NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Longitude by altitudes. was Re: How Many Chronometers?
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 May 13, 07:20 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 May 13, 07:20 -0700
Peter, you wrote: "By their own accounts, the contact was typically brief, ephemeral, and hardly conducive to the transmission of diseases" Yes, sure. So for example the Norse in Newfoundland, which I mentioned as a counter-example, probably did not infect any of the locals since boths groups stayed as far from the other as they could (or so the saga says). But you do agree that some of the fanciful stories of Norse expeditions penetrating deep into North America are effectively ruled out by this, right? If the contact was anything but "brief and ephemeral", the European diseases would have left an earlier record and would have been common in the Americans by the time the Spanish arrived. And you wrote: "Nothing like a long sea voyage as a useful spell of quarantine." Yes, but that only gets you so far. The diseases DID cross the oceans, and they arrived with some of the earliest Spanish expeditions. In your second message, you wrote: "People from the now Indonesian islands to the north of what is now the Australian Northern Territory visited the Australian northern coast on a semi-regular basis over several hundred years before European settlement" Ah, but was it "several hundred years" or only 75? The consensus (for whatever that's worth) appears to be that this trade began around 1720. That's not much before the main European settlement. I understand that there are some folks who want to push the contact back earlier, but if so, then why no plagues among the Native Australians?? Or maybe there were, and they simply didn't travel far because of the low population density... And you wrote: "Much later it was speculated that infectious diseases in general and Smallpox in particular was introduced to indigenous Australians by these Moluccans (one of the Indonesian islands). Quite recently researchers focusing on this question have showed conclusively that this contention is incorrect." Conclusively, eh? That's a pretty good trick. Myself, I would be willing to entertain the model that "some" smallpox infection came from the Moluccans while the devastating infections occurred in the more densely populated areas of European settlement. If you choose to believe otherwise, then you would have to propose that the Moluccan traders somehow avoided diseases which were endemic in their own islands. How would this miracle occur?? -FER PS: you wrote: "beche de mer (sea slugs)". Do folks in Australia still call these 'sea slugs'? They're sea cucumbers by modern terminology, distantly related to the starfish and sea urchins, but I understand that they used to classed with the true sea slugs --which are shell-less snails (mollusks) like land-bound slugs. Understand, I'm not objecting to whatever terminology is considered normal down there. Do you call sea cucumbers "sea slugs"? And if so, is there a different name for true sea slugs? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---