Terra Australis Incognita

I have a holiday surprise for my readers!  You may consider it my Hanukkah/Christmas gift to you.  While going through my notes over the past week, it occurred to me that because I had written about the exploration of the Pacific, on and off over the years, it wouldn’t take too much effort to turn it into a full-fledged history chapter.  So here it is, covering the South Pacific during its age of exploration:

Chapter 2: Terra Australis Incognita

1500 to 1780 A.D.

Demographics at the Time of the European Arrival

The Mysterious Southern Continent

Did Spain Discover Hawaii First?

The Spanish Lake

Early Expeditions to Australia

The Discovery of Easter Island

The Discovery of Tahiti

Captain Cook

I know, Chapter 1 hasn’t been written yet, so II ‘d better compose something soon for the years before 1500.  It reminds me of when Neil Simon produced a movie called “Chapter 2,” and people wondered, “Where’s Chapter 1?”  Currently I estimate it will take four chapters to tell the complete story of Oceania, since there are not a whole lot of people in the region, or many records before the last few centuries.  In that sense, Chapter 1 will be prehistory more than written history.

Because I have started a new subject on The Xenophile Historian, I will also have to post links to it from all the other folders.  That will take a few days, but the most important links, from this blog and the home page, are up already.

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/pacific/pacific2.html

Perhaps Melikaliki Maka (Merry Christmas in Hawaiian) is the most appropriate thing to say here!

Just a Menorah for the First Night

Happy Hanukkah and Chag Sameach!

Don’t Environmentalists Have Respect for Native American Achievements?

You certainly think they would, since they are leftists.  Apparently Greenpeace doesn’t, because they set up one of their messages next to one of the more famous Nazca drawings in Peru, and it looks like the footprints and tire tracks they left getting to the site have damaged the monument.  If you want to discredit the cause you’re supporting, here’s how to do it!

And here is the article:

This Greenpeace Stunt May Hare Irreparably Damaged Peru’s Nazca Site

For me, this struck home because three years ago, I wrote about the Nazca civilization, for Chapter 1 of my Latin American history project.  Of course I wanted to put in a picture showing an example of the Nazca lines, so I went to my books and scanned a picture of the very same formation, the “hummingbird geoglyph”:

Considering that the lines are more than a thousand years old, I didn’t think the picture would go out of date this quickly!