After the eruption of the Thera volcano, seafaring in general declined, and the old sailing routes known to the Phoenicians and Minoans long before, were only remembered in the recitations of the Greek storytellers. Within his Odyssey Homer was recording these ancient trading routes and describing places and people, whose lands and harbours were destroyed by rising sea-levels following the end of the Ice Age. When destinations are unclear on modern sea charts, they can be found on medieval portolans (maps) that show coastal topography as it was in pre-history, at a time of lower sea-level.
A Bronze Age Greek sailor would only have navigated by dead reckoning, but I found the destinations of Homer’s hero were in longitudinal relationship to each other, with the latitude distances in the proportion of phi and the Golden Mean.
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Read some extracts from The Odysseus Code:
How far did Odysseus Sail?
In attempting to follow Odysseus’ route, I have taken the times and distances in the narrative as an uncompromising starting point, and have tried to relate the results to places that we recognise today. I let Homer do the navigation and take me as a passenger on his ship, rather than (as so many before me seem to have done) decide where I wanted to go and insist Homer come with me. Only when I reached the end of the trail did I appreciate Homer was writing a story around known destinations rather than sending his hero off on a mystery tour. This subtle change shows that the actual locations of the destinations (some of which were a long way from Greece) were known to Homer prior to writing his Odyssey. This does not mean I believe a man named Odysseus made these journeys, but I believe the knowledge was there for such journeys to be made.
If Homer said Odysseus sailed non-stop on a home-built craft for 17 days, one can work out how far he expected him to have travelled. If he sailed with a west wind, one can form an arc within which his destination must lie. The only variable was to decide the speed at which Odysseus would have travelled on his various modes of transport (penteconter, home-built boat, remains of his ship’s keel), with whatever wind or current was in the forecast (blast of the west wind sent by Aeolus, the north wind of the Aegean, the Portugal Current). On a practical level, what I discovered exceeded my expectations.
The routes between destinations show Homer was not recording the haphazard wanderings of a Bronze Age ship whose bearings were lost in the Dark Ages. The nautical knowledge was there in ancient maps and myths well-known to him, but it was becoming lost after the expiry of the great Minoan seafaring nation nine hundred years before his own historical period. It had been preserved in the oral traditions over centuries, but that tradition too was in decline with the growing use of the written word in Homer’s day.
I was quite prepared to find all the places to which Odysseus travelled within the Mediterranean Basin if that was where the story led, but it just did not work. Other researchers, such as the well-known explorer-sailor Tim Severin, make light of the distances Homer tells us Odysseus travelled, since they do not comply with their theories. A typical example, if I may say so, of Homer’s information being disregarded in order to fit a pre-conceived idea.
“In getting to grips with the truth of the Odyssey all numbers cited by the poet have to be treated with great caution.” Severin warns us. “Numbers are notoriously unreliable.”[1]
I beg to differ, for a study of ancient myths shows that recorded sacred numbers, repeated over the centuries and across continents, have been carried through to the present day without change. Numbers are notoriously reliable! They are a language of their own which transgresses borders and cultures and may convey information even more precisely than words liable to misinterpretation in translation. Numbers would have been an important aspect of any oral recitation that was never purposefully changed. I have therefore paid particular attention to all the numbers recorded by Homer, which clearly take his hero on a very long voyage.
Historians and classicists overlook the practicalities involved in the information given by Homer, and stick to the Mediterranean area because they do not believe Greeks of the day could travel very far in their boats - and they are probably correct. The Mycenaeans were primarily farmers rather than sailors, and when Tim Severin was sent off to follow Odysseus’ route in a Bronze Age replica boat, they set him an almost impossible task. For I contend Homer is describing places and routes known to more sophisticated navigators long before the fall of Troy. Seafaring and shipbuilding declined rapidly after the Thera volcano erupted around 1500 BCE.
There are those too who see the whole story as a myth, and give up on finding places in the real world to match those described, because they see our ancestors as primitive and incapable of transferring information in symbols and metaphors. I think I have found the middle ground – somewhere between the world as we know it and the world as it was in a time before the one we recognise as historical – a time recorded in the myths and legends we have overlooked for so long.
In every case, I have tried to be true to Homer and the myths he used. But I have also been entirely practical. If Homer leads us to an island in a certain place and we find no island there today, then we must try to find out why – did it blow up or slowly sink beneath the waves? In some instances, I believe the places described by Homer no longer exist, some have changed beyond recognition, and the narrative may even have been intended as a reminder of places the author knew had undergone geological changes.
Academics often criticised the Greek geographer Strabo for having taken his geographical information from Homer, but places mentioned by Strabo previously considered to be mythical are often being unearthed. Some townships mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships of the Iliad we know had already been lost in Homer’s day, yet he gives them epithets such as ‘windy’ or ‘sandy’ and when eventually discovered by archaeologists they are found to be just so: as in Windy Enispe or Sandy Pylos.[2] For Homer’s descriptions to be so accurate he must have taken information from earlier oral recitations. And who are we to say from this distance in time that Homer’s geography was in error? Our world is not a static entity. It has changed both in slow movements and in sudden spasms, especially in the Mediterranean area. It is still doing so today and will continue to do so in the future.
... We pick up on Odysseus’s journey as he and his crew are sent away from the island of Aeolus. Without any sign of wind, they have to row their boat for six days across the ocean. I had already ascertained this island to be the present day Ampère Seamount, part of the Azores-Gibraltar underwater structure lying on the latitude of Gibraltar at longitude W12.7º in the Atlantic Ocean. Whether this seamount was above water or not in Homer’s day, it is this position in the ocean that he is pinpointing.
This is perhaps the most contentious passage in the whole of the Odyssey, for it clearly describes a land of high latitudes where the summertime daylight hours are very long compared to anywhere in the Mediterranean area.
Even if one accepts that the Greeks, or their predecessors, were able to sail beyond the Mediterranean Sea, we are still left with the conundrum of just how far Odysseus and his crew could row their ships in 6 days and nights in the open ocean without any help from the sails. And would it be enough to show a significant change in daylight hours?
The whole episode of rowing without any wind seems such an unlikely event, so I suspect Homer was deliberately taking the wind out of the scenario. In this way he could show the necessity of keeping well out to sea and using the currents to one’s advantage, rather than taking the obvious route of following the coast round from Gibraltar.
The Atlantic Crossing Guide published by the Royal Cruising Club tells us:
“The North Atlantic Current, urged on by the
prevailing westerly winds, eventually meets the obstruction of the British
Isles and the continent of Europe, which together cause it to divide; part
going north of Scotland and part turning south-east, and later south, to form
the Azores Current, the Portugal Current, and finally the Canaries Current … In
ocean sailing generally, it pays to seek a route which affords a favourable
current. Your chances of a fair wind would then be good.”[1]
When Odysseus leaves the island of Aeolus they row for six days non-stop. We know they were heading north because they reach a land where the daylight hours were significantly longer in summertime. In my search for his destination I was looking for somewhere fitting this criterion, shown on the portolans and yet feasible so far as the length of time his journey took and the speed he might have made.
I decided to set two teams of rowers a race. One boat would leave from the Straits of Gibraltar and the other from Ampère Seamount, and I would see how fast each team had to row in order to reach a hypothetical land of the Laestrygonians in 152 hours.They row for 6 days x 24 hours = 144 + 8 for ‘on the seventh day’ = 152 hours).
I put the marker buoy for the end of the race at 49ºN 11ºW. This was not an arbitrary choice, but marks a series of islands south of the south-western tip of a much enlarged Ireland, shown on the Dulcert Portolano drawn in 1339. This archipelago lies in a line between 48º30’N and 50ºN, and in an arc from 11ºW along the curve of the westerly edge of the Great Sole Bank.
The Ampère team have to cross 15 degrees of latitude and 2 degrees of longitude (west to east) whilst the Gibraltar team must cross 13 degrees of latitude and 5 degrees of longitude (east to west) having cleared the Straits and its currents. On the face of it neither has much advantage over the other. But, whilst the Ampère team have a straightforward journey of 840 miles ahead of them, the Gibraltar team have to navigate around headlands.
When the Gibraltar team set off from the Straits following the coast, they have at least one knot of current against them until they turn north at Cape St. Vincent. Even then, they are slowed down by at least ½ knot of current as they follow the coast of Portugal. They try to hug the shore and find a counter-current but this increases the distance to cover and brings them into danger, so seems hardly worthwhile. When they eventually round Cape Finisterre and get into the Bay of Biscay (as we call it today) they think they are in for a straight run north but the current sets them first westerly then easterly - away from their target and confusing their navigator. They almost don’t make it at all!
If they had not had any current to contend with, they would have had to maintain an impossible average speed of 6.2 knots in order to reach the finish line in 152 hours. Against the current they would have had to row at about 9 knots to make the destination and would very likely have been wrecked on the coast of France. A penteconter warship such as Odysseus may have had, could be rowed at speeds of 9 or 10 knots under a short dash, but this speed would not be sustained over a long period and in the open ocean.
After two days of rowing non-stop with the men working in shifts, they are amazed to find the boat is going faster than they can row! This must be a trick of the gods! In fact, they have picked up the strong current of the Gulf Stream, or the North Atlantic Current as it is called in that area, which pushes them eastwards then north-east as they continue to head the prow of the ship due north with their eyes fixed on the Pole Star.
They arrive way ahead of the Gibraltar team without having to alter course at all. But as the winners of the race get eaten by cannibals, they might have preferred to linger longer on the way!
In order to get there in the 152 hours (24 hours x 6 days = 144 hours + 8 hours for ‘on the seventh day’ = 152) it actually took them, not allowing for the current, they would have had to row at an average speed of 5.5 knots. A sailor of the day would know that even this is unacceptably fast for rowing in the open ocean over 6 days, so Homer is indicating just how much help the current would have given them once they had reached the North Atlantic.
However far north they had travelled, and however fast or slowly, the current would eventually have set them onto the coast of Ireland. But we are specifically told they arrived at an island, and if the islands shown clearly on the portolans existed above water in those days, the current would have set them onto this archipelago before they reached the mainland of Ireland.
Now it is obvious why Homer sent his hero so far out into the Atlantic before turning north. On this run between the Mediterranean and the British Isles, all pilot books suggest making a heading westward of one’s course, whether sailing north or south, to avoid being taken too far east and into the eastern side of the Bay of Biscay, as happened to the Gibraltar team. Or to avoid the Bay of Biscay altogether, as the short steep seas can make for a difficult or at least uncomfortable passage – especially when rowing!
Odysseus or the sailors of his day, whether they knew about the Gulf Stream or not, could have reached southern Ireland if they had set out from the position of Ampère Seamount and simply travelled due north. The obvious route round the coast from Gibraltar had been found not to work, but a more offshore course proved worthwhile. The strength of the currents is not entirely predictable, but it has been suggested that in ancient times the strength of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current was roughly double what it is today, which would have made their required speed of rowing a lot less.
So was there a myth known to Homer of a river in the sea, the Gulf Stream, which in these parts is called the North Atlantic Drift? It seems likely there was, and the position of Ampère Seamount – whether it still existed as an island or not – was the navigational point at which one should turn north to reach the Land of the Laestrygonians - and even the land of the Hyperboreans.
 Figure 18: Odysseus’ Northern Routes A composite drawing
of the northern routes of Odysseus based on Hapgood’s transcription of the Dulcert Portolano with approximate
position of land as it is today shown darker. |
[1] The Atlantic
Crossing Guide edited by Philip Allen, Royal Cruising Club with Granada
Publishing & Adlard Coles Ltd., 1983
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