scholarly journals The ships that headed north - an archaeological perspective

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 175-186
Author(s):  
Mike Belasus

Information on ships that were used for the North Atlantic trade, mainly from Hamburg and Bremen, is scarce and, to date, has been completely derived from historical documents. This is problematic because the terms used for ship types do not represent technical definitions. As there is currently no direct archaeological evidence for the ships that headed north, finds of ships and ship timbers from other areas had been considered to offer a first glance into shipbuilding and the mechanisms of change in building methods. Two main building methods can be distinguished in the medieval period for sea-going and coastal craft: the bottom-based Bremen-type shipbuilding method and clinker shipbuilding methods. The new carvel shipbuilding method was established in the late fifteenth century in north-west Europe. The archaeological evidence shows that there was no immediate change over but that in many cases, there was instead a convergence to achieve flush carvel-built hulls. Considering the Bremen-type with its flat bottom and limited sailing abilities and the fact that the German merchants only started to participate in the North Atlantic trade in the late fifteenth century, the question arises of whether there were other technical issues that prevented them from this enterprise until they managed to gain the knowledge required to build ocean-going vessels that could withstand a journey of several weeks across the North Sea and Norwegian Sea.

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Knut Helle

North Atlantic trade in the high Middle Ages was centred on Bergen. The Bergen connection was important to the North Atlantic islanders and townsmen who specialized in trading with them, but up to the early fourteenth century did not count for much in Bergen’s total trade. This changed when larger assignments of Icelandic stockfish were sent to Bergen from the 1340s and reexported via the town’s Hanseatic settlement, the later Kontor. During the fifteenth century fish exports from the North Atlantic to Bergen declined sharply as the English increasingly fetched their fish directly from Iceland, and Hanseatic merchants from Hamburg and Lübeck followed in their wake to Iceland and the more southerly islands. Yet, in the author’s opinion, Hanseatic trade with the North Atlantic from Bergen was not reduced to the degree that has often been assumed. And it should not be overlooked that Bergen had economic relations with the North Atlantic islands outside the Hanse.


Author(s):  
Lars U. Scholl ◽  
Lars U. Scholl ◽  
Lars U. Scholl

This essay analyses the North Atlantic Cotton Trade through records of cotton arrivals at Liverpool, using two sets of data from 1830-1832 and 1853-1855. Using Customs Bills of Entry, Williams presents data of cotton receipts from the United States to Liverpool; quantities of bales exported; numbers of vessels; origin ports of vessels; distinguishes between regular and occasional cotton traders; arrivals at Liverpool by nationality; and vessel tonnage. He determines that the majority of vessels participated in the cotton trade seasonally, and suggests that the cotton trade was not self-contained, but part of a complex interrelationship within the North Atlantic trade system, encompassing commodity dealings, shipping employment levels, and the seasonal characteristics of cargo. The conclusion requests further scholarly research into the pattern of ship movements in the Atlantic. Two appendices provide more data, concerning arrival dates of regular traders in Liverpool, and the month of departure of cotton vessels from Southern states.


AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Rolf Hammel-Kiesow

This paper explores the limits of the Hanseatic Diet’s ability to regulate Hanseatic trade with Iceland and the North Atlantic island groups of Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes*. It comes to the conclusion that the Hanseatic Diets prohibited direct commercial links to Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes consistently from 1416, but turned a blind eye to the Iceland trade. The reasons for this inconsistent policy were the necessity of maintaining the Bergen’s monopoly on the stockfish trade (which was also in the interest of the Danish-Norwegian crown),  while at the same time keeping the door open for Hanseatic merchants who were not active in the Bergen trade to forge commercial links with Iceland, albeit at their own risk. The representatives of the Hanseatic towns often preferred to leave an issue undecided, in order to keep as many options open as possible. The huge divergence in the interests of merchants and towns forced the Diet to dissemble, pursuing policies out of the public gaze which subverted the resolutions the Diet had passed for public consumption.


AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Adolf E. Hofmeister

There is little evidence of Bremen merchants in Norway before the royal charters issued from 1279 onwards, even though Bremen had been the seat of the missionary archbishop for the Nordic countries since the ninth century. Trade in Bergen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was dominated by the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic Sea coast led by merchants from Lübeck. Despite opposition from Hanseatic merchants sailing to Bergen, merchants from Hamburg and Bremen developed new trading posts to barter cod on Iceland and Shetland in the fifteenth century. Traders from Hamburg and Bremen on Iceland competed for licences issued by the Danish king. The 1558 debt register of a merchant from Bremen in Kumbaravogur provides considerable insight into this trade. The Danish king restricted sailings to Iceland to Danish merchants from 1601. On Shetland the Scottish foud allotted landing places to foreign skippers and traders. Merchants from Bremen became respected members of the island communities and in the seventeenth century they changed to trading in herring. Several tariff rate rises led to the end of Bremen sailings to Shetland by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bremen merchants in Norway succeeded in breaking the Lübeck dominance in Bergen in the sixteenth century. By 1600, other Norwegian harbours in the North Atlantic, notably Stavanger, were also destinations for ships from Bremen.


Author(s):  
Michael Larsen ◽  
Morten Bjerager ◽  
Tor Nedkvitne ◽  
Snorre Olaussen ◽  
Thomas Preuss

NOTE: This article was published in a former series of GEUS Bulletin. Please use the original series name when citing this article, for example: Larsen, M., Bjerager, M., Nedkvitne, T., Olaussen, S., & Preuss, T. (2001). Pre-basaltic sediments (Aptian–Paleocene) of the Kangerlussuaq Basin, southern East Greenland. Geology of Greenland Survey Bulletin, 189, 99-106. https://doi.org/10.34194/ggub.v189.5163 _______________ The recent licensing round in the deep-water areas south-east of the Faeroe Islands has emphasised the continued interest of the oil industry in the frontier areas of the North Atlantic volcanic margins. The search for hydrocarbons is at present focused on the Cretaceous– Paleocene succession with the Paleocene deepwater play as the most promising (Lamers & Carmichael 1999). The exploration and evaluation of possible plays are almost solely based on seismic interpretation and limited log and core data from wells in the area west of the Shetlands. The Kangerlussuaq Basin in southern East Greenland (Fig. 1) provides, however, important information on basin evolution prior to and during continental break-up that finally led to active sea-floor spreading in the northern North Atlantic. In addition, palaeogeographic reconstructions locate the southern East Greenland margin only 50–100 km north-west of the present-day Faeroe Islands (Skogseid et al. 2000), suggesting the possibility of sediment supply to the offshore basins before the onset of rifting and sea-floor spreading. In this region the Lower Cretaceous – Palaeogene sedimentary succession reaches almost 1 km in thickness and comprises sediments of the Kangerdlugssuaq Group and the siliciclastic lower part of the otherwise basaltic Blosseville Group (Fig. 2). Note that the Kangerdlugssuaq Group was defined when the fjord Kangerlussuaq was known as ‘Kangerdlugssuaq’. Based on field work by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) during summer 1995 (Larsen et al. 1996), the sedimentology, sequence stratigraphy and basin evolution of the Kangerlussuaq Basin were interpreted and compared with the deep-water offshore areas of the North Atlantic (Larsen et al. 1999a, b).


1967 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-404
Author(s):  
A. F. Crossley ◽  
I. N. Parkinson

1. INTRODUCTION. The distribution of jet streams over the North Atlantic, Europe and the Mediterranean for the two years 1957–8 was described in an earlier paper (Crossley, 1961); the present paper extends the study to the area which is here referred to somewhat loosely as the Middle East —it extends between latitudes 40° N. and 10;° N., and from longitude 30° E. to 90° E. in the north but to only 65° E. in the south (Fig. 1). The aircraft trunk routes intersecting this area include those from the Eastern Mediterranean across Arabia and the Persian Gulf to West Pakistan and north-west India.The jet streams which affect the Atlantic-European area in the upper troposphere are mostly of the ‘polar’ type with a core in the neighbourhood of 300 mb. so that they can be conveniently located as a rule on the contour charts for 300 mb.; in the Mediterranean region and in the corresponding latitudes of the North Atlantic the westerly subtropical jet stream is also concerned and charts for both 300 and 200 mb.


Ocean Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Lucia Pineau-Guillou ◽  
Pascal Lazure ◽  
Guy Wöppelmann

Abstract. We investigated the long-term changes of the principal tidal component M2 along North Atlantic coasts, from 1846 to 2018. We analysed 18 tide gauges with time series starting no later than 1940. The longest is Brest with 165 years of observations. We carefully processed the data, particularly to remove the 18.6-year nodal modulation. We found that M2 variations are consistent at all the stations in the North-East Atlantic (Cuxhaven, Delfzijl, Hoek van Holland, Newlyn, Brest), whereas some discrepancies appear in the North-West Atlantic. The changes started long before the 20th century and are not linear. The secular trends in M2 amplitude vary from one station to another; most of them are positive, up to 2.5 mm/yr at Wilmington since 1910. Since 1990, the trends switch from positive to negative values in the North-East Atlantic. Concerning the possible causes of the observed changes, the similarity between the North Atlantic Oscillation and M2 variations in the North-East Atlantic suggests a possible influence of the large-scale atmospheric circulation on the tide. Our statistical analysis confirms large correlations at all the stations in the North-East Atlantic. We discuss a possible underlying mechanism. A different spatial distribution of mean sea level (corresponding to water depth) from one year to another, depending on the low-frequency sea-level pressure patterns, could impact the propagation of the tide in the North Atlantic basin. However, the hypothesis is at present unproven.


Hydrobiologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Ollé ◽  
Laura Vilà-Valls ◽  
Jaime Alvarado-Bremer ◽  
Genoveva Cerdenares ◽  
Thuy Yen Duong ◽  
...  

AbstractEuthynnus (family Scombridae) is a genus of marine pelagic fish species with a worldwide distribution that comprises three allopatric species: E. alletteratus, E. affinis and E. lineatus. All of them targeted by artisanal and commercial fisheries. We analyzed 263 individuals from Atlantic and Pacific Oceans using two genetic markers, the mtDNA Control Region (350 bp) and nuclear calmodulin (341 bp). The results obtained challenge the phylogeny of this group. We found a deep genetic divergence, probably at species level, within E. alletteratus, between the North Atlantic-Mediterranean and the Tropical East Atlantic. This deep genetic divergence was tested with several species delimitation methods. This complete phylogeographic association between the North Atlantic and the Tropical East Atlantic support the hypothesis of two cryptic species. In addition, population genetic heterogeneity was detected between the North East Atlantic–Mediterranean and North West Atlantic regions. Our results indicate two scales of differentiation in what is currently considered a single population. Accordingly, for management purposes, the populations of E. alletteratus, should be divided into a minimum of three management units. On the other hand, the high level of differentiation found in E. alletteratus contrasts with the shallow genetic divergence of E. affinis and E. lineatus.


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