A GANNET TO THE RESCUE

Now that we seem to have astronomy on our side, let's see what drift, tide and wind would do to the craft of Odysseus:

As you can see, the North Atlantic Drift will carry him north and east, and there is a northerly flow off the coast of Norway.

Now the tides. These will push him about six hours north and then about six hours south at about half a knot, and about three hours more or less east or west at the same speed. The overall effect would be minimal as he has sails.

Next, the winds. These should be in the summer season.

There doesn't seem much doubt then that Odysseus was headed in an easterly direction.

Because of the north of east prevailing wind and drift direction, it is hard to say how much further north than due east he might be. But wherever he landed it would on this hypothesis have to be somewhere on the coast of Norway.

The troubles of Odysseus are far from over, though. The Immortal, Poseidon, the sea god who is father of the injured Cyclops Polyphemus, sees Odysseus and decides to give him "a good full portion of trouble". A storm wrecks the craft of Odysseus, and he hangs on to part of the wreck. Another Immortal, the goddess Ino, sees the trouble Odysseus is in:

"She took pity on Odysseus as he drifted and suffered hardship,

and likening herself to a winged gannet she came up

out of the water and perched on the (c)raft and spoke a word to him: ...

'Take off these clothes,---

and then strike out ... and make for a landfall

on the Phaiakian country, where your escape is destined.

And here, take this veil, it is immortal, and fasten it under

your chest; ---'

So spoke the goddess and handed him the veil, then herself

in the likeness of a gannet slipped back into the heaving

sea and the dark and tossing water closed above her."

Gannets are remarkable birds. When I was a navigating officer at sea I watched gannets many times. Sometimes over one hundred feet in the air, one would fold its wings and drop like a stone at high speed into the water, to come up holding a fish. Gannets are ocean birds. In Europe they winter further south, but off the coast of Spain or Africa. They are rarely if ever seen in the Mediterranean.

This one word, gannet, is what actually started me on the whole adventure of replotting the voyages of Odysseus. I'd seen plenty of gannets, but you find them only in the north. I knew at once that if the bird was a gannet, Odysseus had to be somewhere off, say, the coast of Scotland, the Orkneys, or the Faeroes, or Norway. The puzzle is the word Homer uses. Other translators refer to other birds, but I talked to a professor who is a philologist at the University of Toronto, and from what he said I conclude, as did Lattimore, that the best translation is gannet. So to me, this points directly to a northern climate.

After swimming up and down the coastline for two days looking for a place where the storm breakers are not crashing upon rocks, Odysseus finds a river mouth and finally gets ashore. He sleeps in a forest under some shrubs because, he says:

"...if I wait out the uncomfortable night by the river,

I fear that the heavy dew and the evil frost together

will be too much for my damaged strength ..."

So here we have frost, and we know that he is travelling in mid-summer. Again, this implies to me a northern climate. Now we know what the climate is like today in the Mediterranean and in Norway, but what was it in Odysseus' time? I went to the department of biology at the University of Toronto and talked to Professor Jim Ritchie.

JR "I'm interested in reconstructing past environments, and particularly the past vegetation cover of the circum-Mediterranean area including North Africa. We use a variety of techniques in doing this, particularly the analysis of pollen grains that are preserved in sediments."

EF "At one point Odysseus is reported to have sheltered between two bushes, he says, because of the evil frost. Now wherever he was at the time it was mid-summer, because the Mycenaeans were famous for not voyaging during the winter months. So my question then is how far north would he have been to have needed this precaution against evil frost in mid-summer?"

JR "He would certainly have had to have been at elevations greater than 3,000 or 4,000 metres above sea level. That is to say, he would have had to have been on the higher mountains to have stood the remotest chance of frosts. But even that would narrow the area down to very small spots in the Mediterranean area."

EF "Well, according to the text, actually all he did was to swim up and down the rocky coastline, looking for somewhere to get ashore safely. He found a small river flowing into the sea, got ashore at the river, and just struggled, one gathers, a few hundred yards at the most on to the shoreline and there found the bushes, and sheltered himself beneath them. So I think any possibility of high altitude from the coast would be out of the question. It does seem from what you say then that this piece of evidence would indicate a more northerly climate than the Mediterranean."

JR "Yes, I'd say that's a clear assumption."