The Age of Reconnaissance began with the Opening of the Oceanic Seaways—to use the terms invented by John Parry to introduce the period of European ‘discovery’ and ‘encounter’. With respect to oceanic seaways, we must not forget the earlier history of Asian marine enterprise in the seas of the East, nor the earlier Scandinavian out-thrust that reached to Vinland. And with respect to reconnaissance, we recognise the earlier overland globetrotting, typified by Marco Polo and his Arab near-contemporary, Ibn Battuta. None of this, however, disallows the fact that, in the middle medieval centuries, the greater part of the Atlantic Ocean, and almost all of it below the fortieth parallel North, was empty of humanity, with not a ship on the high seas, not a human being on the high-seas islands. Only one corner of this empty southern ocean was exceptional, and to that I return. The inhabitants of each of the coasts of the central and southern Atlantic, Amerindians and Africans, went on water but only in canoes. Th...