Today, when we look at the map of the world, we find a very interesting phenomenon. Today's more economically developed countries are almost all coastal countries, such as the United States, Canada, and France; almost all developed areas within a country are also in coastal areas, such as China.
Wang Zhaochun, director of the Science and Technology Department of the State Oceanic Administration, also said that more than half of the world's population lives within 60 kilometers of the coast, and it is expected to reach about 70% in 2020.
The ocean is undoubtedly in an extremely important position in human life.
It not only provides us with rich resources, but also a bridge to the world, and it is also a way for some cities and countries to prosper and strengthen.
Among the four oceans of the world, the Atlantic Ocean is more inseparable from human society because of its unique geographical location. It is located between Europe, Africa, the Americas and Antarctica, west through the Panama Canal and the Pacific Ocean, east through the Strait of Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean Sea, Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean, north of the Arctic Ocean, south of the Antarctic Sea, shipping routes in all directions, is an important link and hub in the world's global shipping system.
On the Atlantic coast, it is also almost the most developed region and country on all continents, there are more than sixty large and small countries, winding coastlines, full of cities and seaports, in the world's more than 2,000 ports, the Atlantic coast occupies 3/5, many of which are world-renowned ports. There are more than 4,000 ships on the North Atlantic route every day, with 2/3 of the world's cargo turnover and 3/5 of the cargo throughput, of which the North Atlantic route between North America and Europe is the busiest.
And just two thousand years ago, it was still a silence, although there were people living on the seashore, people were full of fear of the unknown ocean, crossing the ocean and blending with the world, it was still a distant dream.
How did humanity and the Atlantic Ocean develop to be so inseparable today?
The British explorer and writer Simon Winchester, in his Tale of the Atlantic, may have given us an answer. Through years of detailed evidence, field exploration, and in-depth research, he has presented a magnificent Atlantic biography from the beginning of Hongmeng to modern society, in front of the eyes of the world, which includes the process of human beings from discovering the Atlantic Ocean to knowing it, using it, and conquering it.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Discovery of the Atlantic Ocean: an independent ocean with abundant resources</h1>
"The Story of the Atlantic" says that the first human settlement by the sea, according to the archaeological basis of the current discovery, was in the Atlantic Ocean.
It was on the eve of the Ice Age, when the climate turned cooler and inland food began to become scarce, and humans walked through the grasslands of Ethiopia and Kenya, leaving behind fossil records of preying on elephants, hippos, and gazelles, and 30,000 years later, he crossed Africa to the southern seashore.
He found that there was a lot of nutritious food on land and water, and perhaps a warmer climate, and he finally did not have to migrate, and he finally chose a place to camp.
In modern times, it is called the top of the minaret.
In 2007, Curtis Maren, an American researcher on evolution and social change, published a paper in Nature, publishing a world-renowned discovery, in South Africa's southern western Cape province, a place called the top of the minaret, found a cave (named PP13B by archaeology), there is evidence that humans have lived, proving that humans settled by the sea for the first time, and made caves their home.
These people who settled on the eastern shore of the Atlantic, when they were no longer worried about hunger, they began to develop agriculture, aquaculture and handicrafts, and established the world's first town, the Levant", "Jericho", while the future Americas, when the west coast of the Atlantic, was still deserted.
Later, some regions and countries of today's Europe, appearing on the east coast, built the earliest ships. Ten thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Netherlands and France hollowed out trees to make small boats and crossed some rivers and swamps. Two thousand years later, the first seaworthy ship appeared in Kuwait, sailing into the waves of the Red Sea, and the first ship facing the Atlantic Ocean was made by the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians were the bravest navigators of antiquity, the most shrewd merchants, with a well-developed maritime trade and colonization, and they lived on the eastern shores of today's Mediterranean, equivalent to the coastal areas of Lebanon and Syria, where many commercial centers and colonies were established.
Huge commercial interests made the Phoenicians no longer satisfied with a corner of the Mediterranean, and once upon a time their seafaring limit was the Strait from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, called Gibraltar, with the title of "Pillar of Hercules" on both sides. In the seventh century BC, they finally crossed the raging waves and storms of Hercules and brazenly traveled westward, all the way to trade, fight, and rule, invincible.
In this unknown and dangerous sea, they found a gastropod called a bone snail. Bone snails can extract purple dye, and this brilliant color is loved by the royal family, which makes it twenty times more expensive than gold. Thousands of bone snails were needed to refine the pigments needed for a robe, and only then did purple become a symbol of power and status, and a great source of wealth for the Phoenicians. Looking for bone snails, they traveled farther and farther in the Atlantic Ocean, reaching Brittany in France, Cornwall in England, and also along their own commercial centers in Spain, to the Moroccan island of Mogador, where they found more and more bone snail habitats.
The purple paint attracted the Phoenicians, who galloped across the Atlantic And inspired sailors from other countries. The Romans, Arabs, Vikings, and Irish, trembling through the Pillar of Hercules, began their adventures and explorations in the Atlantic.
Whether it was Leo Eriksen, a Nordic (Viking) in 1001, Columbus, an Italian in 1492, or Vespucci later, they actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the other side of its west, which was later named the place of the Americas. Some of them realized that this was a new continent, and some of them didn't realize it at all, it didn't matter, what was important was that people finally determined that the Atlantic Ocean had a border, a separate ocean.
Marine resources attract people to explore the Atlantic Ocean, and the independent identity of the border means that it may also have its own characteristics and laws, as long as you understand its temper, you can use it well in navigation.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > second, understanding the Atlantic: increasingly advanced ocean exploration technology</h1>
From eating the first shrimp, to the pursuit of marine resources, galloping the ocean, it is in the adventure of the gradual understanding, so that human beings reduce the fear of the ocean, and then can understand the ocean, conquer the ocean.
However, when Polynesian sailors traveled through the Pacific Ocean, Persian and Chinese sailors crossed the Indian Ocean, and the Vikings mastered the secret of navigation in the Far North, people's understanding of the Atlantic Ocean was not as smooth and fast, and according to historical records, Cape Bohador was one of the reasons that hindered people's unimpeded access.
"The Tale of the Atlantic" tells us that the terrain, the environment, and the climate together make up the elusiveness of Cape Bohdore, the sandbars and shallow waters that force ships to pass by here will subconsciously drive to the deep sea, and once they do, the winds and currents ahead will drag the ship hundreds of miles. For a long time, no sailor could successfully pass through here.
It was not until 1434 that it suddenly became clear that courage and risk alone could not avoid the dangers of the ocean, and that there must be a rational mind to help people truly understand the ocean.
The first person to use techniques such as observation, foresight, scheduling, and calculation to face the Atlantic Ocean was a young Portuguese sailor named Gil Eganes, who carefully measured the direction and velocity of the sea, the direction and strength of the sea wind, and at the same time used rich knowledge of astronomy, climate history, marine geography, etc., plus time records, and other methods to successfully create the "current navigation" calculation method, thus bypassing the Bohador Angle twice.
Since then, more and more marine parameters have been included in the scope of research, such as tides, the depth of the ship's draft, the direction of the fish and seabirds, and so on. More and more elaborate instruments were invented, compasses, astrolabuses, and bathymetric cables began to appear, and tide tables and astronomical calculus were published.
With such a foundation, the speed increase was inevitable, and the small fishing boat on which Eaniš took had become a brisk with three or four masts, and the size of the boat had naturally increased.
In 1513, the Spanish explorer Ponce de León discovered the Gulf Stream, which could push ships to speed up. The discovery quickly gained a lot of fans, the most famous of whom was the American politician and founding father Benjamin Franklin, who drew a map based on it, successfully opening up a new field of marine cartography.
Franklin's map of the Gulf Stream
In 1854, the American explorer Morrie published a bathymetric map of the North Atlantic Basin, announcing the longest and deepest mountain range in the underwater world, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and also providing the possibility for the laying of submarine transoceanic telegraph lines.
In 1872, the Challenger embarked on a journey that lasted three and a half years across the Atlantic Ocean, and then fifteen years, publishing 80 volumes of reports, which represented the entire knowledge of the ocean, especially the Atlantic Ocean, which is still a milestone today, and it has finally successfully established oceanography.
From ancient times to modern times, from fear to understanding, human beings finally have the ability to fully utilize the Atlantic Ocean.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Conquer the Atlantic: Achieving a World Center of Trade and Economy</h1>
As people's understanding of the Atlantic Ocean continues to deepen, the initial confusion and fear of it slowly disappears, people go farther and farther on the Atlantic, even transoceanic sailing has become very easy, more and more places have been discovered, marked with maps, there have been human settlements, and this range has become larger and larger, until it becomes what we know today.
Simon says in The Atlantic Tale that in the process, the two great benefits of the Atlantic's generosity to humanity have not changed: the provision of food as a conduit for trade. What has changed is that people's access to them is becoming more and more accessible, and the number of resources they have accessed is increasing.
The most abundant product in the Atlantic Ocean is fish. In the past, fishing, there was no destination, catch can not catch, how much can be caught, all rely on luck, whether it can safely go home is not certain. When the ocean became controllable, people had a destination for the first time, and there were ports along the way where they could dock and rest, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century, one by one transoceanic routes were opened up, and people had more and more chances of successful sailing and successful fishing.
On this basis, the speed of fishing boats has improved faster and faster, wooden boats have gradually been replaced by steamboats, and the capacity has become larger and larger; hand fishing methods have gradually been eliminated, modern fishing techniques such as longlines, floating gillnets, and trawling operations have been widely used, and the harvest volume has increased thousands of times; in order to ensure the quality of food, air drying, freezing and other technologies have developed, and even a series of procedures for making convenient foods such as slicing, freezing, processing, packaging, etc., can be completed on board. For decades, such large-scale fishing became the core pillar of the coastal economy of Canada and England.
The improvement of navigation technology has made the hunting of giant mammal whales also become very easy, and the ships equipped by whalers are getting bigger and bigger, the sails are getting thicker, the oil drums are getting bigger and bigger, the harpoons are getting sharper, the ropes are getting stronger, and the iron tools are getting more and more durable. In the eighteenth century, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and many other countries joined the ranks of hunters, who swept through the deep sea areas where whales operated, and some stayed at sea for several months, and the commercial benefits obtained could not be calculated.
Maritime transportation has become more and more developed, so that gold, tobacco, fur and other transactions can also be achieved by sea, transoceanic freight has become a new mode of trade in the Atlantic. Transoceanic freight initially did not have regular and fixed routes, but it gradually became standardized: there were fixed departure times and return times, and there were prescribed ports of call and routes. Regular transoceanic freight was pioneered by the Americans, these ships specializing in transporting goods and having fixed schedules, later called "liners". On January 5, 1818, the first ever liner, a 424-ton trigon, departed from New York, heralding a new era. Just a year and five months later, the United States ushered in a new era, using the first steam-powered transoceanic cruise ship in history, and although it still had three masts, it was transported faster, and it took only 23 days to travel from the Savannah River to the Irish coast. Later, the three-masted sailing ship evolved into a four-masted iron-hulled galleon, and finally, it was all replaced by steamships, and this evolution represented an increasing speed, and after 125 years, the 23 days of the above trip were shortened to 3 days.
In the last days before the disappearance of sailing ships, in the late nineteenth century, it also played an important role in transporting tens of millions of migrants to the west coast of the Atlantic.
Some of these immigrants were involuntary and trafficked African black slaves; some were colonists from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries who made it their mission to build the coastline of the Americas; and the most important part was the Europeans who came to the colonies to get rid of their overseas rulers, who had nothing and hoped to find hope of a new life in the new world.
These immigrants were enormous, with only about 1 million new immigrants in the United States in the 70 years from American independence to 1840, and 30 million in the next 60 years.
Two thousand years later, the west coast of the Atlantic is no longer deserted, but has a dense population, a developed economy, as modern people are familiar, this young land represented by the United States, like Europe on the east coast, has become the center of world trade and economy.
The origin of all this may be traced back to more than two thousand years ago, when the Phoenicians frantically searched for that purple pigment.
(Picture from the Internet, invasion and deletion)