The History of The Azores Archipelago

Подробнее о видео

Stories of islands in the Atlantic Ocean, legendary and otherwise, had been reported since classical antiquity. Utopian tales of the Fortunate Isles (or Isles of the Blest) were sung by poets like Homer and Horace. Plato articulated the legend of Atlantis. Ancient writers like Plutarch, Strabo and, more explicitly, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy, testified to the real existence of the Canary Islands. The Middle Ages saw the emergence of a new set of legends about islands deep in the Atlantic Ocean. These were sourced in various places, e.g. the Irish immrama, or missionary sailing voyages (such as the tales of Ui Corra and Saint Brendan) and the sagas of Norse adventurers (such as the Grœnlendinga saga and the saga of Erik the Red). The peoples of the Iberian peninsula, who were closest to the real Atlantic islands, and whose seafarers and fisherman may have seen and even visited them, articulated their own tales. Medieval Andalusian Arabs related stories of Atlantic island encounters in the legend of the 9th-century navigator Khashkhash of Cordoba (told by al-Masudi) and the 12th-century story of the eight Maghurin (Wanderers) of Lisbon (told by Muhammad al-Idrisi). From these Greek, Irish, Norse, Arab and Iberian seafaring tales – often cross-fertilizing each other – emerged a myriad of mythical islands in the Atlantic Ocean – Atlantis, the Fortunate Islands, Saint Brendan's Island, Brasil Island, Antillia (or Sete Cidades, the island of the Seven Cities), Satanazes, the Ilhas Azuis (Blue Islands), the Terra dos Bacalhaus (Land of Codfish), and so on, which however uncertain, became so ubiquitous that they were considered fact. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, two dead bodies that looked like those of Amerindians were found on Flores. He said he found that fact in Christopher Columbus' notes, and it was one reason why Columbus presumed that India was on the other side of the ocean. In A History of the Azores, written by Thomas Ashe in 1813, the author talks of the discovery of the islands by Joshua Vander Berg of Bruges, who landed there during a storm on his way to Lisbon. This claim is generally discredited among academics today. As were local stories of a mysterious equestrian statue and coins with Carthaginian writing that were purportedly discovered on island of Corvo, or the strange inscriptions found along the coast of Quatro Ribeiras (on Terceira): all unsubstantiated stories that supported the claims of human visitation to the islands before the official record. But there was some basis in fact, since the Medici maps of 1351 contained seven islands off the Portuguese coast which were arranged in groups of three; there were the southern group, or the Goat Islands (Cabreras), the middle group, or the Wind or Dove Islands (De Ventura Sive de Columbis), and the western islands, or the Brazil Island (De Brazil).

0:00:00 - intro
0:00:12 - Myth and legend
0:04:47 - Early appearance on charts
0:07:59 - Portuguese exploration
0:09:44 - The re-discovery
0:13:04 - Settlement
0:18:03 - Iberian Union
0:19:13 - Liberal wars
0:20:49 - 20th century
0:22:27 - Carnation Revolution
0:22:44 - outro

#Azores#History#TheKnowledgeVideoChannel