[conspire] Federales in Portland?

[Ruben Safir]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 04:45:23PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):
> 
> > Except for one thing.  Have you ever tried to take a Caravel into the
> > deep ocean with just sales, and no map?
> > 
> > These guys had balls.
> 
> Granted.  And, _if_ there had been little or nothing 
> between his point of departure and China, and if he truly knew the
> approximate real size of Earth, that would only make it even more gutsy.
> 
> As it was, they had a six-week voyage across the Atlantic after leaving
> the Canary Islands -- until they finally reached some island in the
> Bahamas or Turks & Caicos chains.  Before they pulled off that feat,
> nothing west of the Azores and Madeira had been known to Europeans
> (other than by the Vikings, of course).  Well, technically, there 
> _is_ convincing evidence Portuguese navigators had already established
> that there were lands over here, and Columbus may have known:
> https://www.americanheritage.com/was-america-discovered-columbus
> 
> Also, as the article points out, there were somewhat vague but
> compelling claims left over from the ancient Phoenicians that they had
> visited vast lands far beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
> 
> But even so:  gutsy.  Sometimes, gold fever helps for that.  (For
> Columbus, it really was all about the gold he expected to come home
> with.)
> 

I've been on the open ocean on a 65 foot fishing boat with deisel engine.  13
foot swells can care the hell out of you.  And they had no engine to
push the boat into an appropraite angle to the waves... just sales, 30
feet high, swinging back and forth in the crows nest, with a bunch of guys 
pulling ropes to manipulate the sails with the wind hammering on them..

I have thought about this a lot and they were totally nuts.  The Apollo
mission was a peice of cake compared to the age of discover sailing
ships.

And the boats often didn't make it.  Columbus left 38 men in the Western
Hemisphere when he left.  They had no fresh water, limited food, they
got sick and they died a lot.   It was a brutal world.  How brutal was it?
Well, people volunteered to get on the boats knowning the chances of
not dieing was very high, and the death at sea was often painful.  And
life was so brutal in Europe that  people couldn't get on the boats fast
enough (especially Jews in 1492).

Martín Alonso Pínzon barely made it back and died of disease a few days
after he returned.  The the Santa María never made it home and was
wrecked on shoals.

Columbus on one of his trips managed to just duck a Hurricaine.

Wicked ...


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