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RE: All is Well with the World
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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 RE: All is Well with the World (in reply to Leñador)
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I'll put in a word for the book, "We the Navigators" by David Lewis. The author is half Hawaiian and is or was a professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He met and talked with several of the surviving traditional navigators, and voyaged with some of them aboard his cruising sailboat.
The traditional navigator would use his methods to steer the ship, without reference to any modern instruments like a compass, while Lewis would keep track of where they were by modern methods. On one voyage they sailed from the Santa Cruz Islands to Saipan and back. Neither the navigator nor his father had ever made the trip, but his grandfather had, and the knowledge of the "star paths" had been passed down through the generations accurately enough for a successful voyage.
Diving in Yap I got talking to the boat driver. Turned out he was a friend of the Yapese navigator Mau Piailug from Satawal, who taught the Hawaiians how to go to Tahiti and back again, aboard Hokule'a. [Relax guys, I checked the spelling on Wikipedia.] Traditional navigation had died out in Hawaii, but Piailug was the major force in getting it started again.
Lewis was also involved in the Hokule'a project, and helped Piailug research how the stars would look on the way to Tahiti.
The boat driver, Piailug and a couple of other guys built a boat and sailed from Yap to Ulithi Atoll and back. Ulithi is a part of Yap State in the Federated States of Micronesia. Google Maps says Ulithi is about 191 km east-northeast of the main archipelago of Yap.
During the days of celestial navigation "modern" navigators would avoid low lying islands like Ulithi, the Marshalls and much of the Marquesas. You have to be within about ten miles to see them in good light and clear weather, in bad weather or at night you could be on them too late to avoid a wreck. The typical accuracy of a good experienced celestial navigator is no better than two or three miles. It can be a lot worse after a period of bad weather limiting star sights for a few days, forcing you to rely on dead reckoning based on course, speed, leeway and currents.
The boat driver said Piailug was married to a woman on Yap proper, though the Wikipedia article doesn't mention her, and Piailug was away from Yap for years at a time in Hawaii and on other projects.
RNJ
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Date Sep. 23 2016 9:49:09
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: All is Well with the World (in reply to Leñador)
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quote:
I wish I had something to add to this thread, Micronesia, Polynesia and Melanesia fascinate the hell out of me, much more so since I've taken up kayaking on a regular basis. The fact that they discovered hawaii and easter island with the technology they had is easily as impressive as the invention of the microchip. More so really, what an incredible group of people.
As much as I enjoy the occasional State Department gig in the Pacific Island nation-states and am interested in their history and cultures, my primary area of expertise (historical, political, cultural, and linguistic) has always been Southeast Asia, specifically Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei, with the Philippines as a Malay outlier. The region, in other words that was formerly encompassed by the term "The Malay Archipelago," which provided the setting for so many of the wonderful stories by Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. Interestingly, there is a direct link between the Malay Archipelago and the peopling of the Pacific Islands.
Linguistic and DNA evidence has pretty well established that Malay origins began with the migration from southern China into Taiwan of proto-Austronesian language-speakers about 3,000 BCE. about 1,500 BCE or so they migrated outward through the Philippines, Sulawesi, northern Borneo, central Java, and Sumatra, later moving into the Malay Peninsula. These migrations occurred over a long period of time. Now it gets interesting in terms of the peopling of the Pacific islands. These Austronesian language-speaking groups began voyaging over long distances and established populations throughout the Pacific, including Polynesia, Micronesia, and parts of Melanesia, as well as Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
The Malayo-Polynesian language classification is a sub-group of Austronesian and is found in Maritime Southeast Asia and throughout the Pacific (and even the Indian Ocean), with its westernmost limit in Madagascar (Malagasy is Malayo-Polynesian) and its easternmost limit Easter Island (Rapa Nui). This language sub-group is found from New Zealand (Maori) throughout Samoa, Tahiti, the Marquesas and French Polynesia, throughout most of Micronesia, all the way to Hawaii.
As just one example of how these languages are linked, in Malay (and Indonesian, which is a variation of Malay) the number five is "lima." When I pulled a couple of gigs at the American Embassy in Apia, Samoa, I learned that the number five in Samoan is "lima" as well. There are other shared words and linguistic similarities. That there is a direct link via migration between the people of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific (and Indian Ocean) islands is interesting enough. But when the vast distances the original voyagers covered throughout this oceanic universe is considered, it borders on the incredible.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Sep. 24 2016 14:11:19
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: All is Well with the World (in reply to BarkellWH)
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On his first trip to Tahiti, Captain Cook met the Chief Navigator. Upon his return to England Cook reported to the Royal Society the list of islands the Chief Navigator said he knew how to sail to.
Navigation experts at the Society scoffed at the Chief Navigator's list, saying his methods were not accurate enough to reliably put him within sight of a low island like Ulithi.
In "We the Navigators" Lewis observes that Saipan is a high island, visible from more than a hundred miles at sea in good light and clear weather, but the navigator's home in the Santa Cruz islands was very small and low. Lewis wondered whether they would be able to find it on the way back.
Instead of aiming directly for the Santa Cruz group, the navigator sailed to a large reef, much closer to home than Saipan. The reef did not break the surface, but was shallow enough that the change in the water's color was visible over a large area. As I recall, the reef was not marked on any "modern" chart. The navigator took his departure for the Santa Cruz from a certain point on the reef, a known seamark. This tactic considerably reduced the effect of any error in heading.
As they neared the end of the return voyage the navigator told everyone to be on the lookout for certain species of birds. These birds slept on land, but went out to sea to fish during the day. Some went as far as 25 miles. They sighted the birds in the afternoon, and followed them homeward until nightfall. Then they sailed off and on all night. You don't want to be sailing toward an unlit island in the dark.
In the morning the navigator set a course by the direction of the long-running and persistent ocean swells. He knew their pattern, and could detect them even in the presence of locally generated waves from squalls or storms.
Lewis reports that they raised the island dead on the navigator's course. Instead of hitting a circle of ten mile radius, to bring the island directly into view, the navigator had only to intersect a circle of 25-mile radius, an area more than six times larger, to find the birds.
I read and studied several books on celestial navigation, and practiced it in the era before GPS. All the books cautioned about the limitation of accuracy. None of them talked about birds.
RNJ
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Date Sep. 24 2016 23:56:02
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estebanana
Posts: 9352
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: All is Well with the World (in reply to estebanana)
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Thor Heyerdahl's premise for making the KonTiki was to put forward and test idea that drifting in heavy rafts and riding currents on mainly one way voyages was how the Pacific was populated and how the language families were distributed, or diasporated. (How's that for a word?) The issue that 'We, the Navigators' brings up right away is that most of the Ocean is connected by short 300 mile hops with some bigger stretches to connect the chains of smaller hops. It became apparent in western navigation applied to the dissemination of peoples and language groups throughout Oceania that simply drifting around was not going unravel the histories and story about how the various archipelagos were populated, or when. The 'how' is now more settled than the 'when', although the when is getting more defined. But now that the "Siderial navigation" techniques of the Microniseans have been reconsidered by western anthropology studies and what amounts to field work by those writing books about the Micronesian navigators we can pretty much come to see Heyerdalh's Kon Tiki as a good adventure story born out of a scientific migration theory investigation that proved to be workable, and in some cases probably accurate, but not as a theory that encompasses the whole story of the way Oceania was populated. Oceanic navigators were working with the intention of hitting certain navigable targets.
This is the thing that connects what Bill has written about language group dissemination, with Richards explanation of the difference between celestial navigation and Western instrument navigation with the compass or solar tracing instruments. The part of celestial navigation that the Micronesians utilized is Sidereal hour angle- basically that stars rise in the same place on the horizon, but each day the star rise is about four minutes different that the night before. The book We, the navigators was a tale of two older navigators in the Micronesian tradition guiding a modern sailboat from one island to another. After this book there was a resurgence of interest in Micronesia to train younger Micronesians in the skill of the traditional navigation. The book 'A song for Satawal" picks up on that story and delves into Micronesian history as well as connects it to the modern movement to reserve the navigation skills and pass them on.
The teaching method for passing these navigation techniques, which include current and wave direction information, and topological information about reefs and islands as navigation markers, plus the bulk of the knowledge about seasonal star position by sidereal hour, is by memorized verses or songs that are in and of themselves charts, or the texts of charts.
Imagine a small canoe like dugout boat with an out rigger pontoon arrangement and something that looks like a lanteen rigged sail made of woven palm leaf. Maybe the whole outfit is not much longer than 20 feet. It's 2 am, in the middle of the tropical ocean and no land is in sight, and tomorrow and the next day no land will be in sight. And you'll stay up all night and sleep a bit during the day. The craft has no compass or instruments of any kind, except song of the navigator. And he is teaching the song to two boys sitting up near the bow.
The songs:
On the first night out from your home island you will see these stars at this high the night sky. In this season look for the star this high in that season look for the star over here. You'll recognize it because it always travels the sky with that star over there. Now which island do you want to visit? Satawal? Ok we will begin the song that gives us the chart to Satawal.
Every destination has a song that describes the "chart" from one island to another. Since some islands are in groups the navigator sets out in the general direction of one of the islands in the group, but at some point he breaks off the general route and shoots for a particular island in the chain. Everything it seems becomes an indicator of how to steer to a certain destination. And the water is a major point of observation. Not only do the navigators see the swell directions through the wind chop, but they also see the wave reflection off of very distant reefs and islands. They can tell the location of islands they are passing which are too far off to make visual contact with by observing the reflective waves off distant shores. Even reefs leave paths of reflection.
The body of knowledge of this science, poetry, navigational art form in it's heyday before western contact must have been staggering, and the ranking of navigators from youthful beginner to aged master must have been complex. Some navigators may have been able to get back and forth between their home island and another island they traded with perhaps 50 miles away, and that may have sufficed for that clan, they had all the navigation skills they needed. Other navigators who were great masters could traverse the whole Western and Southern Pacific, an area that North America fits into a few times. The information this navigation culture held was immense.
In the North Pacific there was another culture of navigators who came from as far as Northern Japan, across the Aleutian islands and into Northern Canada, the entire coast was covered with trade routes sailed and paddled in skin covered boats, with both open and closed decks. Much of these trade, hunting or migration journeys were taken in sight of land , but also a great deal of the time days and nights were spend at sea floating in freezing cold dangerous waters in these kayaks and skin covered freight boats. Trade and hunting was conducted in these skin boats from what is now the Northern Canadian west coast all the way to Baja California.
In pre Western contact times it would have been possible, theoretically, for a family of skin boat navigators to journey from the Sakhalin Peninsula of Russia and through a few generations of sailors end up in Lima Peru by navigating the Pacific Rim. It is possible, but more likely this scenario would have played out in stages over hundreds of years and blends of language and tribal groups. Imagine prehistoric trade and hunting parties were exchanging information between distances of Seattle to the California Channel Islands off of Southern California, and this is real history; it is not a great stretch of that imagination to conceive that navigation legs of the CA Channel Islands on South could have taken place. And where were the limits of how far seagoing cultures could trade? Were the limits linguistic, or territorial?
And this brings us back to Heyerdahl and equatorial current drift theory- it seemed like such a good investigation, but then we reflect upon sidereal navigation of the Micronesians, and the ancient world shrinks. The intent of the navigators was to navigate, not float half in control of the steering.
All was well that world too.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Sep. 25 2016 4:01:15
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: All is Well with the World (in reply to estebanana)
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I first read Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon Tiki" when I was 14 or 15 years old, and it fired my imagination and instilled in me a real love of adventure and exploration. My interest in history, culture, language, and diplomacy would all come later. But reading "Kon Tiki" planted the seed in a young boy's mind.
The Marshallese traditionally used stick charts to impart navigational knowledge. Marshallese stick charts consist of straight and curved sticks tied together representing currents or waves and shells at certain points representing islands. The stick charts of the Marshall Islands were first described in an 1862 edition of "Nautical Magazine" by missionary L.H. Gulick. Gulick, however was incorrect in his understanding of their purpose. He thought the charts literally mapped out actual waves, currents, distances, and islands. they do not.
The stick chart is less a literal representation of the sea and more an abstract illustration of the ways that ocean swells interact with land. Curved sticks show where swells are deflected by an island; short, straight strips often indicate currents near islands; longer strips may indicate the direction in which certain islands are to be found; and small cowry shells represent the islands themselves. Thus, stick charts were used as training instruments for Marshallese navigators on how to "read" the sea, not as actual "maps" to be used as guides on voyages.
Like you, I'm glad a Marshall Islander with a stick chart was not present to instruct Sherwood Schwartz in the ways of navigating by "reading" the ocean. I always looked forward to Gilligan's Island and the adventures and antics of (as you so aptly describe them) "Mr. and Mrs. Howell, the Professor, the sexy Ginger, and the wholesome, but tantalizing, Mary Ann." It was a lovely series.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Sep. 25 2016 12:08:47
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: All is Well with the World (in reply to BarkellWH)
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In the 35-mile passage from the south end of Kwajalein Atoll to the north end of Namu Atoll, there is usually a part of the North Equatorial Countercurrent that sets westward at a couple of knots. But sometimes the Countercurrent does not flow between the two atolls, or sometimes the Countercurrent moves further south and an eddy of the Countercurrent sets eastward instead of westward.
The sailing passage between the two atolls is usually made at night. You depart Kwajalein harbor at the south end of the atoll around sunset, sail north-northwest to the lighted buoys of Gea pass to get from the lagoon into the ocean, sail down the west side of Kwajalein, across the inter-atoll passage, and halfway down the west side of Namu to the pass into the lagoon.
You want to arrive at the Namu pass sometime after 10 AM, so the sun is high enough for you to see down into the clear water, to find the twisting path through the reef. The only safe way to get through the pass is to actually see the obstacles.
The most up to date chart of Namu contains not a single depth sounding inside the lagoon. The legend in the lower right hand corner of the U.S. government issued chart says, "Compiled from a 1928 survey by the British Admiralty Office." The pass is superbly drawn, but too intricate to navigate any other way than by sight. On the chart, the lagoon is totally blank. As you tack upwind across the lagoon to the village of Majikin on the east reef, you need to see the coral heads lurking just below the surface, waiting to rip the bottom out of your boat. The coral heads rise nearly vertically from the 100-foot depth of the lagoon, so a depth sounder is useless to detect them.
In the days before GPS receivers were affordable and portable enough to be carried aboard a cruising sailboat, to compensate for the expected current in the inter-atoll passage you steered left of the compass course between the two atolls.
But if the current was setting eastward instead of westward, you risked being out of sight of Namu when the sun came up. The thing to do in this case was to come up on a broad starboard reach, sail back to the west-northwest, and hope to see Namu before long.
One of my friends was describing such a trip in his Cal 20, about as small a boat as you would like to go to sea in.
A Marshallese friend was in the group. "But why didn't you know the current was going east?" he asked.
"I had no way of finding my position. It was dark and the horizon was invisible, so I couldn't do a star or moon sight," my friend replied. He is an experienced sailor, having done the trip from Kwajalein to Honolulu (in a 35-foot successor to the Cal 20), taking 45 days, among other voyages, before the advent of GPS.
"But when you cleared the south end of Kwad'len the waves would have told you," our Marshallese friend observed.
Nine months out of the year the daily wind forecast is "east-northeast at 12-18 knots, gusts to 25 knots near squalls," the steady and reliable tradewinds. They set up a long running ocean swell. As the tradewind swell diffracts around the south end of Kwajalein it sets up a distinctive pattern, easily felt at night while sailing. The waves become steeper and more closely spaced. The boat tends to pound. After half an hour or 45 minutes you come out into the long, rolling tradewind swell in the passage and the boat's motion smoothes out. But the pattern is subtly different, depending on the eastward or westward set of the current in the inter-atoll passage. Most Marshallese knew this. Few Americans could sense the difference, even after being told about it.
Nowadays you just compare your GPS position regularly to your dead reckoning position, find your current induced drift, and plot your course to compensate for it. In the morning you see the coconut palms waving over the village of Namu-Namu, and enjoy the smooth sailing in the calmer waters in the lee of the atoll, but still with a good breeze blowing across the low islands. After you come to anchor in fifty feet off the Majikin beach in the afternoon, men appear alongside in outrigger rowing canoes, bringing drinking coconuts as a gesture of welcome. One of the canoes bears an official representative of the village council, who recites a speech of formal greeting.
If you live on Roi-Namur you are only 110 miles from home, but you are in a different world.
RNJ
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Date Sep. 25 2016 22:41:38
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: All is Well with the World (Cont... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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Marta and I have spent the last two weeks in Tempe, Arizona (just east of and adjacent to Phoenix) visiting Arizona State University, visiting friends, attending a Pacific islands dinner, and reading a good book on Hemingway's 1925 trip to Pamplona with friends which he turned into his famous novel "The Sun Also Rises." The weather is now beautiful, and I spend every morning out on the terrace with a cup of coffee reading the newspaper before getting further into the book I am reading.
Among our friends is a fellow with whom I went to High School who, after university and some years working, married an island girl from Saipan in the Northern Mariannas. Like natives of the Northern Marianas and Guam, she is a Chamorro. Her father worked for the old Trust Territory of the Pacific islands in Majuro, the Marshall Islands. She grew up in the Marshalls from a very young age and eventually migrated to the U.S and married my friend. She heads an Island Liaison organization operating in Arizona, and the organization sponsored a dinner last Saturday evening to which we were invited. The Pacific was well represented with islanders now living in Arizona. Never thought so many Pacific islanders lived in the Phoenix area. Good food and island music.
I want to mention the book I am reading, as many (or at least several) Foro members no doubt have visited Pamplona. The book is entitled "Everybody Behaves Badly: The Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece 'The Sun Also Rises'," by Lesley Blume. It was recently published, and it concerns the real-life characters who accompanied Hemingway on the trip to Pamplona, with all its bravado, bullfights, drunken brawls, and incidents that show up in "The Sun Also rises." One of the most interesting characters is a British aristocrat, Lady Duff Twysden, who appears in Hemingway's novel as Lady Brett Ashley. It is a very good book if you have an interest in the Paris literary scene of the 1920s and the famous "Lost Generation," as well as Pamplona, the Fiesta de San Fermin, and Spain of that era.
I spent a week in Pamplona during the Fiesta de San Fermin in July 1965 with my head full of Hemingway. I had read "The Sun Also Rises," and thought of myself, naively of course, as very "Hemingwayesque," as I sat at an outdoor table in front of the Hotel La Perla in the Pamplona town square. It was a temporary illusion, of course, as I was in the U.S. Air Force on a month's leave from my Air Force Station in Germany. After the Fiesta in Pamplona, I spent a week in Madrid, and then spent ten days in Nice on the French Riviera. Alas, I did not get to Andalucia on that trip.
At any rate, I highly recommend "Everybody Behaves Badly" for fans of Hemingway and the Lost Generation's peregrinations in Paris and Spain.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Nov. 2 2016 16:59:40
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: All is Well with the World (Cont... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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Thanks, Bill.
My unread book stack is getting thin, down to only two. I think I'll buy "Everyone Behaves Badly."
I just started John le Carré's memoir "The Pigeon Tunnel" last night. It's interesting and a lot of fun so far, as he lets his sense of humor play over his early years as a junior British diplomat, a junior officer in the counterintelligence service MI5, and a junior officer in the intelligence service MI6.
John Dickerson's "Whistlestop" is a good read. It's a collection of American presidential campaign stories, also told with a good sense of humor by the host of CBS Television's "Face the Nation." The carnival atmosphere of presidential campaigns dates back to the very first, and provides context for the present one, though there is nearly nothing about recent antics--the book was written during the very early stages of today's unparalleled tragicomedy.
For me one of the better books of the last few years is Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind."
RNJ
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Date Nov. 2 2016 20:01:38
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: All is Well with the World (Cont... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
I just started John le Carré's memoir "The Pigeon Tunnel" last night. It's interesting and a lot of fun so far, as he lets his sense of humor play over his early years as a junior British diplomat, a junior officer in the counterintelligence service MI5, and a junior officer in the intelligence service MI6.
I first read John LeCarre's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" in 1965 while serving with the U.S. Air Force in Germany and have enjoyed his books since. Nevertheless, I cut my teeth on espionage novels while in high school reading the superb novels by Eric Ambler. Eric Ambler wrote realistically about espionage, much of it pre-World War II, when Germany was trying to gain access to the Ploesti oil fields in Rumania, and other such machinations. Ambler's novels such as "The Dark Frontier," "The Mask of Dimitrios," "Journey into Fear," "Judgment on Deltchev," and others hold up very well today.
In my opinion, the finest author of espionage novels writing today is Alan Furst. He writes much like Eric Ambler, and his novels generally take place in in the 1930s leading up to WWII and during the war. Very good stuff. His latest is entitled "A Hero of France," and concerns a French underground leader during the war.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Nov. 3 2016 14:33:50
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: All is Well with the World (Cont... (in reply to BarkellWH)
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Just a couple of the many acute observations from Harari's "Sapiens":
Well into the book he inquires into the reasons why the scientific revolution took wing in western Europe in the 16th century. Both China and India had long established high cultures and were far more wealthy than Europe. Why did science not fourish in one of those great civilizations?
The key element, according to Harari, was "the discovery of ignorance." Until then, Europe, as well as the more advanced civilizations, believed that all important knowledge was divinely revealed, or else handed down by ancient sages. Anything that wasn't in the Bible, Confucius, Buddha, the Hindu sacred epics, the Q'ran or their exegeses by succeeding authorities, was trivial and not worth knowing.
In Europe, in only a few generations, it became evident that there was a vast trove of knowledge to be gained through empirical observation and theoretical investigation, knowledge that was not revealed by the ancients, knowledge sometimes at odds with revelation or tradition. The scientific revolution was born when people admitted there was a huge domain of ignorance that could be reduced bit by bit via the scientific method.
Earlier along in his account Harari points out that one of the great virtues of human language was not only its ability to convey information about the world. Monkeys can do that. Some of them have separate calls that mean, "Look out, there's an eagle," and "Careful, there's a snake!" The rest of the troupe respond appropriately. Monkeys can even lie, giving the eagle call, then snatching away a piece of fruit when the victim looks up.
Human language, on the other hand, can speak of things which never existed. For example, "You could never convince a chimpanzee to bring you a banana by promising him an endless supply of bananas after he was dead." Harari goes on to cite various at least partly useful fictions such as money and the joint stock corporations of modern capitalism.
A bracingly insightful author, with a fast moving style and a great sense of humor.
RNJ
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Date Nov. 4 2016 13:00:02
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: All is Well with the World (Cont... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
The key element, according to Harari, was "the discovery of ignorance." Until then, Europe, as well as the more advanced civilizations, believed that all important knowledge was divinely revealed, or else handed down by ancient sages. Anything that wasn't in the Bible, Confucius, Buddha, the Hindu sacred epics, the Q'ran or their exegeses by succeeding authorities, was trivial and not worth knowing. In Europe, in only a few generations, it became evident that there was a vast trove of knowledge to be gained through empirical observation and theoretical investigation, knowledge that was not revealed by the ancients, knowledge sometimes at odds with revelation or tradition. The scientific revolution was born when people admitted there was a huge domain of ignorance that could be reduced bit by bit via the scientific method.
Absolutely! The flowering of the Western mind, fired by the Renaissance with its rediscovery of Greek philosophy and logic and fueled in part by the Reformation, reached its apogee with the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment that severed the link between the sacred and the secular realms. Inventions such as the clock, microscope, telescope, and other technical advances were put to practical use by Europeans in the West. Meanwhile, Eastern, traditional societies kept these inventions as "curiosities," to be held closely by the courts and were not widely available to the general populace.
During the early part of the 15th century, Ming Dynasty China sponsored remarkable voyages to Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean littoral by Admiral Zheng He and his treasure fleets. A new emperor in the middle of the century put a stop to the voyages and Ming China turned inward, just at the time that the Europeans (primarily the Portuguese) were beginning their voyages of exploration. Likewise, after flowering in the 9th and 10th centuries, the Muslim World was overtaken by narrow doctrines that proclaimed all knowledge was found in the Qur'an, and to question anything outside the Qur'an's parameters was akin to blasphemy. This had the predictable result of shutting down all enquiry. Even today, many madrassas (Muslim schools) consider memorization of the Qur'an to be "education." Meanwhile, the West's tradition of free enquiry led to ever greater discoveries and advancement.
The West gets a bad rap from many quarters today, but we (and the rest of the world) are the fortunate inheritors of the Western tradition of free enquiry and advances that led to The Modern.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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