Re: Amerindian navigators and Eurocentrism in scholarship

[zippy@fuse.net]

Ron Hopkins-Lutz wrote:
> 
<snip>
> Oh if you don't know about coracles, then you're missing a really fun
> subject!
> 
> Coracles are circular:  not even elliptical. Navigating them is as hard or
> easy as navigating an inner tube, depending on how good you are with inner
> tubes. I've always been amazed they can make it more than three feet at a time
> in a given direction in them.
> 
> They were in use in deep water for at least a few hundred years. Amazing
> tribute to human tradition that. Made of hide too. Some fellow tried to show
> that St. Brendan could have made to the Americas across the Atlantic in a
> coracle, per some Irish sources. Don't remember if he actually made it, but
> seems to me he did, or got so far to the West as to make no matter. Of course
> since they'd probably hit North America somewhere between New Jersey and
> Boston, one wonders why anyone would have bothered coming back to North
> America once they did? (That's a joke.)
> 
<snip>

I think you may have confused two different types of traditional Irish
hide vessels, the coracle and the curragh.

The coracle is as you describe it. Very small, coracles were used for
personal transportation on inland waters, rivers and lakes. I have not
heard that coracles were used at sea.

The curragh was also an open hide boat, constructed of leather over a
wooden frame, but larger than a coracle and boat-shaped (length 3 or 4
times the beam, and pointed at the ends). Many curraghs carried a mast
and sail. The curragh was similar to the Eskimo umiak. Curraghs were
sea-going vessels, used for fishing and trasportation.

The "Brendan Voyage" was an experimental archaeology project, no doubt
inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki and Ra voyages, carried out in the
1970s. A team attempted to sail a curragh, not a coracle, from Ireland
to North America via the Faeroes and Iceland. They made it most of the
way, but abandoned ship off the coast of Newfoundland, I think because
they ran into pack ice.

I'm no expert on this subject and the above is from memory, so feel free
to correct any errors I've made.
-- 
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

		- Ripley, _Aliens_