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Tacking against a head wind was familiar to Athens and Rome, and Carthage could not have remained ignorant of this technique. The steering gear of their ships, pivoting on its axle, was already highly developed. Lucretius shows a helmsman steering ‘a mighty ship’: ‘however much way it has gathered, a single hand steers it—a single tiller twists it this way or that’. In his Medea, Seneca also testifies to ships’ manoeuvring capabilities: ‘Tiphys made bold…to write new laws for the winds’ by skilful manoeuvring, and Virgil too writes of how Aeneas’s companions are able to stand up to sudden and often violent variations in the winds: As one man they all set their sails, letting them out in time, first to port and then to starboard.

Moreover, he [the king of Denmark] has said that an island has been found by many in this ocean, which has been called Vinland, because there vines grow wild and bear good grapes. 47 The narratives of the sagas, however, are not at all supported by archaeological evidence, especially as regards Vinland. The Newport Tower on Rhode Island, like the Kensington Stone in Minnesota, have been shown to be forgeries manufactured in the nineteenth century, and the map of Vinland acquired by Yale University in 1966, is worth little more.

Between 1150 and 1250, under leadership from Lübeck, the German Baltic communities organized themselves into a commercial league, the Hanseatic, at the very moment that the countries of the littoral were offering their salted herring, wood and mined goods. The Hanseatic League was able to establish an extensive network in the hinterland, such as Brunswick in Saxony and Cologne in Westphalia. ’2 Having at first been able to go by the Moslem trade route running north of the Mediterranean basin through the Black Sea, and following the loss of Constantinople and the Turkish market in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Genoese organized a turn towards the west in order to dominate trade routes such as the alum of Rome towards Flanders.