Introduction
“No man is a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself in jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, only worse. There is, in a jail, better air, better company, better food, better conveniency of every kind, without the chance of drowning.” – Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784
History, they say, is written by the winners…and that does seem to be fairly accurate. This book is focused on a slightly different perspective of the history of the Age of Sail, including the Age of Discovery. The accepted history of this era has become more fairy tale than fact. It has been revised and PG rated, and important events of the era have been relegated to the dustpan of history.
Just to touch upon a few topics in this book: The great navigators had no clue what they were doing; Columbus thought he could reach Japan from Spain in thirty days. It took sixty-one days just to reach the West Indies. Until the day he died, Columbus really thought he had found the eastern side of Japan. Magellan wasn’t the first to circumnavigate the world; it was likely his Southeast Asian slave named Enrique. Magellan planned to cross the Pacific Ocean in two to three days. It took three months, twenty days.
Admiral Horatio Nelson, one of the greatest naval commanders of all time, suffered from violent seasickness whenever he was onboard a ship.
The British monarchy and its supporters made massive riches by buying and transporting Africans into slavery. They bought and sold more Africans than any other institution in the 300-year history of transatlantic slavery. History is full of inconvenient truths.
Let’s face it, great leaders are not always the ones that are put in charge; often it is someone incompetent, or with no experience whatsoever. The top commanders on both sides of the battle of the Spanish Armada had no experience as naval officers. Good decisions are not always made.
Greed has historically been the prime motivation for almost all the great achievements of the past. The terrible things “successful” civilizations have done to indigenous populations are often minimized. And then, there are those fortunate men, who by accident manage to do something really important. History calls these men great, when in fact, they were just lucky.
Revisions to the historical record may have been intentional. I refer to Napoleon Bonaparte, “What is history, but a fable agreed upon? By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.”
“History is written by the victors,” a quote attributed to Winston Churchill, is an interesting case in point. Churchill first heard this quote from one of his enemies. He purloined it, did a rewrite, and claimed it as his own. Hermann Göring expressed this insight when standing trial at Nuremberg for Nazi war crimes, “The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”
The Age of Sail, broadly interpreted to including the Age of Discovery, lasted from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. It was an era of sailing ships and a small number of determined and talented visionaries.
This all occurred such a long time ago; why should anyone care what happened then? It really doesn’t matter anymore, does it?
The Age of Sail should have a great deal of influence on us now, and what mankind does in the future. It was the era of the greatest change to the world in the history of mankind, possibly until the Age of Space Exploration. It was a time that saw an unprecedented rise of powerful maritime nations. It was during this period that the first global trade networks were established. This era created an explosive force of ambition and greed that was so strong, civilizations untouched by each other for eons, collided with rampant violence and destruction. About twelve percent of the world’s population died during those violent times, including close to ninety percent of Native Americans. Additionally, more than two percent of the world’s population at that time were transported and sold into slavery. The changes wrought during this era brought about two hundred years of almost continuous international aggression and brutal warfare.
The Age of Sail, as innocent as that name sounds, is largely responsible for the greatest extermination of human beings ever experienced on earth, and the mass enslavement of a significant percentage of the human race. I’ll refer to an important quote by George Santayana. From his original work, paraphrased, “When experience is not retained, infancy if perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat in.”
The consequences of the Age of Sail are not something the human race wants to repeat.
