Customer Reviews

The Conquest of the North Atlantic

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Eminent British naval historian Geoffrey Marcus gives us a new look at pre Columbian Viking and British exploration in the North Atlantic area. He provides us much additional information on the Viking discoveries and settlements in Iceland and Greenland. Also, he adds useful data on early Irish and Viking ship construction.

Marcus provides evidence that the first European to sight, though not land on, the North American continent was Bjarni Herjolfsson, not Leif Eiriksson. Readers interested in this little discussed period of history should not miss this important study.

I give two stars to this book decause of its good coverage of early norse/celtic/british exploration of the Northern Atlantic.
However the deliberate omission of important contributions by other people namely the Basque and the Portuguese in medieval times is difficult to understand. It's enough to look at a map to find a lot of non-norse/non-english/non-native names (as a small example the words "Labrador","Boa Ventura","Canada","Porto Novo" are Portuguese!).
If the title of this book was: "Early Norse and British exploration of the North Atlantic" I would give 5 stars.