Ulysses Found

by Ernle Bradford | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0750937254 Global Overview for this book
Registered by garibaldisghost of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire United Kingdom on 10/19/2006
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by garibaldisghost from Nottingham, Nottinghamshire United Kingdom on Thursday, October 19, 2006
Synopsis:
Ernle Bradford is a great historian of the Mediterranean and its peoples. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War with The Odyssey always at the foot of his bunk.

Having settled in Malta after the war, he took his small yacht in search of his hero Ulysses. Starting at Troy, taking into account the winds that Ulysses would have encountered, he checked capes, islands, caves and harbours against Homer's description of Ulysses' landfall; all are described and identified. He provides convincing arguments for the locations of the Land of the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops' Cave, Circe's Island and the beach upon which Ulysses was washed up naked at the feet of Nausicaa and many others.

This book will appeal to the armchair traveller, the literary detective and all who love Homer's great poem. It gives the chronology of Ulysses' voyage, and is illustrated with photographs and maps.

Journal Entry 2 by garibaldisghost at on Saturday, October 21, 2006

Released 17 yrs ago (10/21/2006 UTC) at

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To be released at the meet-up.

Journal Entry 3 by kittiwake on Sunday, January 28, 2007
Picked up from Costa while I was having a cup of coffee this morning.

Journal Entry 4 by kittiwake on Sunday, March 18, 2007
My mother is going to read this next.

Journal Entry 5 by kittiwake on Monday, March 10, 2008
Back on Mount TBR.

Journal Entry 6 by kittiwake on Thursday, February 19, 2009
Ulysses met with no other ships west of Greece -- perhaps because there were none. In his encounters with the inhabitants of the lands and places which some scholars have called 'mythical' it is noticeable that all these people are landbound. The story of Ulysses is, it seems, the story of the first Greek sailor to explore the unknown Western Mediterranean. The reasons why so many of the places and events described have been over-laid with fantasy and myth is because even when Homer was writing, some three or four centuries after the events described, this part of the Mediterranean was still practically unexplored.

During WWII, Ernle Bradford spent four years as a sailor on a British destroyer based in the Mediterranean. Afterwards he spent many years cross-crossing the Med in a variety of small boats, and in this book he tracks the course of Odysseus's ten year voyage home after the Trojan War. His sailing experience made him realise that the Mediterranean as seen from a small boat, is an entirely different place than when seen from a large ship, and led him to him to develop his own theories about how far Odysseus and his men could have sailed or rowed in a day and their likely route and landing places. He came to believe that the geographical features and sailing directions mentioned in the Odyssey were accurate and based on real sea voyages (apart from the trip to the Pillars of Hercules and the Stream of Ocean) and he was able to match them to the descriptions in the Admiralty Pilots for the Mediterranean. Even though an earthquake in 1783 changed the contours of the sea bed in the Straits of Messina and weakened the savage whirlpools, as late as 1824 a British naval officer wrote that he had seen ships spun round by Charybdis, including a seventy-four gun ship .

Bradford points out that before invention of the magnetic compass, North, South, East and West were not exact directions, and he took this into account when thinking about the sailing directions mentioned in the Odyssey. The stars were in different positions then, and the North wasn't marked by the Pole Star, while in Classical times the Greeks had the concept of a Summer East and a Winter East, since the sun rises and sets in different positions at different times of the year. Even in the 1960's, in decked boats with compasses and charts, Mediterranean fisherman and traders were less likely to put out to sea in rough weather than northern European sailors, and liked to hug the coast and lie at anchor each night, so Odysseus and his men in their open boats would have been even more likely to do so.

There are so many interesting things in this book, from the concept of sea gates like Stromboli, to the deep sea creatures thrown up onto the beaches at spring tides by the up-welling of cold water off Messina.

An utterly fascinating non-fiction book published in 1964, that should interest Odyssey fans and sailing enthusiasts alike.

Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge
MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Journal Entry 7 by kittiwake at on Monday, March 16, 2009

Released 15 yrs ago (3/21/2009 UTC) at

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At the Nottingham Bookcrossing meeting on Saturday lunchtime.

Journal Entry 8 by kittiwake on Tuesday, June 30, 2009
My mother went on holiday earlier this month to the Aeolian Islands which are featured in this book, and decided that she would like to read it again. "Ulysses Found" was still on the bookshelf at the Costa Coffee OBCZ, so I picked it up last week and passed it on to her.

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