Free Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany by Julian Stockwin Page A

expeditions sailed south to extend the boundaries of the known world. But in the fifteenth century the red sandstone cliffs of Cape Bojador off the west coast of Africa was seen as the point beyond which there was no return. There the seas crashed into the cliffs in constant fury, fearsome waterspouts erupted and dust storms howled off the cliff tops.
    According to popular belief, past the cape lay the end of the world, the Green Sea of Darkness, an area where the sun was so close to the Earth that a person’s skin would turn black, the sea boiled, ships caught fire and monsters lurked waiting to smash the ships and eat the sailors. Henry did not believe any such nonsense, but up until 1433 he could entice no seaman to pass Cape Bojador.
    Henry’s persistence did finally pay off. He persuaded Gil Eannes, who had turned back after starting a previous voyage, to make a second attempt. This time Eannes reached the cape, skirted around its deadly hazards and then worked his way inshore until he reached the coast, where he landed and picked flowers. When he returned he announced that beyond Cape Bojador there was in fact no Green Sea of Darkness.
    Prince Henry died in 1460, having transformed European expansion and trade from the old land routes to new sea routes in the Southern Ocean. By the end of the sixteenth century Lisbon was the European hub of commerce with the Far East.

Henry the Navigator .
M ERCATOR, MAPS AND MARS
    Geradus Mercator was a Flemish cartographer born in 1512 at the dawn of the Age of Discovery. He invented a revolutionary way of projecting maps on to paper which enabled mariners to steer a course over long distances by plotting straight lines without continual adjustment of compass readings.
    In 1544 Mercator was put in jail for seven months on trumped-up charges of heresy, probably because the Dutch had ambitions to be a world sea power and were anxious to prevent such maps getting into the hands of others.
    Mercator later moved to the German Duchy of Cleves, and in 1569 he used his radical projection plan to construct a map of the world. Although his map was to change the future of cartography and navigation profoundly, initially it received scant attention. However, this was the age of Queen Elizabeth, and rival nations were groping for the navigational key to an ocean empire. Seers like John Dee were sent over to bring back such secrets and they duly returned with instruments and the new charts.
    At the time these were too advanced for the ordinary mariner, and it was not until some years after Mercator’s death in 1594 that his projection was accepted for navigational use at sea on any significant scale. By about 1640 it was widespread and this continues to be the case on today’s navigation charts. And in the twenty-first century it is Mercator projections that NASA are using to map Mars!
    Mercator’s legacy did not stop there. He was one of the first mapmakers to cut up maps and bind them inside boards, later coining the term ‘atlas’ to refer to such collections.

Geradus Mercator .
I CY GRAIL
    The search for the Northwest Passage, a shorter shipping route from Europe to the wealth of the Orient via the ice-bound waters of the Arctic, began in the late fifteenth century with the voyages of the father and son explorers, John and Sebastian Cabot.
    Finding this fabled passage preoccupied the Elizabethan imagination. Among the heroic maritime explorers of the age who sought to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis.
    Gilbert, who wrote a treatise on the Northwest Passage in 1566 that inspired many later explorers, disappeared off the coast of Labrador on 9 September 1583. From the deck of Squirrel he hailed another expedition ship, Golden Hinde , calling across to them in encouragement, ‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.’ Later that evening somewhere in the darkness his ship was swallowed up by the sea, with the loss of all