Atlantic

I finally finished reading a book I started almost two weeks ago! It usually doesn't take me this long. But I have been busy and just didn't have time. The book was excellent though, and I have been trying to squeeze in a half hour here or there almost every day to finish it.
It is the story of the Atlantic Ocean, from it's formation a hundred and some-odd million years ago, through the eras of exploration in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, all they way up to the modern concerns about the effects of global warming and the recent discoveries at how we as humans have completely devastated many of the Atlantic's indigenous populations of fish and mammals.
It was a sweeping book, and for sure there was much more pack in there than I will ever remember, but it was worth the read even for the 50% or so I may retain for the rest of my life (ha ha..I am being optimistic!) And Winchester has such a way with words, and such an...entertaining vocabulary that it is not "textbook" like at all. Take this little paragraph for example:

Some of the historical facts were really enlightening too. For example we celebrate the discovery of the new word by Christopher Columbus, but he never set foot on North America, nor did he ever believe that he had  actually discovered a "new world" (he thought he was in some undiscovered part of what we would consider the western Pacific). And he was a cruel and terrible man. Not only did he treat his servants and slaves cruelly (which was acceptable at that time) but he abused those who worked for him and others that he had authority over. For the latter reasons he was arrested and brought back to Spain in shackles! And we celebrate a holiday commemorating this man? WTF? (It is interesting I just read an article yesterday claiming that Columbus was secretly a Jew, looking for a new land for his people....I highly doubt that, and if I were Jewish I wouldn't want anything to do with Columbus but I digress..)
I also discovered that one very interesting Lief Erikson (of Scandinavian descent) truly discovered North America (from the European standpoint, since there were Native Americans here before then), and with less brutality and bloodshed than Columbus. I kind of remember reading that somewhere before but I never actually spend any time thinking about it. I was was wondering to myself why we don't celebrate him instead, when I discovered that there actually IS a Leif Erikson Day! I am so very excited about this news! It is October 9th (Columbus Day is the 8th). (A cool side note is that Wisconsin was the first state to adopt the holiday;) SO, I think this year I will have a Lief Erickson Day party to celebrate and commemorate the first real European discoverer of the New World! Doesn't that sound like fun? Christopher Columbus can kiss my....well you get my point.

Reading at Panera

Reading about the slave trading that went on (for almost 400 years!) was hard to get through. Not because the text was complicated, but because reading about the atrocities that were committed against innocent families actually made me feel sick. The unbearable way human beings were stored as cargo and transported across the sea, the way families were ripped apart, and...It is such a dark and shameful period in human history. Maybe it's because I live in a world that has been more or less enlightened (at least the scientific community is), but I can't even imagine how anyone could feel it was just to treat the African men, women, and children the way they did. I guess many convinced themselves it was OK because enlightened Greek philosophers spoke about "people accepting their place in society", another justification was that the people in the Bible had slaves, and God told them to obey their masters. A rather startling fact, that John Newton, who was a clergyman no less, and who wrote the all too well known song "Amazing Grace" was a slaver. It is documented that he would say his prayers above deck while "his human cargo was in abject misery below".
The section about Pirates was both interesting and disturbing all at the same time. The heyday of pirating only lasted 75 years...I thought it was much longer, but apparently it was such dangerous, awful business that it was not to last. Several well known authors wrote about the likes of Black Beard, and the flying of the Jolly Roger, which is why they are so famous and well known today but the period in real life was relatively brief compared to the legacy it left behind. Pirate captains were ruthless barbarians, and their depravity knew no limits when it came to creative punishments when one of their sailors disobeyed, or they captured a passing ship. I won't even repeat the examples here, because they are the sort of thing that will give you nightmares, but let's just say I'll think twice before dressing as a pirate again for Halloween. Yuck.
I read about some of the more famous battles fought in the Atlantic during the early 19th century (World Wars I and II). Like the Battle of Jutland, where over 250 vessels of British and German nationalities confronted one another...Can you imagine that? Seeing 250 boats all at the same time? There were many more battles involving the German U-boats.
There was so much more, but this entry is too long already, so maybe I will save them for a different day. But this was really a great and informative book!