When The Earth Was Flat

When the Earth was flat, sailors must have had incredible difficulty coming to grips with the concept of circumnavigation. Leaving the flat Earth behind was no simple task. It was a vital first step before daring to set off on voyages beyond the sight of land. Before they were equipped to encounter considerable hardships in unknown waters, they had to surpass the most challenging of all barriers, their own fears. When the captain was enlightened, as was undoubtedly the case of Henry the Navigator or quite some time later, Christopher Columbus, their crews still harbored fears of falling off the edge of the Earth. When the Earth was flat, just about everyone knew that it would be terribly easy to fall off the edge except for sea dogs who had witnessed tall ships sink beneath the horizon on a regular basis. Sailors, who managed to traverse the brink of doom while close-hauled on a beam reach, realized that at any moment they could very well be swallowed up by sea monsters. Defeat one fear and another pops up to take its place. If it wasn't one thing it was another. Is it any wonder that European seafarers took such an age to round the Cape of Good Hope? It was a case of doctrine dictating destiny.

Long before the time, when Henry the Navigator hugged the coast of Africa for dear life while pioneering in waters known to be dangerous to an extent that the modern mind would conceive of as being ludicrous, sailors from Tahiti had already made sea voyages of several thousand miles and in the process become Hawaiians. Contrast this with the slow process of the Europeans. Of course the first Hawaiian immigrants did not have to contend with waters at the boiling point when they crossed the equator. Human skin in the Torrid Zone turned black, a gangrenous image, was another factor that did not figure in the mindset of those who set off from Fatu Hiva. Henry the Navigator, who was intrepid, hugged the coastline of Africa and ventured further south than any other European had dared. Of course, it was the difficulty of navigating that made it prudent not to sail outside the sight of land. It wasn't until 27 years after Henry's death that Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The age of maritime exploration had begun in earnest.

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