reaching Persia and Bukhara, and acting as Queen Elizabeth’s representative at the court of the highly temperamental tsar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1555: A second English expedition guided partially by Russian sailors, reaches Novaya Zemlya. However, the ship has to turn back because of the frightful conditions at 70oN – not just the ice floes but the unwelcome attention of a massive Right Whale that ‘made a terrific noyse in the water’ and swam within a few feet of the ship.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1555: The Portuguese first visit Guangzhou. It was too distant from the Pearl River, so they left after a few years to found what became their base, the future city of Macau.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1550s: The rulers of France, Spain and Portugal make it clear they are unable to repay the capital of loans raised from business houses in Antwerp, though they are graciously willing to pay 5% interest forever. This bankrupts the Fuggers of Augsburg, the greatest bankers of their day and pillars on whom the prosperity of Antwerp rested.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1553: English King Edward VI commissions Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor to find a NE route to Asia. Off the coast of N. Finland, storms disperse both ships; Willoughby’s ship along with one other press on into the Barents Sea, which lies between Spitsbergen and the long and desolate pair of islands known as Novaya Zemlya (‘New Land’), before icy conditions force the ships back to the Kola Peninsula at the very top of Scandinavia. Forced to spend the winter there, all sixty-three sailors die. Chancellor’s ship end up on the coasts of the White Sea, from where Chancellor set out on an ambitious but successful overland journey to Moscow, laying the foundations for a successful fur trade between England and Russia which came to be handled by a licensed Muscovy Company.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1552: The Ottoman siege of Hormuz, gateway to the Arabian Gulf, which the Portuguese had held since 2015. Turkish forces land on Hormuz Island, surround the citadel, and fail to take the impregnable fortress-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 16c: The Dieppe maps show an extensive Southern continent below South America.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1546: The Ottomans capture Basra, giving them control of the Persian Gulf.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1546: The Ottomans siege of Portuguese Diu fails.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1542-1544: Spanish Commander Villalobos expedition of the Pacific, setting out from Navidad on Mexico’s Pacific Coast searching for the islands visited by King Solomon- the distant land of Ophir mentioned in the Book of Kings. Villalobos’s journey took his ships towards what therefore became known as the Solomon Islands. Villalobos sails onto the Philippines Islands, henceforth, naming the island group as the Philippines in celebration of the heir to the throne of Castile, the future King Phillip II.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1544: Death of Villalobos on an island W. of New Guinea while trying to reach Mexico on his return from the Philippines.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1542: The Spanish extend their ambitions all the way to the Ryukyu Islands. The idea that was germinating in the minds of the Spaniards was that they could use the Philippines (not as yet known by that name) as a base from which to trade with east Asia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1542-1543: Cabrillo explores the coast of Californian reaching as far N. as San Francisco Bay, without discovering what they had hoped to find: a channel that would enable ships to pass through the North American continent.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1538: The Ottomans capture Aden, securing control of the Red Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1538: Mercator’s first world map marks the Magellan Strait as the channel between two continents- S. America and Terra Australis, a massive southern continent- ‘that land lies here is certain but its size and extent are unknown’; its northern tip reaches as far as the Magellan Strait.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1535: Discovery of the Galapagos by Spanish Explorers.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1535: The ruler of Gujarat grants the Portuguese control of the Diu customs house and allows them to build a fortress in Diu. Within 20d the Ottoman commander, Hadım Süleyman Pasha, decides that his siege of Diu is futile and returns to port in Suez.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1533: Ribeira Grande is granted city status, when it became the seat of the Portuguese bishop responsible for west Africa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1530s: The Portuguese acquire the small coastal port and fishing harbor of Bombay, and then Diu.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1530s: The Franco-Ottoman alliance.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1530: Marco Polo’s book of travels is widely circulated.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 5 Apr, 1529: The Treaty of Zaragoza is signed between the Spanish King  and Emperor Charles VI, and Joâo III of Portugal, specifying that the Portuguese line of influence would be marked 297.5 leagues E. of the Moluccas, a line at the time believed to pass near the Mariana Islands and that granting sovereignty over the Moluccas to Portugal, including rights of navigation and trade in exchange for a 350K ducat payment to Spain (Guampedia). 

• 1528: Verrazano’s 3rd expedition of the America’s; Verrazano is said to have been eaten by cannibals.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1527: Hugh Elyot and Robert Thorne are both credited with the discovery of Newfoundland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1526: Verrazano’s 2nd expedition of the America’s; his fleet of four ships is scattered, he reaches Brazil, where he loads brazilwood; but one of his ships enters the Indian Ocean, apparently trying to reach Madagascar. Instead, it is blown towards Sumatra and then makes its way back past the Maldives to Mozambique, where the Portuguese governor takes charge of the crew and reports back to Lisbon in alarm.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1526: Piri presents Süleyman the Magnificent with a revised world map, followed by a second world map two years later.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1525: The Loaísa-Elcano expedition sets off for Cipangu (Japan) and the Spice Islands with 7 ships and 450 men, including four who had served with Magellan-Elcano. The plan was to head for Japan and then to turn Southwards towards the Moluccas. The crew of the ship on which Loaísa and Elcano had been sailing did reach Tidore, only to find that the Portuguese were now installed nearby in rival Ternate, and had recently sacked Tidore. Disaster struck another ship, which struggled to reach Mexico and made contact with the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Only four ships of seven actually reach the Strait of Magellan, and Loaísa himself died.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Cortés had been corresponding with the Spanish court about routes to the Indies, and the court was keen for him to find out what had happened to Loaísa’s ships. Cortés launched three ships on the Pacific, under the command of his cousin Saavedra, who set off for Tidore with the aim of carrying off the survivors from Loaísa’s ships (about 120 people in all). Two ships went down near Hawai’i. But in an all too typical act of the time, the crew of the third ship, the Florida, reached Tidore, looked at what was going on, decided there were too many people to take off the island, and filled its empty spaces with a cargo of cloves instead.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1524: Verrazano’s 1st expedition of the Americas, commissioned to explore the Atlantic Coast of N. America between FL and New Brunswick including NY Bay and Narragansett Bay.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1522: A Habsburg rivalry with France disrupts maritime trade; depriving many cities of spices as ships fail to reach Flanders from Portugal, Italy and Spain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1520s: Discovery of Australia by Cristóvão de Mendonça, who explored the waters S. of Indonesia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1520-1566: Reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, 10th and longest reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Under his administration, the Ottoman Empire ruled over >25M people (Wiki).

• 1520: The Bahamas are largely deserted of the Taínos due to disease and demand for labor in the gold fields of Hispaniola. The disappearance of the Taínos led to the importation of cheap labour from Africa, black slaves who were not even notional subjects of the Spanish rulers and had even fewer benefits of protection.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1520: Death of Sultan Selim, succeeded by Süleyman (‘the Magnificent’).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1519-1522: The Magellan–Elcano voyage becomes the first to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan never had it in mind to circumnavigate the globe. The purpose of his expedition was to reach the East Indies, to load his ships with spices, and to return the way he had come; the fundamental error, which he shared with Columbus, was to assume that the distance between Europe and Asia, sailing westwards, was much smaller than it actually is. Magellan and a cartographer named Faleiro were to enjoy a monopoly on trade to the lands they found, but the Crown had learned a little from its mistakes, and this monopoly was limited to 10y, to avoid the endless lawsuits that were still being pressed by Columbus’s heirs. They also received handsome tax privileges, 20% of the profits from the first voyage, and the hereditary office of governor of the lands they brought under Spanish rule. Magellan and Faleiro had managed to persuade King Charles that the Moluccas lay within the Spanish half of the world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 8 Sep, 1522: Elcano’s Victoria ties up at Seville, 18 Europeans had survived the trip.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 4 Sep, 1522: Elcano’s lookouts spy Cape St Vincent.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Summer, 1522: Elcano’s Victoria wends its way past the Portuguese bases of W. Africa, putting in at Ribeira Grande in the Cape Verde Islands for supplies. The crew told the Portuguese customs officials that they had got lost on their return from the Caribbean, but when an attempt was made to pay with cloves for food and slaves (needed as extra hands), it became obvious that the ship had been poaching on what the Portuguese regarded as their part of the world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Early Feb- Early May, 1522: Elcano sails from Timor to the S. tip of Africa staying far S. to avoid Java and Sumatra where the Portuguese were known to trade. 15 Europeans die on this stretch.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Nov, 1521: Elcano’s fleet reaches the Moluccas. Elcano loads one ship, the Victoria, with cloves and sets out for Spain by way of the Indian ocean, carrying a crew of 47 sailors. A handful of sailors are left in Tidore so that they could set up a Spanish base there. The other seaworthy ship, the Trinidad, would take the trans-Pacific route home with a crew of 53 men and nearly 50t of cloves, but not by way of the Strait of Magellan; the idea was to send it to Panama and then trans-ship its cargo across Central America and into the Caribbean. The Trinidad struggled to find a route, ending up in the latitude of Japan, and then turning back to Tidore. Alas for her, Tidore had already been visited by a Portuguese squadron which was searching for the Spanish flotilla; the Portuguese closed down the Spanish station, set up their own on Ternate, and found the Trinidad, from which they seize its cargo.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Jul, 1521: Elcano’s fleet visits Brunei in Borneo; their captains still determined to find a route to the Moluccas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Apr, 1521: Death of Magellan during an attack on the island of Mactan. Soon after, the rajah of Cebu turned against the Spaniards massacring 27 men whom he had invited to a feast, including João Serrão. Elcano takes command of the fleet.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Mar- Apr, 1521: Magellan’s fleet penetrates into the Philippines Islands, demanding that natives in Cebu place themselves under the control of the Rajah of Cebu, who was henceforth to be the Spanish King’s representative.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 6 Mar, 1521: Magellan’s fleet reaches Guam. 31 men die of scurvy or other illnesses during the Pacific crossing. Magellan names Guam the ‘Island of Thieves’ after several naked islanders run amok on board the Spanish ships, seizing anything they could carry.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 28 Nov, 1520: Magellan’s fleet departs Tierra del Fuego (owing to the fires he saw there, possibly lit by Patagonian inhabitants) and enters the Pacific Ocean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Feb-Nov, 1520: After exploring the River Plate, Magellan travels Southwards, meeting late summer storms, slowing progression, exhausting food supplies which places the crew on rations, and leading to mutiny. The greatest challenge of all comes when Magellan’s fleet reaches the strait that he correctly identifies as a passage through the S. tip of South America, later known as the Strait of Magellan. His captain of the San Antonio deserts returning to Spain and leaving his fleet with 3 ships.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Dec, 1519: Magellan’s fleet arrives off Rio de Janeiro.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1519: Five Ships and 260 men under the command of Magellan set out from Seville in search of the passage to Asia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1519: Founding of Havana; Its strength lay in its position astride the Gulf Stream, which made it the ideal transit point between the two American continents and Europe.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1519: Lisbon court cartographer Pedro Reinel produces a world map showing a circular projection with the South Pole at the center.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1518: Defeat of the Spanish Armada; the English defeat of the Spanish Armada brings hope that Philip II will ambitions in northern waters.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1518: The Spanish king arranges the purchase of 4,000 slaves from Portuguese merchants, to be sent to the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1518: The Portuguese deploy a fleet into the Persian Gulf to defend the claim of the sultan of Hormuz to suzerainty over Bahrain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 16 Dec, 1517: The Siege of Jiddah; a Portuguese armada of 33 warships with 3K troops attack Mamluk held Jiddah, losing 800 lives, several ships, and dominancy of the Red Sea. The Portuguese retreat to Kamaran Island and the Ottomans annex Jiddah.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1517: A Portuguese squadron of eight ships is allowed to sail up the Pearl River and dock at Guangzhou (Canton) .-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1517: The Ottomans overwhelm Egypt, bringing them, and the Red Sea under their authority.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1516: The Ottomans overwhelm Syria, which had been ruled since the late 13c by the Mamluk sultans of Egypt.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1516: Discovery of the River Plate by Juan de Solís, who thought it was a freshwater sea that would take him to the Spice Islands. However, Solís fell out with the Indians and was killed, so the survivors return to Spain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1515: Nuremburg native Johannes Schöner produces a globe of the world showing a channel between N. & S. America, a channel between S. America and the Southern Continent, and placing Japan only a few degrees W. of America.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1515: Castilian King Ferdinand II commissions Juan de Solís to lead a voyage Westwards that would find a way round the bottom of, or through the middle of, South America.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1515: Albuquerque becomes Portuguese governor of India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1514: The first proper sugar mill in Hispaniola is built, on the initiative of a Spanish landowner named Velloso. Earlier attempts began in 1503.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1514: The Battle of Çaldıran; the Ottomans defeat the Persians.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1513: Spanish Conquistador Juan Núñez de Balboa, attempts to create a Spanish settlement on the coast of Panama.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1513: Piri draws his world map in Gallipoli.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1513: Portuguese forces defeat a Javanese navy of Junks in the Malacca Strait, helping to guarantee free passage for Portuguese ships as far as Ternate and Tidore.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1513: The Portuguese attack Aden with 24 ships, 1700 Portuguese troops, and a 1000 Indian troops, to setup a blockade preventing ships from reaching the spice markets of Alexandria. The Portuguese occupy Kamaran Island, though they are unable to hold it for long.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1513: The Pacific is first glimpsed by Balboa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 3 Apr, 1513: Juan Ponce de León lands in Florida, bringing back the first slaves captured on the N. American mainland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 27 Dec, 1512: The Laws of Burgos; the first codified set of laws governing the behavior of Spaniards in the Americas, particularly with regard to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Unfortunately, by then it was far too late to save the Taínos. Unaccustomed to heavy labour and corralled into settlements, with families often broken apart for months at a time, the Taínos began to disappear: falling birth rates, ill-treatment by Spanish masters, (disease) even massacres, resulted in their rapid extinction.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1511: Albuquerque seizes and captures Melaka, guaranteeing access to the spice islands, yet still lacking control the Malacca strait as the expelled sultan still held lands in Sumatra.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1511: The Venetians urge the Mamluks to make common cause with the Ottomans against the Portuguese, inviting the Mamluks to obtain wood from the Turks, while offering supplies from Venice as well.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1511: Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar sets out from Hispaniola to form the first Spanish settlement at Baracoa, Cuba, with orders to conquer the island. The new settlers were greeted with stiff resistance from the local Taíno population.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1511: Chuzan traders come into contact with the Portuguese at Melaka, who had captured the town only weeks prior. Disconcerted by the sudden change of regime, the Ryukyuan’s sail away, never to return.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1510: The slave trade to the Americas began in earnest. After that, the islands’ slaves fell into three categories: ‘trade slaves’, destined for the slave market in Portugal or, increasingly, America; ‘work slaves’, for sugar and other plantations on the Cape Verde Islands; and domestic slaves, bought to serve in settler households, who were certainly the most fortunate.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1510: Founding of Nombre de Dios in the Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1510-1540: Peak of the Slave trade between São Tomé & Elmina; up to half a dozen vessels move back and forth almost continuously between the two, laden with African slaves when bound for Elmina.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1510: The Atlantic Slave trade to the Americans begins.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1510: The Portuguese capture Goa, using it as their seat of government in India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1509: Sebastian Cabot’s (son of John Cabot) sets off with two ships and a royal license on a voyage to Labrador.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1508: Norman sailor Jean Aubert sails out of Dieppe reaching as far as Newfoundland and returning with 7 Mic-Mac Indians, the first N. Americans to be seen in France.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1508: Ponce de Leon arrives in Puerto Rico and builds a Spanish town. The Royal Council in Castile decides that Ponce was treading on the legal rights of Diego Colón, forcing Ponce to move on from the island.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1507-1509: A Mamluk fleet deploys out against the Portuguese.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1509: A Portuguese fleet led by Almeida defeats a Mamluk fleet at Diu.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1508: A Mamluk fleet defeats a Portuguese fleet under Almeida, Portugal’s first governor of India. The failure of the Mamluks to follow through their victory over the Portuguese in 1508, and had witnessed the victory of Almeida’s fleet over the Mamluk navy at Diu the next year.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1507: Martin Waldseemüller publishes his world map.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1507: Magellan sails to India and stays in the Indian Ocean for several years.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1507: Afonso de Albuquerque with 460 men about 6 ships raid outstations of Hormuz along the coast of Oman with terrifying violence that spares neither women nor children forcing Hormuz to submit. Albuquerque formally grants the crown of Hormuz to the 12yo nominal ruler Sayf ad-din, taking care to nominate a vizier and a guardian for the young king as well.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1506: A report by a Portuguese agent shows that gold lay in a kingdom ruled from a place called Zimbaue, which it took about 3w to reach- the first European reference to a successor kingdom to the empire of Great Zimbabwe.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1506: Elmina brings in a revenue of nearly 44,000,000 reis, more than 10x the revenue from Guinea slaves and Malagueta pepper, funding the imperial expansion of Portugal as the little kingdom’s fleets broke their way into the Indian Ocean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1506: The Portuguese conduct a raid on a Malagasy port; stealing 20 shiploads of rice.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1505: Magellan sails to India under Portuguese commander Francisco de Almeida.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1505: Weary of the growing Portuguese presence, the Mamluk Sultan begins builds up the defenses of Jiddah to protect Mecca.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1505-1506: Bedouin raids are so persistent that the pilgrimage route through Syria to Mecca had to be suspended.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1505: A Portuguese fleet under Almeida deploys to the Indian Ocean with 1500 men aboard >20 ships including many high-ranking Portuguese and captains with experience of the waters (such as João de Nova) with the aim, set out in a 30,000-word set of instructions, to gain mastery over the W. Indian Ocean. When he found that the sheikh of Kilwa was less than welcoming- the sheikh argued that he could not meet Almeida as a black cat had crossed the road in front of him- Almeida unleashed his troops on Kilwa, overrunning the town. The sheikh fled and Almeida’s troops begin to build the fort, installing Anconi, a compliant Muslim, as King of Kilwa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • The Portuguese continued onto Mombasa, intimidating and bombarding the town before looting/burning the city, and massacring many of its inhabitants. After Kilwa and Mombasa, the Portuguese reputation preceded them, and the Sofala sheikh, aged 80 and blind, was hardly in a position to resist. In exchange for defending against attacks by African raiders from the interior, they are allowed to build a fortress and commercial base, which they create from scratch in a couple of months during the autumn of 1505. This gave them charge of the gold trade out of Sofala, from which the Arab traders were now excluded.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1504: Death of Spanish Queen Isabella.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1503-1504: The Portuguese establish a fort and factory at Cabo Frio close to modern Rio de Janeiro. Ships from the port began importing black slaves and laborers who were exporting 30K logs (~750t) of Brazilwood annually. The Tupí Indians (Indigenous Brazilians) were willing helpers. In exchange for small items of truck, such as little mirrors, combs and scissors, they were happy to load logs on the Portuguese ships. A small-scale trade in Brazilian slaves also developed, war captives of the Tupís for whom the expected fate was that they would be ceremoniously killed and eaten at a cannibal feast.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 24 Jun, 1503: The 150t Espoir, captained by Binot Paulmier de Gonneville of Normandy, sets sail from Honfleur. The Espoir avoids landfall in the Spanish carries, hugs the African coast, and passes through the Cape Verde Islands unchallenged. After spending 10d at Cape Verde, the voyage home past the Azores was slow, but it was easy enough until they entered the waters off Jersey and Guernsey, where the ship fell prey to pirates, Edward Blunth of Plymouth and Mouris Fortin, a Breton corsair. The pirates catch up, pillage and sink the ship, massacring many of the sailors. Only 28 men returned home to Honfleur alive.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1503: The Casa de Contratación is founded in Seville to take charge of trade with the New World.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1503: The Spanish under Ferdinand V drive the French out of Italy (Britannica).

• 1502: Nicolás de Ovando replaces Columbus as governor of the Indies and build a true Spanish city with stonemasons and carpenters from N. Spain to construct monumental palaces and churches in the latest Iberian styles.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1502: The Cantino Map is drawn in Lisbon, with a caption to Greenland describing it as the land ‘discovered by license of the most excellent prince Dom Manuel king of Portugal, the which is believed to be the peninsula of Asia’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1502-1503: Vasco da Gama’s 2nd Voyage to the Indian Ocean with 20 ships divided into 3 squadrons and departing just as de Nova left Indian waters. One squadron of ten ships was tasked to collect cargoes of spices, one to clean the sea of Arab trader’s hostile to the Portuguese, and one to stay in India, protecting the Portuguese who were taking up residence there.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Feb, 1503: The Portuguese under da Gama defeat the Navy of Calicut.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Mar, 1501- Sep, 1502: Portuguese King Manuel I deploys a 2nd fleet under Galician commander João de Nova to learn what Cabral had been doing: Cabral left a message in a shoe suspended from a tree near the southern tip of Africa; astonishingly, the message was found, and de Nova was warned that he should stay wary of the hostile Samudri of Calicut. De Nova manages to establish a ‘factory’ for the Portuguese at Cannanore and returned to Portugal with hundreds of thousands of pounds of pepper, cinnamon and ginger.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1500: Rise of the Dutch in the North Sea and the Baltic, while the Germans by and large cede these areas of activity to them.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1500: Portuguese explorers reach Madagascar, finding that the island lay under the authority of several different kings.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1500-1504: The Guerra Brother raid Topia, Brazil, the land inhabited by the Tupí Indians with impunity capturing slaves and selling one girl named Sunbay in Spain for 6,000 maravedís (an exceptionally high price). These captives were called indios bozales (bozales- primitive, savage), which was also used of untrained black slaves from W. Africa. By 1504 the Guerra brothers could slave anywhere except the lands of Columbus and the king of Portugal, which concentrated their efforts on Carib territory in the S. Caribbean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1500: De la Cosa draws his remarkably well-informed world map.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1500: A Portuguese fleet under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral with 13 ships sailing for the Indian Ocean are blown off course and inadvertently discovery ‘Land of the Holy (or True) Cross’, soon to be rechristened Brazil, because it was rich in Brazilwood. 7 of the ships return to Lisbon, while one ship reaches Madagascar, the first European landing there.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1500: Rediscovery of Greenland by Gaspar Corte Real, from the Azores.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1499: Invasion of Italy by French King Louis XII; the French take Milan, Genoa, and Naples, but are driven out in 1503 by Spain under Ferdinand V (Britannica).

• 1499: Vespucci begins to contemplate that the New world may be physically separated from Asia, eventually concluding that S. America was the “Antipodes’, the Southern Continent; “I have discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous peoples and animals than in our Europe, or Asia or Africa.”-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1499: Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, previously the captain of the Niña on Columbus’s first voyage, sets out under royal license for the New World. He is ordered not to bring back Caribbean natives as slaves, though Africans were acceptable if he enters E. Atlantic waters; he takes 36 slaves from the New World.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1498: Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s brother, move the center of Spanish operations from La Isabela to the new capital Nueva Isabela, but Santo Domingo was the name that stuck until 1936, when the ruthless Dominican dictator Trujillo modestly renamed it Ciudad Trujillo.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1497: Portuguese King Manuel I expels both Jews and Muslims and bans the open practice of Judaism in his Kingdom.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1497: Melilla on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast is captured by the Castilians.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Jul, 1497-Sep, 1499: Vasco da Gama’s 1st voyage to the Indian Ocean with 4 ships that take the route along the W. coast of Africa and past the Cape Verde Islands. His ships were swept along, arriving somewhere along the coasts of modern Namibia and South Africa. There they met naked, tawny-colored Bushmen who were disappointingly ignorant of spices, gold or pearls; further south, Vasco da Gama’s chronicler described people who looked and acted more like the black Africans known from much further to the north. Vasco da Gama arrives in Calicut, India on 20 May, 1498. Their first encounter with the Hindu gods was transmogrified in the fertile imagination of the Portuguese into an encounter with the Virgin and Child. Da Gama was able to leave loaded with samples of pepper and other goods, and to reach Lisbon again in September 1499. Within five years an astonishing eighty-one ships were dispatched from Lisbon to India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1496-1498: The Voyages of John Cabot, commissioned by English King Henry.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1498: John Cabot’s 3rd Expedition to the Americas; Cabot heads towards Newfoundland, with the idea that the ships would strike southwards towards the tropics, in search, perhaps, of a route to India, or at least Japan and China. Cabot himself disappears.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1497: John Cabot’s 2nd Expedition to the Americas; Cabot discovers ‘New-found-land’ (and possibly Labrador) and finds that the best chance for profit came not from rich ports and courts but from codfish- it was so plentiful that English fishing boats would no longer need to sail to Iceland. -Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Mar, 1496: John Cabot’s 1st Expedition to the Americas; English King Henry grants John Cabot extensive rights of conquest, trade monopoly and dominion in the lands he would discover. He is defeated by the weather and the pessimism of his crew.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1496: Tenerife is conquered by the Spanish.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1495: Death of Portuguese King João II; succeeded by his cousin, Manuel I.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1494: The Treaty of Tordesillas, mediated by the pope, Alexander VI Borgia, grants Sparin rights to the west of the line of division, Portugal to the east.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1494: The Invasion of Italy by French King Charles VIII; The French take Naples but an alliance between Maximilian I of Spain and the Pope drive the French from Italy (Britannica).

• 1493: Portuguese King João II settles São Tomé with Jewish children, forcibly taken from their parents in order to ensure that they are baptized and brought up as Catholics. These were Jews who had fled from Spain to Portugal in 1492, at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and who had overstayed the eight-month period the king had reluctantly allowed them to remain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1492: The Spanish expel all Jews from Spain, giving them 8 months to leave.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Aug, 1492-1504: Columbus’ voyages to the Americas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1502- Nov, 1504: Columbus’ 4th voyage to the Americas; Columbus departs with 4 ships while the governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, sails out to the Indies ahead of him with 30. In June 1502 Columbus’s ships stood off Santo Domingo, the 3rd attempt at European settlement in Hispaniola and now the island’s capital; but they had to sit out a hurricane, as he was not supposed to set foot on the island that he had discovered and ruled. Ovando loses nearly his entire fleet in the storm. Columbus sails south towards Panama in 1503 where his men discovery solid gold ornaments worn by local Indians. Columbus attempts to found a settlement in lands he suspected were genuinely rich in gold; but when he was beaten off by the locals and when his ships were tossed to and fro in another hurricane, he found himself washed up on the shores of Jamaica, an island he knew vaguely but had never tried to conquer. For a whole year from June 1503 onwards he was allowed to languish there, since the Spanish governor of Hispaniola rather enjoyed leaving him to rot, but one of his companions who had made the journey to Hispaniola from Jamaica by canoe sent him a ship, and in early November 1504 he was back in Spain, only to discover that his eager patron, Queen Isabella, was on her deathbed; her husband had other priorities (following his conquest of Naples a year earlier).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1497-1500: Columbus’ 3rd voyage to the Americas; Columbus heads further south, through the Cape Verde Islands, in the hope that he would find a route to the Far East somewhere to the S. of Hispaniola. He discovered ‘a very great continent, which until today has been unknown’, the N. coast of S. America. In Hispaniola, reality intruded: trouble with the Taínos was compounded by trouble with his fellow Europeans, and he faced a series of rebellions by his Spanish lieutenants. These culminated in the dispatch of yet another official investigation under a somewhat dubious figure, Bobadilla, and in the arrest of Columbus. In 1500, Columbus was sent back to Spain in chains that he refused to have removed until he stood in the presence of the king and queen, whom he was still, remarkably, able to charm.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

    • 1498: Columbus reaches the mainland of America (S. rather than N.), and felt too ill to set foot there, though he did send his men ashore.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Sep, 1493- Apr, 1496: Columbus’ 2nd voyage to the Americas with an armada of 17 ships. Much of his energy was spent trying to subdue the interior of Hispaniola, as he became sucked into rivalries between the different chieftaincies on the island. He establishes a new center of operations at La Isabela in N. Hispaniola, and the Taíno Indians were subject to harsh demands for tribute in gold. Columbus hurried back to Spain in 1496 and due to his skills as a navigator, he was allowed to go out a third time in 1497.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

    • 1495: Spanish inspector, Juan Aguado, is sent to Hispaniola to assess Columbus and his discoveries.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

    • 1493: Columbus takes sugar cane from La Gomera in the Canaries to Hispaniola, though several attempts were necessary before the Caribbean sugar industry took off.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Aug, 1492- Mar, 1493: Columbus’ 1st voyage to the Americas with two caravels and the Santa María (a slightly larger Nao- Carrack). The expedition set out from Palos de la Frontera in Andalusia, passed through the Canary Islands, and reached its first stop in the Bahamas on 12 Oct. Over the next few months Columbus explored the Bahamas and the coast of Cuba, but decided that the large island he called Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) would be most suitable as a base. Columbus returns to Europe in Mar, 1493, after a difficult voyage through the Azores that washed him up in Lisbon, where King João II was deeply disconcerted to learn of his discoveries, having previously ignored him as a fantasist. After Columbus had presented himself, and the Taínos he brought back with him, to Ferdinand and Isabella at court in Barcelona he received a 2nd commission, setting out in September.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

    • Christmas, 1492: La Navidad on Hispaniola is constructed out of the timbers of the Santa María. Within a year, all the Spanish settlers are dead, turned on by the Taíno chief and his men. La Isabela was subsequently constructed and would be the collection point for the gold and spices of the Indies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Columbus divided the inhabitants of the New World into good Taínos, whom he had made into notionally free subjects of the king and queen, and evil Caribs, who were fair game for slaving expeditions: ‘when your Highnesses order me to send you slaves, I expect to bring or send the majority of them from these people.’ Rather than being actually slaves, the Taínos were understood to be legally free; but like other subjects they had to render some service to their rulers, which for Columbus meant tribute in gold dust, an amount per head sufficient to fill a hawk’s bell. Queen Isabella was adamant that the natives were her free subjects and must not be enslaved.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1492: German cartographer Martin Behaim, produces the first proper globe.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1490: The king of Denmark relaxes his ban on direct English trade to Iceland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1487: Van Olmen’s ill-fated voyage W. of the Azores.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1487: Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartholomew Dias after his ships sail SW to escape a storm. Dias would have liked to carry on further; but his crew was worried at the lack of supplies on board – the next voyage in these waters, by Vasco da Gama, had no great difficulty in obtaining supplies from the local population – and were determined to work their way back to the supply ship.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1485: Cão receives a 2nd commission from Portuguese King João to explore Coastal W. Africa. With two caravels and four captives, Cão sails up the river Congo and meets the Kongo King before returning to explore most of the coast of S. Africa. Cão had shown that it was possible to press on beyond the new Portuguese bases in Elmina and São Tomé, and to find a welcome in lands untouched by Islam that should be the gateway to the Indian Ocean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1484: Habsburg regent, Maximilian of Austria, demands that all foreign merchants evacuate Bruges. Many of the merchants, including wealthy Italians, move their business to Antwerp.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1483: The Spanish conquer Gran Canaria.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1482: Portuguese Commander Diogo de Azambuja leads an expedition charged by King João II to establish a colony in Coastal W. Africa. After identifying a spot 40km beyond Shama, at a place called ‘the Village of the two parts’, Azambuja meets with the local ruler, Caramansa, and establishes the colony of Elmina. Caramansa and his subjects preferred to be paid for their gold not in cowrie shells of cloth, but in slaves.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1479: The Treaty of Alcáçovas (considered the precursor to the Treaty of Tordesillas) is signed between the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Portugal; the Portuguese retain their rights to the Atlantic islands, including those yet to be discovered, and along nearly all the Guinea Coast, while Castile was allowed to keep hold of the Canary Islands and a notch of the mainland opposite.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1478: Christopher Columbus, visits the Madeira archipelago, aiming to buy sugar in exchange for cloth; his business partner in Madeira was Jean de Esmerault, a Fleming.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1478: The Hansards began building the ‘House of the Easterlings’, or Oosterlingenhuis, that can still be seen (though much rebuilt) in the heart of the old trading area of Bruges.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 11 Dec, 1474- 26 Nov, 1504: Reign of Isabella as Queen of Castille and Léon (Wiki) following the death of her half-brother King Henry ‘the Impotent’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Henry was not really impotent, but his half-sister, Isabella, who had married the heir to the throne of Aragon five years earlier, took the view that anyone accused of homosexuality must ipso facto be unable to father a child. So, she pushed aside the claims of Henry’s daughter Juana and seized the throne; thereupon Afonso, already Juana’s uncle, married her and invaded Castile. The contest was settled on Iberian soil, with the victory of Ferdinand and Isabella.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1474: Gibraltar is settled with converted Jews.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1474: The Utrecht Peace treaty is signed by the Hansa and English, assigning full ownership of the maritime trading site in London to the Hansa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1472: Portuguese ships reach the sharp bend of Africa, discovering the uninhabited islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Within 10y, the islands had become the collection point for the thousands of slaves who were brought (and bought) from Ghana, while the nearby island of Príncipe was the major Portuguese base for trade with the Benin coast. At a rough estimate half of those who came to São Tomé died from disease and other factors within a few months of their arrival.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1469: Marriage of Isabella to Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1467: The Governor of Iceland is killed by English raiders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1463: The Kings of Chuzan in Okinawa began trading with lands as far distant as Java and Melaka.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1460: Death of Henry the Navigator.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1456: Greifswald University is founded in Germany.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1456: The Siamese attack Melaka.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1453: The Fall of Constantinople; Ottoman forces led by Mehmet II capture Constantinople leading to the fall of the Byzantine Empire and transforming the Ottomans from doughty warriors of Islam on the W. fringes of the Muslim world into Sunni emperors who saw their mission as not just the extension of Turkish power into Italy and western Europe but as the imposition of Ottoman rule over neighboring Muslim states as well.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1453: The French occupy all of Gascony.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1445: The Siamese attack Melaka.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1444: The Portuguese Crown renounces taxes on goods sent from Madeira to Portugal, greatly benefiting the Madeirans who export its sugar and wheat on an enormous scale.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1439: Portuguese Henry the Navigator receives permission from the Crown to settle ‘the seven islands of the Azores’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1437: The Portuguese attack Tangier; proving total disaster. Portugal was almost cornered into a position where it would trade Ceuta for one of Henry’s brothers, who had been taken captive; but Henry preferred to let him die in a Moroccan jail – he loved Ceuta more than his brother.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1434: Gil Eanes, under the patronage of the Order of Christ, works his way past the reefs of Cape Bojador, possibly the first to breakthrough into west Africa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1433: Death of Portuguese King João I. Prince Henry takes charge of Madeira.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1432: The Kings of Chuzan began communicating with lands as far distant as Java and Melaka.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1431: The Tuaregs take control of Timbuktu, holding it for 38y.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1429-1879: The Ryukyu Kingdom, centered on Okinawa, rules as a tributary kingdom of Ming China, who unified the islands to end the Sanzan period (Wiki).

• 27 Jun, 1425- 31 Jan, 1435: Reign of Xuan-de (Yong-le’s grandson) as the 5th Ming Empire; Xuan-de suspends further naval voyages and grants Zheng He a military command at Nanjing and the building of the great Bao-en Temple at Nanjing (‘Number One Pagoda’).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 7 Sep, 1424- 29 May, 1425: Reign of Hong-xi as the 4th Ming Empire; Hong-xi was hostile to maritime expeditions and abolished the expedition to the ‘Western Ocean’, concentrating his energies on the construction of his new capital at Beijing and on war in Mongolia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1424: Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator launches an assault on the Canaries that is rebuffed by the islands natives.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1422: The Gollub War; the Teutonic Knights are defeated by an alliance of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Wiki).

  • 27 Sep, 1422: The Treaty of Melno is signed between the Teutonic Knights and an alliance of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, ending the Gollub War (Wiki).

• 1420: João Gonçalves Zarco & Tristão Vaz, squires of Prince Henry explore the uninhabited Madeira islands.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1419: Rostock University is founded in Germany.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1419: The Siege of Ceuta; the Kingdom of Portugal siege Ceuta leading to the rise of the Empire of Portugal and the demise of the Marinid Sultanate (Wiki).

• 1416-1458: Reign of King Alfonso V of Aragon. During his reign he sends friars to Ethiopia, dreaming up a plan for a marriage alliance between an Aragonese princess and an Ethiopian prince.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 21 Aug, 1415: The Christian Kingdom of Portugal with 45K soldiers and 200 ships (and Prince Henry the Navigator) conduct a surprise assault on the Marinid Sultanate city of Ceuta. After a day long battle, the city falls to the Christians (Wiki). The Portuguese make Ceuta into a garrison city inhabited by 2,500 soldiers, and send there all sorts of undesirables. While navigating in the Strait of Gibraltar, many ships of the Portuguese fleet were scattered by the winds and current, however the Castilian King forbid his officials from offering help.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1411: The Treaty of Ayllón is signed as a peace agreement following 2 decades of aggression between the Kingdom of Portugal and the Crown of Castile sign a treaty (Wiki).

• 6 Aug, 1409- 1 Feb, 1411: The Polish-Lithuanian- Teutonic War; the Teutonic Knights are decisively defeated by an alliance of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Wiki).

  • 1 Feb, 1411: The Peace of Thorn formally ends the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War (Wiki).

  • 15 Jul, 1410: The Battle of Grunwald (‘Battle of Žalgiris’ ‘First Battle of Tannenberg’) is fought during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War. An alliance of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania decisively defeat the German Teutonic Order, led by Grandmaster Ulrich von Jungingen. Most of the Teutonic orders leadership were killed or taken prisoner. The battle shifted the balance of power in Europe and marked the rise of the Christian Polish-Lithuanian union as the dominant regional political and military force (Wiki).

  • Aug, 1409: The Teutonic Knights invade Poland (Wiki).

• 1405-1434: The Ming Voyages; 7 massive maritime expeditions led by the Eunuch Zheng He, that set out from Ming China visiting E. Africa, Yemen, Hormuz, Ceylon, Melaka and lands of the SCS.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1431- Jul, 1433: Zheng He’s 7th (and last) Voyage; the main fleet heads first for Champa and then across the SCS to Surabaya on Java (the heartlands of the Majapahit kingdom). They arrived on 7 Mar and only left Java after more than four months, they visited Sumatra next, calling in at Palembang, but only stopped there for three days. In Aug they were in Melaka, where they halt for another month, and then on to Semudera, where they remained for about 7w. They found safe anchorage in the Nicobar Islands and bought plenty of coconuts from the friendly natives. From there they sail for Cochin and Calicut, and then on to Hormuz. By Jul, 1433, the fleet was back at Liujiagang. On board were ambassadors from ten countries around the Indian Ocean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1421-1422: Zheng He’s 6th Voyage to return the remaining envoys to their home countries from SE Asia to E. Africa (Britannica).

  • Summer, 1417- 1419: Zheng He’s 5th Voyage to return foreign envoys to their homelands, retracing his previous routes, including stops at Java, Sumatra, and E. Africa (Britannica).

  • Dec, 1412-1415: Zheng He’s 4th Voyage, ordered to set out, bearing gifts for sundry kings in the SCS and beyond. Among the places visited were Palembang and its replacement as the main trading center near the Malacca Strait, Melaka, ruled by Parameśvara. The rise of Melaka thus owed a great deal to Chinese influence, and to the patronage of Zheng He. On his return from the Indian Ocean, Zheng He would display another rare show of force and send in his troops to suppress a rebellion against the king of Semudera, thereby showing what advantages could be gained from submission to the Chinese emperor.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

    • Mogadishu, the 1st town Zheng He reached in Africa, was named on the sailing instructions given to him.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1409-Mid, 1411: Zheng He’s 3rd Voyage; the king of Ceylon, Alagakkonara, was accused of insulting Zheng He and even of trying to assassinate him, luring Zheng inland and plotting to send his own ‘bandits’ to raid the Chinese fleet. Zheng’s way back to his ships was blocked by felled trees, though messages were sent to his fleet via unblocked roads. Zheng led his soldiers into battle across back roads and launched a surprise attack on the capital; he captured the king, who was carried back to China, although the emperor decided he was just an ignorant barbarian, and did not execute him.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1408-1409: Zheng He’s 2nd Voyage with 249 ships and the declared function to present letters of appointment to the King of Calicut, including a silver seal of office, and to present gifts of silk robes, caps and belts to the king and his chief advisers, who would be ranked in best Chinese fashion. Similarly, the rulers of territories enroute to Calicut, such as Siam, Java and Melaka, were to be honored with imperial letters.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1405- Oct, 1407: Zheng He’s 1st Voyage with 255 ships and ~27,550 men including 62 treasure ships which were built at the Lonjiang shipyard in Nanjing and floated down the Yangtze River as ships on which the gifts to China’s vassals were loaded. The fleet set out for Java, spending the winter of 1406-1407 in Calicut before heading back past Melaka, with an eye on the troubled situation in Sumatra, where a Chinese pirate named Chen Zu-yi had taken control of Palembang, the old capital of Śri Vijaya. Zheng He, determined to assert Ming authority over the SCS, attacked the pirates, who had at least 17 ships, and killed some 5K of them. ‘After this the seas were restored to peace and order’. Zheng He’s fleet arrived back in Nanjing in Oct, 1407.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1404: Melaka’s founder and rajah, Parameśvara, is made king, legitimizing his position as master of the Malacca Strait and of the trade route linking the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1403-1424: Reign of Yong-le (Yung-lo ‘Perpetual Happiness’) over the Ming Dynasty; Yong-le was a ruthless and extravagant ruler with grandiose plans for naval expeditions, land campaigns, the beautification of Beijing, and the active patronage of culture. He rebuilt the Grand Canal linking Beijing to the Chinese rivers assuring the capital of regular grain supplies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Mid 1421- Sep, 1422: 41 Ming Treasure Ships set out for vassal states, returning with envoys from Siam, Semudera, and Aden.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1402- 1414: Reign of Parameśvara as the founder of the Malacca Sultanate (Wiki).

• 1402: The Black Death reaches Iceland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• ~1400: A long pause in voyaging out of Hawai’i begins.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1400: The Normans seize Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, with the intention of setting up an independent lordship there.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1400: Peak of the Mali Empire.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1397: Pomeranian Duke Erik is crowned King over a united Nordic union.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1396: 12 Greenland falcons are said to have constituted the ransom paid for the crusading son of the duke of Burgundy when he is captured by the Ottomans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1394: The Teutonic Knights expel the Vitalienbrüder from Gotland; 15y later, they sell the island to the Nordic queen and Erik.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1392: The Danish siege Stockholm. This siege was a dramatic moment in a war of succession that would, by the start of the 15c, see a personal union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1389-1398: Reign of Parameśvara as the last King of Singapore (Wiki).

• 1380s: Rise of Phillip the Bold as Duke of Burgundy.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 9 May, 1386: The Treaty of Windsor, a political alliance signed between Portugal and England at Windsor seals the marriage of King John I of Portugal (House of Avis) to Philippa of Lancaster.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1385: The ruler of the great Lithuanian duchy, extending all the way across Belarus and much of Ukraine, acceptes Christianity, as part of a marriage treaty with his Polish neighbors.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1385- 14 Aug, 1433: Reign of Portuguese King João I.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1384: The Castilian siege of Lisbon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1383: The Battle of Aljubarrota; the House of Avis, assisted by English archers (Wiki) seize the throne of Portugal, to prevent it from failing into the hands of their hated neighbors, the Castilians.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1380s: Rise of the Aviz dynasty in Portugal.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 14c: The Hawaiian Islands become secluded from the rest of the Polynesian world for unknown reasons.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1380: Winchelsea is sacked by Castilian raiders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1379: The Skrælings kill 18 Norse Greenlanders and enslave two boys.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 26 Aug, 1379: Assassination of Genoese Emissary Janus Imperiale after coming to the court of Edward III with a proposal that Southampton should be declared a staple port for foreign merchants seeking wool, however the King had already established Calais, which he had brought under English rule, as the port for wool exports.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1370s: The king of Siam sends several embassies to China, loaded with remarkable gifts, such as six-legged turtles and elephants.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1370: The Hansa cities make peace with the Danes at Stralsund.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Mid 14c: The Polynesians reach the limit of their spread across the Pacific.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 23 Jan, 1368- 24 Jun, 1398: Reign of Hung Wu-ti (Hongwu) as the founding emperor of the Ming (‘light’) Dynasty following the fall of the Yuan Dynasty. Hung Wu-ti is determined to reclaim Chinese sovereignty over the entire expanse from Java and Cambodia to Korea and Japan. Hung Wu-ti bans Chinese merchants from trading overseas, reverting to the old system of tributary embassies. The Chinese withdrawal, paradoxically, opens up the seas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1369: First Ming Emperor, Hung Wu-ti, delivers a reprimand to the Japanese in Kyushu, complaining of Japanese piracy.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1356-1862: The Hanseatic League dominates maritime trade in the Baltic and North Sea. The Hansa (Hanse) were a confederation of merchants from towns along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, and across great swathes of the N. German hinterland that had become a major naval power by the 14c.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1356: The first Diet is held at Lübeck.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 29 Aug, 1350: The Battle of Winchelsea; The English destroy the Castilian fleet as its returning from Flanders; possibly the first naval battle in the west in which cannon were used.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1350: A third settlement of New Zealand begins with the arrival of a whole fleet of canoes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1350: Emergence of the city of Ayutthaya (Ayudhya, near modern Bangkok), by the king of Siam and would remain a center of power and a focal point for the trade of the SCS until it is sacked by the Burmese in 1767.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1349: Satto seizes power over the Kingdom of Chuzan (Okinawa).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1347-1351: The Black Death strikes first the Mediterranean and then Europe, killing ~50% of the population. Manpower shortages stimulate an active slave trade out of the Canaries, operated by Catalans and Castilians who kidnapped islanders without compunction.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1346-1355: No ships are known to have reached Greenland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1343: Hanseatic traders are first described as ‘the merchants of the Hansa of the Germans’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1343: Catalan King James III is deposed by his cousin, the King of Aragon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1342: Norwegian priest Ívar Bárdarson visits Greenland’s Western Settlement. He found that it contained only ‘horses, goats, cattle and sheep, all wild, and no people, either Christian or heathen’. It has long been assumed that the smaller settlement had therefore ceased to exist by 1342.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Jul, 1341: Catalan Majorca King James III deploys an Italian funded expedition from Lisbon to the Canaries with 3 vessels to access the gold of sub-Saharan Africa and create an island empire embracing both the Balearics and the Canaries. The voyage of 1341 marks the first time medieval western Europeans had come into contact with isolated Stone Age societies.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • A dark aspect of the Portuguese voyage of 1341 was that it planted in the mind of European merchants the notion that primitive folk could be carried away without compunction and enslaved. Nothing is known of the fate of the four Canarians who were brought back to Lisbon; but documents from the late 14c often speak of Canary islanders who were working as slaves on estates in Majorca, in 1345.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1340-1375: Reign of Danish King Valdemar IV Atterdag (‘Return of the Day’), known for his reunion of Denmark after the bankruptcy and mortgaging of the country to finance wars under previous rulers (Wiki).

  • 1370: The Hansa cities make peace with the Danes at Stralsund.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1362-1368: Hansa states Sweden and Norway, ally against Valdemar for retribution, sending a fleet and an army to ravage the coasts of Denmark. They succeed in capturing and pillaging Copenhagen and forcing Valdemar out of Denmark (Wiki). The Danes cede to the Hansa the towns that controlled traffic through the narrow passage of the Øresund – Helsingborg, Malmö.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1361: The Danes, led by Danish King Valdemar IV Atterdag invade and defeat the Gotlanders, killing 1800 men in front of their city. Valdemar demands (and receives) large amounts of silver and gold, before returning to Denmark (Wiki).

• 1340-1375: Reign of King Valdemar IV Atterdag over the Danes, who draws together the Hansa cities in relentless attempts to overwhelm Visby and Gotland, to create a base there for Baltic expansion.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1336: Genoese explorer Lançalotto Malocello reaches the Canary Islands; his name is commemorated in that of one of the easternmost islands- Lanzarote.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1317: Genoese Admiral Manuel Pessagno is hired to organize the construction of a fleet.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1311: English King Edward II, suspends his father’s law, the Carta Mercatoria, to collect money for wars in Scotland. However, the Hansards insist on their tax exemption.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.  

• 1303: English King Edward I issues the Carta Mercatoria, levying higher taxes on foreign vice native merchants.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1300: Rise of Singapura.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1299-1922: The Ottoman Empire rules much of SE Europe, W. Asia, and N. Africa (Wiki).

• 1295: Swedish king Birger conquers the Karelians in S. Finland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1292: The Mongols launch a naval expedition against Java.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1291: The Vivaldi brothers from Genoa explore the African coast looking for a sea route to India, disappearing somewhere off the coast.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1287: The Battle of Bạch Ðằng; the defenders of Ðại Việt attack a Mongol naval invasion force with blazing arrows, destroying the Mongol fleet.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1284: The Mongol Yuan ban private foreign trade. Despite strict penalties, the ban last 10y; and is reimposed 20y later, only to be followed by its relaxation, reinstatement and final relaxation (1323).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1281: Majorcan & Genoese ships begin to regularly reach London from the Med.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Spring, 1281: The Second Mongol Invasion of Japan; following the beheading of Mongol ambassadors sent to Japan, the Mongols invade Hakata Bay by Sea and Land with a conscripted force of former Song soldiers. After the Mongol ships lash themselves together, a typhoon strikes killing 10K men and sinking some 400 ships. Having failed a second time to take Japan, Khubilai turns his attention to Vietnam and Java. In the case of Vietnam, his excuse for conquest was that the kingdom of Ðại Việt had offered refuge to leading members of the Song government.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • At the outset, Hakata Bay became the scene of intense fighting on sea and on land, as the Japanese ships and ground troops harried the much larger invasion force that had come by way of the islands of Tsushima and Iki, while a second wave of attackers gathered at the western tip of Kyushu, off the island of Takeshima.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • Korean ships arrived in Tsushima; the islanders tried to escape to the hills, but the cries of their children gave away their hiding places, and the Koreans ruthlessly massacred the islanders. The invaders then bombarded the inhabitants of Iki, the next island between Korea and Japan, with exploding ceramic spheres launched from catapults.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1279: Fall of the Song Dynasty; a Mongol fleet destroys a Song fleet of nearly 900 vessels (of which only nine escape destruction or capture). The Admiral commits suicide after tossing the child emperor into the sea, extinguishing the Song Dynasty.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1277: Genoese ships first learn how to pass through the dangerous waters of the Strait of Gibraltar and sail on towards Flanders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1277: The Chinese port of Quanzhou surrenders to the Mongols.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1275: The ruler of the E. Java Kingdom of Singhasari, deploys his forces against Jambi, sacking their capital.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1275: Rise of the Yuan Dynasty after the Mongols under Khubilai Khan conquer the Southern Song Capital at Hangzhou.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Oct, 1274: The First Mongol Invasion of Japan; a joint attack by the Navy’s and Armies of the Mongol Empire and their vassal, the King of Koryŏ; 900 ships with thousands of men sail to Hakata Bay. The Mongols are said to have nailed the naked corpses of Japanese women to the thwarts of their ships. They set Hakata on fire but the Japanese put up a tough resistance and repulse the invading force. The Japanese build a 20km wall defending Hakata Bay.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • At the imperial court in Kyoto, it was argued that the prayers of the Shintō priests at the great shrine of Ise had persuaded the gods to send the great black cloud that emerged out of a clear sky; out of it sped the arrow of the gods that roared like a typhoon, while the sea rose up in a great mountain of a tsunami and crushed the invasion fleet into splinters. It has been argued that ‘the bakufu became a truly national power only after this war’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• End 13c: A sea route from the Med to the North Sea opens, closely linked to the surge in demand for fine wool in Italy.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1270: Buddhism spreads in the Ryukyu Islands after a Monk named Zenkan supposedly shipwrecks there.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1269: 70 Mongols and Korean Emissaries arrive in Tsushima, Japan, demanding an answer to the Khans letter from the Shogun, who deigns not to answer.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1268: The Japanese shogun receives a letter from the Mongol Khan threatening of war if the Japanese did not agree to cordial relations: ‘it will lead to war, and who is there who likes such a state of things? Think of this, O king!’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1262: Iceland accepts the authority of the King of Norway on condition that the Norwegians send six ships a year to the island.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• Mid 13c: The Saga of Eirík the Red is written.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1261: Greenland accepts the authority of the King of Norway.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1260: Castilian King Alfonso launches a fleet against Salé, failing to capture the port opposite modern Rabat that for centuries was seen as a hive of pirates.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 13c: Rise of Bergen, with 5-10K inhabitants, as an important center of royal power and of North Sea Trade. Bergen establishes itself as the major port of Icelandic Trade.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 13c: Emergency of Florence, made famous through the quality of its cloth.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1252: Florence launches a gold coinage.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1252: Founding of Stockholm.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1237: The Livonian Brothers of the Sword are incorporated willy-nilly into the larger and better-organized Teutonic Knights.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1226: Lübeck, the major Hansa city in the Baltic, is elevated to the special status of a free imperial city by Emperor Frederick II.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1212: The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa; Almohad power in Spain is broken following a land battle in which the kings of Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal set aside their differences and launch a joint attack on the Berber empire.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1201: Albert von Buxhövden arrives in Latvia with 23 ships and 500 crusaders and establishes a trading center at Riga. This also becomes the base for the crusading brethren, whose mission was to convert the local Livs (a people related to the Finns and the Estonians), if need be by force.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• ~1200: The Greenlanders’ Saga is written. In the Saga we learn that new land to the W. of Greenland was first spied out by Bjarni Herjólfson, who was trying to reach Greenland from Iceland in around 985 but was blown off course.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1200: The Inuit first encounter the Norse Greenlanders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1200: The Armenians split into those who accept loose papal authority and those who reject it.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1200: The Orkneyinga Saga is written, one of the liveliest of all the Icelandic sagas.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia

• 1200: The Tahitians begin building terraces and laying out orchards where they cultivate breadfruit.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1194: The king of England lifts all taxes and tribute on Cologne merchants.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• End 12c: Beheading of Adeni Jews; all Jews of Yemen were forced to accept Islam. The few who resist are beheaded and the head of the Adeni Jews embraces Islam. This event stirs the Jewish world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1191/2: Prince Yaroslav III of Novgorod enters into a treaty with the Gotlanders and the Germans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1187: Invasion of Sweden by Estonian raiders who sack cities as far away as Sigtuna, on Lake Mälaren.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1185: Kamakura becomes the seat of Japanese government; maritime trade within the Japanese archipelago flourishes, including Tea and Sake. Suspicion of outsiders led the Japanese government to control the number of times a merchant could visit Japan – Chinese visitors were limited to one trip every 3y and trips overseas by Japanese traders were strongly discouraged.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 12c: Zen Buddhists spread knowledge of tea-drinking, as an aid to contemplation. At first, tea was drunk after steeping the leaves, or part of a brick of powdered tea, in water; tradition attributes the arrival of whisked matcha, powdered green tea drunk thick and strong, to the traveller Eisai, who had tasted something similar in China at the end of the twelfth century.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1180s: The Red Sea is closed to non-Muslims after Crusader lord Reynaud de Châtillon launches a fleet on the Red Sea with the aim of attacking Mecca and Medina, and of launching pirate raids on traffic passing through the Red Sea. Although Reynaud’s activities were suppressed, his pirates came dangerously close to Medina.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1177-1184: The ‘Battle of the Atlantic’; Admiral Dom Fuas Rouphinho launches Portuguese ships into the Atlantic leading attacks on the Almohad al-Andalus, down the coastline from Seville to Ceuta.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1184: The Almohads attack Lisbon by sea, but are unable to take the city.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1181: The Almohads capture 20-40 of Dom Fuas’s Portuguese ships, killing him in the process.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1180: Capture of the Almohad flagship and 8 other vessels by the Portuguese.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1159: Lübeck is re-founded under Henry the Lion, the duke of Saxony and one of the greatest German princes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• May, 1152: Marriage of Henry II & Eleanor of Aquitaine granting the English rights in Gascony.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 1150: The second settlement of New Zealand by Toi.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1145-1149: The Second Crusade is launched in response to the fall of the County of Edessa in 1144 to the forces of Zengi, which had been founded during the First Crusade by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem in 1098 (Wiki). 

  • 1148: Fall of Lisbon; crusaders with 164 ships set off from Dartmouth, England and attacks the Almohad caliph, a revivalist movement originating among the Berbers of the Atlas Mountains, occupying Lisbon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

    • Convinced that an attack on Lisbon would serve the purposes of a grand crusade which was being fought not just in Syria but in the Wendish lands bordering Germany and in the Muslim lands bordering Catalonia, the crusaders eagerly joined a Portuguese expedition against Lisbon and, after great violence, forced the city’s surrender; predictably, this was followed by its sack, and even the bishop of the Mozarabic Christians whom they found within its walls was slaughtered.6 The capture of Lisbon gave the Portuguese a superb base in southern Iberia; in the thirteenth century the weakness and then collapse of the Almohad Empire in Spain and north Africa left them free to chip away at the Algarve, and they were masters of Silves by 1242.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

  • 1147: Wends Campaign; Abotrite ruler, Niklot, attacks Lübeck; but is resisted.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1135: The siege of Aden by the Kish (Qays), who hope to seize the port and customs house. After several months, two large ships belonging to Ramisht of Siraf are boarded by Adeni troops who attack the Kish from the rear, dispelling them.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1128: The Song establish a Chinese Colony in Korea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1126: The Song capital at Kaifeng is captured by the Jurchen, N. nomads. The Jurchen create an empire of their own in large tracts of N. China, with the result that the now Southern Song court moves from Kaifeng to Hangzhou.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.     

• 1100-1400: The Mediterranean becomes a theatre for contest between the Genoese, the Pisans, the Venetians and eventually the Catalans.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1093-1103: Reign of Norwegian King Magnus III, who transforms the predatory and diffuse raiding of the Vikings into a coordinated project.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1090: Song ship restrictions are lifted; thereafter ships could set out from any prefecture that was willing to issue permits.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1080: Founding of Novgorod (‘New City’), dedicated to the Norwegian king, St Olaf.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1074: A century-long Chinese ban on the export of Cu cash is abolished, enabling Chinese merchants to satisfy strong foreign demand for Chinese bullion.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1070: Abu Bakr ibn Umar founds Marrakesh as the Almoravid Capital (Wiki).

• 1070: Bergen, Norway is founded by King Olaf the Tranquil.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 25 Sep, 1066: The Battle of Stamford Bridge; the English Army under King Harold Godwinson defeats an invading Norwegian force led by Norwegian King Harald Hardraða (‘hard ruler’) and Tostig, the brother of the English King who was challenging his claim to the throne. Both Hardrada and Tostig are killed in battle, along with many of the Norwegian Invaders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1050s-1147: The Almoravid Dynasty; a Berber Muslim Dynasty centered in the territory of present-day Morocco with its capital at Marrakesh that stretches over the W. Maghreb and Al-Andalus. The Dynasty emerges from a coalition of the Lamtuna, Gudala, and Massufa, nomadic Berber tribes living in modern Mauritania and the W. Sahara (Wiki).

• 11c: Norwegian King Magnus Barelegs transforms the predatory and diffuse raiding of the Vikings into a coordinated project.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1028-1035: English/Danish King Cnut assumes the Norwegian Throne, reigning as the King of the N. Sea Empire (Wiki).

  • 1031: Scottish King Malcolm II submits to Cnut (Wiki).

  • 1018: English King Cnut dually assumes the Danish Throne (Wiki).

  • 1016: Cnut, a Danish Prince, is crowned English King (Wiki).

• 1025: The king of Chola launches a violent attack on Śri Vijaya. Although the attack did not result in permanent occupation, Śri Vijaya was no longer able to count on its tribute-bearing dependencies in northern Sumatra and the western Malay peninsula.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1022: The King of Norway enters into a commercial treaty with Iceland, guaranteeing the shipment of woolen cloth in return for grain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1016: The Śri Vijayans deploy their fleet against Java, scoring a victory in the battle for command of the trade routes across the South China Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1014: Battle of Clontarf; Irish King and High Priest Brian Boru leads his armies to victory over the Norsemen at Clontarf (though he himself dies in battle).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~1000: Discovery of N. America (Vínland) by the Norse; Leif Eiríksson, son of Greenland colony founder Eirík the Red, is blown off course, landing in Northern N. America. Leif and his men came first to the land Bjarni had considered worthless; it was given the name Helluland (‘the land of slabs of rock’). Further south, they discovered white sandy beaches that fringed a flat, forested interior; this land they called Markland (‘the land of forests’). After another two days at sea, they reached an island and a headland; ‘in this country, night and day were of more even length than in either Greenland or Iceland’, and the river they saw teemed with salmon. There was an abundance of rich grass, and when one day a German slave named Tyrkir staggered back to their camp drunk from eating too many wild grapes they decided to call this land Vínland, ‘the land of wine’. They built some large houses, and wintered in Vínland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • A second expedition, led by Leif’s brother Þorvald, returns to Leif’s houses in Vínland, and the prospects for settlement seemed good, until they found three skin-covered boats that lay upturned on a beach, with three men underneath each boat. There is no evidence these men meant any harm, but they killed 8, though 1 escaped; and then they realized that there was some sort of settlement not far off, and before long they came under attack from a swarm of skin-boats, manned by people they called ‘Skrælings’ (wretches), a term that they also came to apply to the Inuit. After establishing limited trade, the Skrælings turned troublesome and were caught trying to steal weapons. Before long a battle broke out between the Norse and the Skrælings, and the Norwegians decided to return to Greenland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • Another attempt at settlement in Leif’s camp followed later, and now Freydis, the illegitimate daughter of Eirík the Red, went out with the colonists. However, this time the trouble that flared was between the settlers themselves, with one group being reproved for storing their wares in the houses Leif had built. They set up their own settlement not far from Leif’s original one, but Freydis had them killed, and when she found that none of her male companions would kill her victims’ womenfolk, she took an axe and murdered five women as well, for which she was never punished in Greenland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~1000: The Qingling (aka Ashab Mosque) is built in China, the country’s oldest.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1000: The Inuit first enter NW Greenland by way of kayak.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 995-1000: Reign of Norwegian King Olaf I (Olaf Tryggvason); during his bid for King, his five longships reached Orkney, where they encountered three ships that the current earl of Orkney (another Sigurð) was leading on a Viking raid. Sigurð was summoned to Olaf’s ship. ‘I want you and all your subjects to be baptized,’ Olaf demanded. ‘If you refuse, I’ll have you killed on the spot, and I swear that I’ll ravage every island with fire and steel.’ ‘After that,’ the Orkney Saga tersely relates, ‘all Orkney embraced the faith.’ This must have made it possible for Sigurð to marry the daughter of Malcolm, king of the Scots.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • 1000: Iceland converts to Christianity after King Olaf bans trade with the then Pagan Icelanders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 992: Java invades Sumatra.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 989: Chinese merchants are granted freedom to sail abroad. They still had to register their arrival and departure, and they were expected to return within 9 months to the port from which they had originally sailed, so that their goods could be weighed and taxed. At the start, only two ports, Hangzhou and Mingzhou, were designated as departure points, with Guangzhou added later.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 986: The first printed book arrives in Japan, brought by the monk Chōnen. The book consists of a collection of the main Buddhist texts that had recently been produced in Chengdu after 12y spent laboriously preparing the woodblocks. Thereafter the Japanese fell in love with printing.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 986: Eirík the Red leads the first settlers (x400) on 25 ships across the sea from Iceland to Greenland; 14 reach Greenland, some sinking and others having to turn back. Eirík worked his way beyond the southern tip of Greenland, identifying two areas suitable for settlement: to the south, following watercourses away from the rocky coast, and navigating past islands teeming with bird life, he found the grassland of the so-called Eastern Settlement. 400 miles to the north he identified another area, much cooler, which he thought would make a good base for hunting expeditions, and this became known as the Western Settlement.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • The promise of the Eastern Settlement, with its green fields, led him to name the territory Greenland, ‘for he argued that men would be drawn to go there if the land had an attractive name’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 976: A severe famine strikes Iceland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 960: Taizu is named first Song Emperor.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 958: The Cham King sends the Arab Merchant Pu Hesan (Abu Hassan or Husain) to the Chinese Emperor with an explosive gift; flasks of an inflammable weapon similar to Greek fire.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~950 (-1350): The Islands of New Zealand are settled by the Polynesians.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 930: The Icelandic parliament begins meeting every June in Alþing.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 926: The Kingdom of Parhae in the N. of Korea, and part of what is now the borderlands of China and Russia, is overthrown by marauders from the interior. With the fall of Parhae, Japan lost interest in attempting to assert its influence on the mainland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 925: Discovery of New Zealand (‘Long White Cloud’- Māori) by the Polynesians.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 911: The Franks concede control of what would henceforth become Normandy to the Northmen from whom it took its name.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 909-1171: The Fatimid Caliphate rules much of N. Africa ranging from the Atlantic Ocean in the W. to the Red Sea in the East, ultimately making Egypt their capital. The Fatimids, a dynasty of Arab origin, trace their ancestry to Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and her husband ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, the first Shi’a imam. The Fatimids originated during the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatamids conquered Tunisia and established the city of “al-Mahdiyya” (Wiki).

• Late 9c: Rise of Amalfi, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa as Med seaports in response to the expanding Shi’ite Fatimid dynasty along N. Africa. The increasing dominance of the Genoese, Pisans and Venetians in the spice trade linking the Levant to Europe, and the success of their navies in dominating the Mediterranean Sea routes, prompt the Genizah merchants to turn away from the Med and to look with greater interest at the opportunities offered by the Red Sea and the route bringing spices from India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Late 9c: The colonization of Iceland begins after King Harald Fairhair gains control of large swaths of Norway and demands the payment of new taxes. Discontented Norsemen who had lived free from royal interference set off to create their own new commonwealth in a virtually empty land across the ocean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • 870-930: >10K migrate to Iceland, principally from Norway.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 882: English King Alfred’s newly formed fleet defeats a small Danish squadron; one result was that the ‘great host’ was deflected away from Alfred’s realms and travelled instead up the River Scheldt, to make a nuisance of itself in northern France and Flanders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 878: A ‘great part of the inhabitants’ of Wessex flee across the sea, while the English king, Alfred, takes refuge in the woods and marshes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 878: Rebel Huang Chao seizes power in Guangzhou, killing ~120K and temporarily destroying the silk trade by felling the mulberry trades on which the silkworms relied upon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 870: Middle Francia is portioned into W. and E. Francia, which would form the nuclei of the future Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire, respectively (Wiki).

• 861: Decline of the Abbasid Caliphate with the greatest challenge coming from the rise to power of the Shi‘ite Fatimid dynasty, first in Tunisia (where they had founded the city of Qayrawan- ‘the caravan’, with its Great Mosque), and then in Cairo, where they are able to compete for domination over the Levant.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 859: Muslim fleets set out to challenge Viking raiders, carrying on board flasks of Greek fire and teams of archers; they scour the seas as far away as the N. coast of Spain, so that the presence of these ‘Moors’ (Mauri) alarmed the Christians who ruled there as much as did the arrival of the Vikings. Muslim fleets score a series of successes, culminating in the destruction of 14 Viking ships near Gibraltar.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Mid 9c: Fragmentation of the Carolingian empire.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 851: ~350 Viking Ships penetrate the Thames, ravage London and then march inland, where they are soundly defeated.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 850-1300: The Little Climatic Optimum (‘Medieval Warm Period’).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.    

• 845: The suppression of the Buddhist Monasteries by the ‘Commissioners of Good Works’ by Chinese Emperor Wuzong of Tang and other imperial officials has been described as ‘the most severe religious persecution in the whole of Chinese history’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.    

• 844: Vikings sail S. by way of Lisbon and Cádiz to the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, making their way to Seville, where they loot the city for a week, enslaving or killing men, women, and children.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 843: The Treaty of Verdun; the Frankish Realm is divided into three separate kingdoms: West Francia, Middle Francia, and East Francia (Wiki).

• 843: ~35 Viking Ships land in Britain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 841/6: Assassination of Chang Pogo, for being an interloper. A Korean tradition describes how he plotted a dastardly coup against the king, and then was deceived by a refugee courtier named Yomjang or Kim Yang whom he had taken in.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 839: Chang Pogo helps an ally seize the throne in Silla, declaring ‘a person who sees an injustice and does nothing is without courage’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 838: King Egbert of Wessex scores a victory against Viking raiders near Plymouth.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 837: King Egbert of Wessex is defeated by a Danish warband that arrives off Somerset about ~30 ships.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 835: Viking raid the isle of Sheppey, off Kent, wintering there in 855.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 830s: Viking raid Plymouth, where the Danes enter into an alliance with the Cornish Britons.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Early 9c: On the Measurement of the Globe of the Earth is written by Dicuil.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 810: Haithabu is founded following the war between King Godfred and Charlemagne.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~810: Danish King Godfred invades Frisia, with 200 ships, carrying off 200lbs of Ag as tribute from one of the most prosperous of Charlemagne’s great empire.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~800: The great temple complex at Borobodur is built; abandoned to the jungle a couple of centuries later.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 800-888: The Carolingian Empire is ruled by the Carolingian Dynasty, exercising control on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire over W. and Central Europe (Wiki).

• 800-1200: The Earth experiences a warm period.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 800: The Hawaiian Islands are first settled by Polynesians most likely from the Marquesas. Tales indicate an ease of movement between Hawaii and Tahiti or the islands around Tonga that persist into the 14c.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 794: The Annals of Ulster state that there was ‘a laying waste by the heathen of all the islands of Britain’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 793: The Vikings raid Lindisfarne and its monastery on the coast of Northumbria; “fiery dragon were seen flying in the air (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).

• 789: Viking raids on England begin with a small Norwegian, or possibly Danish, raid on Portland in Dorset; ‘these were the first ships of the Danes to come to England’ (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).

  • Viking ships swept down the great arc linking the fjords of Norway to Orkney, the Hebrides and then down to Ulster and as far south as the Isle of St Patrick (Inispatrick), close to the site of what would become the major seat of Norse power in Ireland, Dublin.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 768: Failed Korea Coup; after a failed rebellion against the King, Sillan Prince T’aeryŏm and ‘their three generations: paternal, maternal, and wives’ relatives,’ are executed.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 762: Caliph Al-Mansur founds the city of Baghdad, near the ancient Babylon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 752: Sillan Prince T’aeryŏm pays tribute to the Empire of Japan with seven ships and 700 men.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 8c: Ziryab, a couturier, hairdresser and choir-master, brings Abbasid Persian fashions to Spain, introducing underarm deodorant, bouffant hairstyles, and artichokes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 750: The Abbasid Revolution; the Abbasids overthrows the Umayyad Caliphate, founding its government in Kufa. The Umayyads flee with those from Damascus resettling in al-Andalus, and forming the emirate of Córdoba, Muslim Spain.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Start 8c: The Japanese imperial court begins issuing Ag and then Cu coins, in imitation of Chinese practice, but silk continued to be used as the medium of exchange in high-level dealings with Japan’s neighbors.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• ~690: Rapa Nui is settled by the Polynesians.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Late 7c: Rulers of Central and Southern Japan begin using the name of Nihon, or Nippon, ‘Land of the Rising Sun”, from which the Western term ‘Japan’ is derived.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 661-750: The Umayyad Caliphate, the 2nd of 4 established after the death of Muhammad. The Umayyads continue the Muslim conquests, incorporating Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb, and Hispania (Al-Andalus) under Islamic rule. The Dynasty was overthrown by a rebellion led by the Abbasids in 750. Survivors of the dynasty established themselves in Cordoba (Wiki).

• 650-1377: The Śri Vijaya trading kingdom based at Palembang on Sumatra is the focal point of a trading network connecting the SCS, the W. Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. 

• 7-8c: The Sakimori are based in Kyushu and on Tsushima to defend Japanese imperial territory against invaders.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 7c: The Korean Civil War is fought between Silla, supported by the Tang Dynasty and Paekche, who turns to Japan for help.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • 663: The Battle of Hakusuki; the Chinese fleet defeats a Japanese fleet off the coast of Korea. Henceforth, Japanese aggression in these waters is limited to pirate raids.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.     

• 636-638: The Muslim conquest of the Levant (Wiki).

  • 638: The Byzantine city of Jerusalem falls to Muslim invaders of the Rashidun caliphate (Wiki).

• 607: The Japanese ruler write a letter to the Chinese emperor stating ‘the Son of Heaven in the Land of the Rising Sun sends this letter to the Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Sets’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 600: ‘The First Reopening’; Jamaica and Bahamas are first settled.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~600: Tahiti and the Society Islands are first visited by the Polynesians (the earliest inhabited sites on these islands that have been discovered date from somewhere between 800-1200).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 6c: Rise of the port of Myos Hormos following the abandonment of Bereniké seaport, possibly due to a combination of the plague of Justinian and local wars in which Axum in E. Africa with ports at Adulis, and Himyar in S. Arabia with ports at Kané, emerge under Christian and Jewish kings who were keen rivals. Both ports form a link in the chain connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, under its Islamic name of Qusayr al-Qadim.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 6c: The Korean kingdoms of Silla, Koguryō and Paekche began paying tribute to Japan.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 541: The Plague of Justinian (bubonic plague) kills scores across Eurasia (Wiki).

• 536-560: The Late Antique Little Ice Age; a period of below normal temperatures caused by several large Volcanoes that causes crop failures, famine, and kills millions (Wiki).

  • 547: A volcanic eruption extends the global low temperatures period started by the Krakatoa eruption of 536.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • 539-540: A volcanic Eruption causes summer temperatures to decline upwards of 2.7 C below normal in Europe (Wiki).

  • Late 535/536: The Volcanic Eruption of Krakatoa ejects massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, reducing solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface and colling the atmosphere for several years. Summer temperatures in 536 fell by upwards of 2.5 C below normal in Europe (Wiki).

• 525: Ethiopia, encouraged by the Byzantine emperor, invades Judaic Himyar (Yemen) with an army of ~120K. The Christian Ethiopians destroy synagogues and kill a large number of Himyarites, descendants of Jewish tribes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 516-534: Danish-Frankish War; forces under Danish King Hygelac raid Frank territories carrying away goods and people. In response, Frankish King Theodoric of the Merovingian dynasty dispatches his son with an army and defeats the Danes at sea, killing King Hygelac and recovering the stolen booty and captives.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • Beowulf recalls the tragedy of Hygelac’s death in ‘Frisia’, in a battle where Beowulf fought as well, escaping from danger by swimming away loaded with a great pile of armour that he had seized as booty.

• 500: Puhar in India disappears beneath the waves, possibly due to a volcanic eruption.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Early 5c: Infamous pirate, Lu Xun, is defeated in the South China Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 410: Roman legions withdraw from Roman Britannia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 4-5c: Waves of Korean refugees arrive in Japan.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 4c: Japanese Sea Raiders use Tsushima as a base for attacks on the Korean coast.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 3c: Rising sea levels began eroding habitable lands along the shores between Flanders and Frisia (aka the ‘Dunkirk II Marine Transgression’). The loss of land prompts migration out of the territories that had been settled by the Chauci and their Saxon descendants; meanwhile the emergence of swamps and marshes encouraged the Romans to pull back from their forts in Gallia Belgica, allowing what land there was to be occupied by Frankish tribes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 286-296: The Roman Empire battles Carausius and his Roman Britannia soldiers.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 286: Roman Naval Commander Carausius declares himself Emperor in Britannia and N. Gaul in response to the Roman emperor accusing him of collaborating with the Franks.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 268: Roman Naval Commander Carausius establishes patrols from Roman Britannia in the N. Sea to stem the threat from piracy. The Roman emperor accuses him of collaborating with the Franks.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Mid 3c: The first major Frankish raid on the Roman Empire; Franks reached as far as Tarragona in Spain and then appropriate the ships they find in the harbor, after which they raid N. Africa.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 166: A pandemic strikes the Roman Empire, killing many. Trade withers.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~2c: Warrior King Fan-man’s war of conquest results in the creation of a land and sea realm encompassing large area of Indo-China including those around the Bay of Bengal, the Kra Isthmus, and the Malay Kingdom (Tun-Sun) where it joins Thailand, with Oc-èo and Funan as SCS Maritime Trading ports.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~98: Germania is written by Tacitus.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 88-194: Height of the Satavahana Empire in Central India.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1c: Rise of Oc-èo, at the top of the Gulf of Siam as a Malay fishing harbor.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 13 Sep, 81: Death of Roman Emperor Titus Caesar Vespasianus from fever. His younger brother, Domitian becomes Emperor (Wiki).

• 80: A massive fire rages through Rome (Wiki).

• 79-81: Reign of Titus Caesar Vespasianus over the Roman Empire, part of the Flavian dynasty (Wiki).

• 79: Death of Roman Emperor Vespasian, his son, Titus Caesar Vespasianus becomes Emperor (Wiki).

• 70: Roman forces led by Titus besiege and capture Jerusalem, destroying the city and the Second Temple (Wiki).

• 68: Death of Roman Emperor Nero. His death leads to the Year of the Four Emperors (Wiki).

• ~60: The Periplous is written, describing the thriving network of trade between the Red Sea port of Myos Hormos and Bereniké.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 47: Capture and execution of Chauci leader Gannascus by the Romans. Gannascus had led bold sea raids against the province of Gallia Belgica.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 20: Hippalos voyages to coastal India, discovering the mechanics of the Indian Oceans SW Monsoon.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• Mar, 32- Aug, 30 BCE: War of Actium; the last Civil war of the Roman Rep, fought between Mark Antony and Octavian (Wiki).

  • 32 BCE: Octavian convinces the Roman Senate to declare war on the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra (Wiki).

• 1c BCE- 225: The Silk Road functions effectively under protection of the Han dynasty.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.

• 141-87 BCE: Reign of Emperor Wu; 7th Emperor of the Han Dynasty.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

  • 138 BCE: The Han navy sails from the Yangtze to fend off Yueh pirates in the SCS. Over the next few years, a series of Han naval attacks maintain firm pressure on the Yueh statelets along the coast. Guangzhou, the capital of the Nan Yueh, falls to the Chinese and is used as a base for a raid into the Gulf of Tongking; the king of Guangzhou is later captured as he tries to flee by sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 2c BCE: Syria falls under Seleucid rule following competition with the Ptolemies of Egypt.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 221-206 BCE: The Qin Dynasty rules Imperial China, named for its heartland in Qin state. The Qin dynasty arose as a fief of the Western Zhou and endured for over 5 centuries until 221 BCE, when it founded its brief empire which lasts only 15 years (Wiki).

• 221-214 BCE: Conquest of Yueh by the Qin Empire; in the face of tough Yueh resistance, the Qin Empire briefly gains control of much of the coastline of the South China Sea, around the Gulf of Tongking. The conquest of the Yueh towns was accompanied by the settlement in the region of ‘criminals, banished men, social parasites and merchants’, with the long-term effect that the Han Chinese population grew, particularly in the cities, and flourished through trade with Chinese lands further north.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.    

• 284-246 BCE: Reign of Ptolemy Soter II over Egypt (Wiki).

  • 270 BCE: Egypt revives the silted Red-Med Canal, reopening Alexandria for maritime trade. Regular traffic links Alexandria to the Indian Ocean by way of Myos Hormos on the Red Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 3c BCE: Founding of the Bereniké Troglodytika seaport by the Ptolemies on Egypt’s Red Sea. The principal Indian products to reach Bereniké was pepper, particularly black pepper from S. India. Other products include coconuts, Indian sesame, mung beans, and Indian gooseberries.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 300s BCE- 1279: The Chola state unifies peninsular India, ruling S. India from the fertile valley of the Kaveri River (Wiki). 

• 312-63 BCE: The Seleucid Empire rules over the Mesopotamian region of Babylonia following the division of the Macedonian Empire on the death of Alexander the Great. At the Seleucid Empires height, it consists of territory that covered Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, and modern Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and parts of Turkmenistan.

• 323 BCE: Death of Macedonian King Alexander the Great. His empires fractures into three parts; the Ptolemies, who rule Egypt, the Seleucids, who rule Mesopotamia, and the Kingdom of Pergamon in Asia Minor and Macedon (lumenlearning).

• 325-285 BCE: Reign of Egyptian King Ptolemy I, who builds up Alexandria as a major political, commercial and naval center from which he could exercise command over the E. Mediterranean. Ptolemy I orders the re-digging of the Red-Med canal built on the orders of Persian King Darius the Great.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 336-323 BCE: Reign of Alexander the Great over the Macedonian Empire (NatGeo).

  • 325 BCE: Alexander the Great commissions Nearchos, a Cretan officer, to set off from the Indus to explore the coast between Modern Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. Alexander orders the creation of a port named (predictably) Alexandria at the mouth of the Tigris–Euphrates system, to facilitate trade down the Gulf.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 400 BCE: The Med-Red Canal built by order of Persian King Darius begins to silt up.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 485-465 BCE: Reign of Persian king Xerxes.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 500 BCE: The Biblical books of Exodus and Leviticus take their current shape.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 522-486 BCE: Reign of Persian King Darius the Great. Darius ordered the digging of the Red-Med Canal, connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean (Wiki).

  • 510 BCE: Persian King Darius Hystaspis commissions Skylax to sail with a crew from the Indus into the ocean and Westwards around Arabia and up the Red Sea. The voyage towards the port of Arsinoë near Suez took 30months.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 539 BCE: Persian Ruler Cyrus the Great embarks on the conquest of Babylon, proclaiming himself ‘king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world’. Under his successors the Persian Great Kings expand their power as far as Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 541 BCE: An Etruscan and Carthaginian force attacks Corsica.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 550 BCE: Decline of the Phoenician trade network over the Mediterranean due to pressure in the East, from Persians and Assyrians, enabling the Carthaginians, themselves of Phoenician origin, to pick up the pieces and create their own flourishing network.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 610-594 BCE: Reign of Egyptian Pharaoh Necho (Nekau), who orders a channel dug from the Nile to the Red Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• ~7c-3c BCE: The Scythians, an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people migrate from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe (modern Ukraine/S. Russia) (Wiki).

• 722-705 BCE: Reign of King Sargon over the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Sargonid Dynasty) (Wiki). Sargon deploys his armies as far as Dilmun.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 814-146 BCE: The Carthaginian Empire; a semitic people in the W. Med migrate from Tyre, Phoenicia, to N. Africa during the early Iron Age. The largest Punic settlement was Ancient Carthage (modern Tunis), but there were ~300 others along the N. African Coast (Wiki).

• 873-849 BCE: Reign of Judean King Jehosaphat.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 900-27 BCE: The Etruscan Kingdom rules modern Italy as a federation of city-states that peak around 750 BCE, prior to being absorbed slowly by Rome until 27 BCE (Wiki).

• 900-550 BCE: A Phoenicians trade network dominate the Mediterranean with its capital at Gadir.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• ~950 BCE: Israeli King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre, launch expeditions down the Red Sea to acquire gold.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 969-936 BCE: Reign of Hiram as Phoenician King of Tyre, who appears in the Bible as an ally of the Israelite kings David and Solomon. Hiram maintained friendly relations with Israel, supplying Solomon with men and materials for the construction of the Temple at Jerusalem and cooperating with Solomon in Mediterranean and Red Sea trading voyages. Solomon gave him tribute and Galilean territory in return (Britannica).

• 1000 BCE: Vanuatu and the Fijian Islands are settled by the Lapita.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 1000 BCE: Domestication of the camel in parts of Arabia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• ~1100 BCE: The Egyptian Red Sea trade goes into recession; the pharaohs are preoccupied with attacks attributed to ‘Sea Peoples’ who came overland from Libya and Syria and from the waters of the Mediterranean.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 1479-1458 BCE: Reign of Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (aka Hashepsowe) as the 5th pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• ~1500 BCE: Decline of the Indus civilizations, possibly due to environmental changes that dry out the Indus Valley resulting in a gradual decline of the great cities.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 1532 BCE: The Hyskos are driven out of Egypt.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 1600-500 BCE: The Lapita Culture; a Neolithic Austronesian people spread across vast tracts of Melanesia via seaborne migration including the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa, and probably Taiwan, where the language of the indigenous population is related to those spoken across Oceania. By around 1000 BCE, the Lapita reached the limits of their expansion, and had created a series of networks across about 4,500 km of the Pacific, in a great arc from New Guinea to Tonga.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 1640 BCE: The Hyskos, a people of mixed semitic and Asian descent, invade Egypt and settle in the Nile Delta, forming the 15th and 16th dynasties of Egypt.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.   

• 1650-1550 BCE: Hyksos period; the Kings of the 15th Dynasty rule Lower and Middle Egypt up to Cusae from their seat of power in the city of Avaris in the Nile Delta. The Hyksos period marks the first in which Egypt was ruled by foreign rulers and they introduced several technological innovations including the horse and chariot, the sickle sword, and possibly the composite bow (Wiki).

• 1800 BCE- 1500: Polynesians settle the Polynesian region of the Pacific Ocean (Wiki).

• 1895-539 BCE: The Babylonian Empire; An ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia (Wiki).

• 2000-1600 BCE: Wadi Gawasis (‘Mersa Gawasis’) harbor is in use on the Red Sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.  

• 2000-1800 BCE: Egypt’s 12th Dynasty (Middle Kingdom period).-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2250 BCE: King Ur-Nanše, ruler of the Sumerian city of Lagash, asserts that ‘ships of Dilmun, from the foreign lands, brought me wood as tribute’.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2300 BCE: Sumer is ruled by King Sargon and trade with ships from Meluḫḫa and Magan at the Sumer dock in Akkad. The creation of a sea link between the cities is one of the first moments when civilizations that had developed independently to a comparable cultural level entered into dialogue with one another across the sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2334-2154 BCE: Akkadian dynasty; the first empire of Mesopotamia following the long-lived civilization of Sumer. It was centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region. The Empire united Akkadian and Sumerian speakers under one rule and exercised influence over Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia (Wiki).

• ~2350 BCE: Tales of shipwrecked sailors written on Papyrus tell of a remarkable voyage to the region of Punt.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2500-64 BCE: The Phoenician period, an ancient Thalassocratic Civilization originating in the Levant region of the E. Med, primarily located in Modern Lebanon. The Phoenicians came to prominence in the mid-12c BCE, following the decline of most influential cultures in the Late Bronze Age collapse. They were renowned as skilled traders and mariners, becoming the dominant commercial power for much of classic antiquity. The Phoenicians developed an expansive maritime trade network that last over a millennium, helping facilitate the exchange of cultures, ideas, and knowledge between major cradles of civilization such as Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2500 BCE: The cities of Harappā and Mohenjo-daro dominate the Indus Valley.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2600 BCE: Reign of Egyptian Pharaoh Snefru.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 2700 BCE: Upper and Lower Egypt are unified under the early pharaohs, resulting in the creation of a centralized, affluent society able to draw upon the rich resources in wheat and barley of the lands regularly inundated by the Nile.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 3600 BCE: The first Neolithic settlers arrive on Orkney from Scotland.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 4000 BCE: End of the Mesolithic; start of the Neolithic. Human populations begin moving towards land ownership as opposed to land exploitation as in the Mesolithic.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 4500-1900 BCE: Sumer Culture; the earliest known civilization in the historical region of S. Mesopotamia (S. Central- Iraq), emerges during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. It is one of the cradles of civilization in the world (Wiki).

• 4500 BCE: Rise of the Ubaid culture in S. Iraq.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 6500-3700 BCE: The Ubaid prehistoric period of Mesopotamia (Wiki).

• 11.5 Ka: The Holocene Period begins following a temporary warm phase in the middle of a continuing ice age.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 13 Ka: The Admiralty Islands are first settled by the Lapita.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 29 Ka: The Solomon Islands are first settled by the Lapita.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 30 Ka: Australia’s Aboriginal tribes began to colonize the coastlines.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 35 Ka: The Island of New Guinea is first settled by the Lapita.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 60 Ka: The Aborigines first settle in Australia, after crossing hundreds of miles of open sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 100 Ka: Hominids reach the Island of Flores which is shortly after isolated from Sunda and the Asian mainland by a stretch of sea.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 140 Ka-18 Ka: Pleistocene era Intermittent Ice Ages; sea levels are lower, while much water is locked in N. ice floes and glaciers. At one extreme, the sea level stood 100m lower than present levels, but within that time frame it rose and fell, so at some points it was only about 20m lower than nowadays. During this era, the Australian continent encompassed the whole of New Guinea and Tasmania.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 40 Ma: Separation of New Zealand and Australia; animal species unique to Australia continue to flourish in New Zealand, especially marsupial mammals.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia. 

• 88 Ma: Madagascar breaks off from India and becomes isolated from the rest of the world.-Boundless Sea by Abulafia.