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Showing posts with the label ANTARCTICA

PART II: FOAM OF THE SEA, NAZCAN LINES AND PIRI REIS MAP

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Part II Foam of the Sea Peru and Bolivia Chapter 4 - Flight of the Condor I’m in southern Peru, flying over the Nazca lines. Below me, after the whale and the monkey, the hummingbird comes into view, flutters and unfolds her wings, stretches forward her delicate beak towards some imaginary flower. Then we turn hard right, pursued by our own tiny shadow as we cross the bleak scar of the Pan-American highway, and follow a trajectory that brings us over the fabulous snake-necked ‘Alcatraz’: a heron 900 feet long conceived in the mind of a master geometer. We circle around, cross the highway for a second time, pass an astonishing arrangement of fish and triangles laid out beside a pelican, turn left and find ourselves floating over the sublime image of a giant condor with feathers extended in stylized flight. Just as I try to catch my breath, another condor almost close enough to touch materializes out of nowhere, a real condor this time, haughty as a fallen angel riding a therma...

PIRI REIS MAP

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from HenryDavis Website http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/mapas_pirireis/esp_mapaspirireis10.htm DATE : 1513 AUTHOR : Piri Re'is DESCRIPTION : During a naval campaign against Venice in 1501, a Turkish fleet captured a Spanish ship in the western Mediterranean. One of the prisoners taken had earlier made three voyages to the West Indies with Columbus and carried with him a set of Columbus's American charts. In this fortuitous manner Kemal Re'is, the famous Turkish admiral, acquired maps of great importance showing a newly discovered part of the world. Piri Re'is , nephew of Kemal, was born in Gallipoli on the shore of the Dardanelles in 1470. Piri also became an admiral and is remembered as a scholar of navigational science and an accomplished linguist. He produced charts, an important book on navigation, and a superb map of the world, which employed the Columbus maps taken by his uncle's sailors. Although fragmentary, this work and the Zorzi sket...