Rick Rogers has studied maps from the 16th and 17th centuries that he believes show the Hawaiian Islands. But he wants to find irrefutable evidence: a shipwreck predating Captain Cook's landing.
Posted on 01/20/2010 9:24:29 AM PST by Palter
Amateur historian Rick Rogers just knows Europeans visited the islands two centuries before Captain Cook landed in 1778. Trying to prove it and convince professionals, that's another story.
In the clear blue water 150 feet down, off Palemano Point on Hawaii's Big Island, Captain Rick Rogers swam along the ocean floor, concentrating on the light white swirls of staghorn reef below him.
As tiny bubbles of air escaped from his tank, his black flippers propelled him above the coral, next to schools of reddish mempache and juicy turquoise uhu fish. The scene was breathtaking, but Rogers didn't care about nature. He was looking for man-made objects only: porcelain plates, pieces of cannons, a sunken iron anchor.
Finding evidence of a shipwreck beneath the ocean would finally prove a theory that Rogers, an amateur historian, has been promoting for decades. He thinks a handful of Spanish and Dutch ships visited Hawaii in the centuries before Captain Cook landed there in 1778. Some Europeans came ashore after shipwrecks, like the characters in "The Swiss Family Robinson," he claims, and eventually integrated into the local society. That early European influence in the 16th and 17th centuries forever changed Hawaiian culture, Rogers says.
"It's cool -- you read 'Swiss Family Robinson' and pirate stories, and here it really did happen," said Rogers, a retired commercial airline pilot. "But nobody else is really paying attention to it."
Rick Rogers has studied maps from the 16th and 17th centuries that he believes show the Hawaiian Islands. But he wants to find irrefutable evidence: a shipwreck predating Captain Cook's landing.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Pre Cook ping.
With a prevailing Easterly against them, somebody must have tacked over at some time and spotted the islands. Either that or they stayed on the port tack all they way from the Phillippines to Mexico!
Finding a wreck doesn’t necessarily mean it pre-dates Cook. There’s a lot more to it before it’s declared ‘fact’. But I wish him well...
Wasn’t it the Spanish practice to treat geographical knowledge of the Pacific as a state secret, so as to maintain their competitive advantage against the other European maritime powers?
It seems hard to believe that they wouldn’t have stumbled on the Hawaiian Islands at some point.
A wreck that old would either be under a considerable amound of sand, coral or perhaps lava. Would be difficult to detect magnetically, too. I think that he has a pretty good theory, but the task of proving it is monumental.
I don't think that the practice was exclusive to the Spanish, but I think you are correct. The Spanish Admiralty has maintained a lot of archival material dating to this period. Wonder if anybody has checked?
There is an annoying tendency among those of us in the Northern European tradition to demean the Spanish maritime tradition. Ditto the Portuguese and French. These guys were out there. I think it at least possible they knew there were islands there, perhaps visited them, but otherwise had little interest in them. On top of that, they probably didn't want anyone else setting up shop there, either.
Wasn’t it the Spanish practice to treat geographical knowledge of the Pacific as a state secret, so as to maintain their competitive advantage against the other European maritime powers?
It sure was! However it was only the Spanish who had the trade network from the Far East to their ports in Mexico, and South America. Everyone else, particularly the Dutch, were more interested in going toward Europe.
It’s almost silly to think the Spaniards at least stumble across the Hawaiian Islands. A Manila galleon would pick up a mid latitude westerly and keep going until it hit the North American coast, perhaps as far north as Oregon; as big and spread out as Hawaii is, well... A sailor doesn’t even need to be within site of the islands, the cloud formations that form above them would be instantly recognized by the greenest hand and can be seen for well over a hundred miles. And surely the Spaniards encountered more than a handful of Polynesian seamen who would have at least been aware of Hawaii. Finally, the fact that map information is ambiguous; a right thinking treasure ship captain would carry two sets of charts - one for navigating, and one to be captured with.
That’s “didn’t at least stumble”, and “sight”. Dumbass.
I’ve personally never demeaned the Spanish or Portugese maritime adventures. They were true explorers. As much as the presence of the islands should lend itself to discovery, the distance involved suggests that the Spanish were not so lucky. Hawaii is about 2500 miles from Acupulco and maybe another 3,000 miles from Manilla. That’s a lot of food and water to carry. If they knew about Hawaii, it makes sense that they would establish a base there. It would allow the ships to carry less rations, which would allow them to carry more goods. The islands would be a shelter from storms in the South Pacific and a source of food and fresh water.
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Thanks Palter and Kenny Bunk. There are at least a couple topics about Pre-Cook contact with Hawaii around here somewhere, I'll post links if I find 'em. |
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1903226/posts
and maybe this link is alive:
http://www.captainrick.com/influences.asp
It sure does. That's why I lean toward the "bad luck" scenario. If sailing westward from Mexico on the prevailing easterlies for 150 years, it would be just plain bad luck to miss the Hawaiian Islands entirely!
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