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From Spain To Senegal: In The Wake Of Explorers

Hector Williams, January 2008

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Many mariners had sailed the seas of the western Mediterranean before the Genoese adventurer; from at least the 6th century B.C. bold skippers ventured out into the pathless Atlantic in search of trade and adventure. Phoenicians, Romans, Moors, Spaniards, and Portuguese carved out new sea routes that eventually led to the Americas.

Historian and an archaeologist, with a special interest in the Mediterranean, Hector joins us as lecturer for our upcoming Spain to Senegal voyage. He is professor of classics and classical archaeology at the University of British Columbia, and past president of the Archaeological Institute of America.

In the 1960s when I was beginning my archaeological career in the Mediterranean and had the time to take ocean liners to Piraeus, the port of Athens, I always felt a thrill as the great mass of Gibraltar came into view. To starboard lay mysterious Morocco, tinged in my young mind by romantic films like Casablanca and The Desert Song. In earlier times when seafarers moved in the other direction I suspect the thrill may have been edged with fear as they set out into the unknown waters of the Atlantic. There were good reasons for the Greek philosopher Plato to set his “lost continent” of Atlantis out beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar was the northern pillar)—there were very few who could contradict him! In 1492 Columbus sailed this way with his fragile fleet of three ships—down to the Canary Islands and across to what he hoped would be China.

Many mariners had sailed the seas of the western Mediterranean before the Genoese adventurer; from at least the 6th century B.C. bold skippers ventured out into the pathless Atlantic in search of trade and adventure. Phoenicians, Romans, Moors, Spaniards, and Portuguese carved out new sea routes that eventually led to the Americas. Even the Ottoman Turks made their way down the coast of North Africa. During our Spain to Senegal voyage we will follow in the wake of these explorers and touch on some of the places they visited and built. Later, in a more notorious time, came the slave traders, delivering their sad cargoes to Europe and the Americas and we will visit the moving slave fort in Senegal, now a World Heritage site.

Until the coming of Islam in the 7th century, North Africa was controlled by Romans. Local tribes—the Mauri or, as we call them, the Moors—had long controlled the interior, establishing the Sahara trade routes and substantial kingdoms of their own. Cleopatra’s daughter married a Juba, a Moorish king, for example. Their ancestors live on in the Berber peoples of northwest Africa who adopted Islam.

Much earlier, however, Phoenician traders from the Levant had made their way across the Mediterranean setting up trading posts in southern Spain, Portugal, and what are now Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and the coast of modern Morocco. Our itinerary will follow a hotly debated possible route of these venturesome Levantines who may have made it all the way around to the area of the Cameroons. Equally controversial is another Phoenician expedition that went around Africa from east to west, essentially circumnavigating the continent in the early 6th century B.C. We’ll have opportunities to discuss the evidence as we make our way south.

The Moors were and are the dominant culture of northwest Africa, and after a visit to the greatest of their Spanish palaces, the Alhambra at Granada (reclaimed for Christian Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in that epoch-changing year of 1492), we’ll have the opportunity to visit Casablanca, Marrakech, and Agadir and learn how they developed a culture much in advance of medieval Europe’s. Later, however, coastal Morocco became one of the haunts of the Barbary pirates who spread terror across the Mediterranean and all the way up to the coasts of Cornwall and Ireland. I have been fascinated by these marauders since excavating Mytilene, birthplace of the greatest of the corsairs, Barbarossa, who conquered the entire coast in the mid-16th century for the Ottoman empire.

Nature lovers, as well as the historically inclined, will enjoy our stops in the Canary Islands, followed by our exploration of the much less-frequented Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony that is now an independent nation. It was by hopping down these island groups and then following the coast of Africa that intrepid Portuguese mariners like Vasco da Gama made their way around Africa and to India and beyond in the later 15th century. I still remember my first view, in Lisbon’s harbor, in 1965, of the great monument to the man who sent them out, Prince Henry the Navigator, an enlightened ruler who embodied the best of Renaissance Europe. It then took me 16 years to get to the other end of that expansion, Macau. People tend to know much more about Spanish imperial expansion but on this voyage we’ll give the Portuguese their due.

Travelers who join me on this voyage will have a rich fare before them, and talks on Atlantis, the Phoenicians, Moorish civilization, the Barbary pirates, maritime archaeology, and the great explorers that sailed along our route will put into context the great variety of fascinating ports along the way.

Join Hector, and our team of outstanding lecturers, on our Spain to Senegal voyage 02 – 16 October 2008.