From the Editor - April 2016

From the Editor - April 2016

I recently started taking an online course about pre-colonial Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), and one of the interesting things I’ve learned is that the first exploration of the GoM by non-indigenous people is speculated by some to have been by the Phoenicians, the most accomplished mariners in the world during the period before Christ. Apparently there is good evidence that the Phoenicians (based in the eastern Mediterranean) had already circumnavigated Africa by 600 B.C., so perhaps were at least capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Their contemporaries in Mesoamerica were the Olmec people, who populated what is today the GoM coastal plain of southern Mexico. On some of the Olmec sculptures found at the ruins of La Venta, near the GoM coast in Tabasco State, there are depictions of men wearing headgear reminiscent of the Phoenician style, pointed shoes, and sporting full beards (rare among native Mesoamericans). This may be pseudo-history, but it’s kind of fun to contemplate.

Though some of my Norwegian colleagues at Statoil might propose that the Vikings were likely the first Europeans to traverse the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the first well-documented evidence of foreign exploration of the GoM comes from the first few decades after Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas in 1492. Surprisingly, Columbus never entered the GoM on any of his four voyages. The first European explorer known to navigate a portion of the GoM was actually the Italian Amerigo Vespucci (my friends over at Eni, take pride!), in 1497, who on his way back to Europe from the western Caribbean passed through the southeastern GoM and Straits of Florida. On Vespucci’s Caribbean/GoM expedition was Spanish cartographer Juan de la Cosa, who had also been a member of the crew on all four of Columbus’ New World voyages. After his return to Sevilla, de la Cosa published the first known map of the Americas, the Mappa Mundi published in 1500 (see page 9). Note the GoM and Caribbean were shown as being one and the same, and also the difference in accuracy of different portions of the map. Cuba and Hispaniola have a fair degree of detail as they were the first places to be colonized in the Americas. In particular, Hispaniola is depicted to have more or less the same shape we know today. In contrast, the very existence of the Yucatan Peninsula seems to have not yet been recognized, probably because Vespucci supposedly only sailed through the southeastern GoM, to the east of the peninsula.

In those earliest years of exploration, the Gulf of Mexico was called different names by the cartographers of Sevilla and elsewhere. As one might expect, initially it was named the Mare Cathaynum (Chinese Sea). Later, acknowledging the rapidly emerging doubts about the region’s proximity to Asia, it was known variously as the Sinus Magnus Antillarum (Great Bay of the Antilles); the Golfo de Flórida; the Golfo de Cortés, in honor of the most important of the conquistadores, Hernán Cortés; and the Mediterráneo de América, an interesting foreshadowing of the more recent view that both marginal sea regions were at one time in much closer proximity, and part of the same Tethyan geological realm. But since 1550, the name that stuck has been the good old Golfo de México.