Atlantic by Simon Winchester

The earth was once all atmosphere which cooled and coalesced. Water condensed out of it, and the continents were formed by super volcanoes spewing magma out that became stable and could be thought of as land masses. Between the land masses formed the sea, essentially.

The Atlantic formed between America and Africa/Europs. People on theeast shore gradually worked their way to the coast but it was the Phoenecians who eventually were brave enough to sail out of the Mediterranean and along the coast of morocco to establish trading routes and to harvest murex snails for their fabulous purple dye.

Next up the Vikings (warriors) and the Norsemen (peaceful traders), Romans, Arabs, Genoese.

Most interesting is the settlement of Norsemen discovered in L’Anse aux Meadows, Canada, which was the first European settlement in America. It was settled by Leif Erikkson, a Norwegian, and predates Columbus by about 400 – 500 years. Columbis actually never set foot on American soil, rather he discovered islands such as the Bahamas and South American countries such as Venuzuela, but the penny never dropped and he didn’t ever recongise this as a continent. That was left to Amerigo Vespucci who saw the connection and wrote a book about it. Mapmakers named the country after him.

At about this point, though, I gave this book up. The problem was thatWinchester went on and on and on with waffle and personal pompous ranting. When he has facts to explain he is masterful but I spent so much time riffling through pages of this book looking for the meat when all I could find was the literary version of that abominable food fad, FOAM.