An island one thousand miles north of Ibiza
(part one)
I wouldn’t describe myself as a history buff — yet I am fascinated at how a plucky northern island of grey skies, green grass, and whites people became the empire that relatively dominated the globe for centuries in the second millennium after Jesus.
Why not Belgium, Japan, or New Zealand? Similar land sizes and climates. The answers are deeply nuanced, involve a myriad of factors, and are perhaps the summation of a billion little obsure human developments and only the biggest ones were written down for us to posthumously postulate. That is why I will be utilizing a new approach called “selective revisionism” where I start with my subjective experience of present-day England — then reverse engineer it to hypothesize about the past
.
It’s way more fun.
Here’s my hyopothesis:
This island came to dominate the second millennium with water-vessel innovations that sprouted an elite navy to protect their early lead in the global sea trade.
Reasonable hypothesis, wouldn’t you agree?
But what we really want to know is WHY this naval prowess was endowed to these folks here
before their temperate maritime contemporaries.
Was it early constitutional governance, sea-going military opportunities with France, strategic marriages, political reforms, and technological innovation?
Sure.
But I think it was predominantly the weather.
There are weeks of the british winter that are stuck on a daily cycle of pitch black to dark grey to medium grey to light grey back to medium grey to dark grey to pitch black.
Anyone experiencing the tail-end of this vicious, sunless cycle is adamantly plotting how to get themselves closer to the equator.
The sense that one’s sanity is slowly oozing into the grey is actually a great motivator. Evidently it was enough to conceptualize and build a Race-Built Galleon by 1570.
Just imagine being Sir Francis Drake setting sail for literally anywhere else and after months of drifting in the wind. Then he hits a warm, luscious, caribbean beaches full of people who swim and pick fresh fruit year-round while he’s spent much of his life eating cockles in the cold rain.
It’s no wonder he pulled up and started acting like a total asshole. We would’ve done the same.
This theory of mine even has a catchy title for click-bait: