"Discovery" conventionally means "discovery by someone -- usually Europeans -- other than the original inhabitants." Text books credit Captain Cook with discovering Australia and New Zealand, but at the time "Captain Dalrymple, head of the Map Department at the British Admiralty. . . wrote a furious protest" (388): Cook could hardly have discovered Australia since he had in hand Admirality maps already depicting that continent! It turns out that the Chinese regularly journeyed to the Australia as early as the ninth century to mine copper, and fifteenth-century Chinese voyages of exploration led directly to the maps Cook used. As Gavin Menzies explains, "Cook's orders from the Admiralty were to explore down to 40 o S -- the latitude of South Australia shown on both charts -- where they 'had good reason' to suppose the Southern Continent existed. They certainly did -- they already had two charts showing such a continent at 40 o S (192).
Menzies's book on fifteenth-century Chinese exploration points to the following facts and deductions:
Europeans possessed navigational charts and maps depicting the coasts of Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America before any Europeans had traveled to these places.
The great European explorers had either seen these maps or had copies in their possessions during their voyages.
The only possible source of such information were the voyages of 1421-24 made by a great Chinese fleet led by Zheng He.
The Venetian Niccolò da Conti, who sailed with Chinese mariners throughout S. E. Asia, is the most likely candidate as the means of transmission of Chinese maps to the West.
About Cook Menzies concludes:
Cook was a great man, and the greatest navigator of all time, but he discovered neither New Zealand nor Australia. More than two centuries before he embarked on his voyages, a cluster of maps from the Dieppe School showed Australia with remarkable clarity. The Jean Rotz map was in possession of the British Admiralty when Cook set sail, and Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook, had acquired another of the finest, the Harleian (Dauphin), showing Australia with the same precision as the Rotz map . . . The Endeavour Reef, on which Cook later ran aground, is clearly shown on these earlier maps, together with what later became known as Cooktown Harbour. When Cook had extricated himself for the reef, he sailed directly for Cooktown, the only harbour in a thousand miles of costline. "This harbour will do excellently for our purposes, although it is not as large as I have been told." Desliens's map does indeed show it larger, for sea levels were lower when Admiral Zhou Man originally charted the coast in 1422-23. [388]
Menzies, Gavin. 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America. New York: William Morrow, 2003.
The chief store-houses of the Hindu myths, as also the major influential texts within Hinduism, have been the two great epics Ramayana and Mahabharatha, the Puranas, eighteen in number, and the five principal Tantras.
The Ramayana (adventures of Rama), considered by certain scholars to be the oldest of the Sanskrit epic poems, is reputed to have been written by the sage Valmiki. Scholars believe it to have been composed around the 5th century B.C. and to have received its present form a century or two later. Ramayana is divided into seven Kandas (sections) and contains about 50,000 lines.
The Maharabharatha (the great story) is the longest epic poem of the world. It is divided into eighteen Parvas (or books) and contains about 220,000 lines. The reputed author is Vyasa, the arranger of the Vedas themselves. The origin of the work Is buried in antiquity. It is believed to have been passed down through the oral tradition for several centuries before it was first written down, presumably in the ninth century B.C. This written version was continuously added to and modified by successive generations till about 200 A.D. Many of its legends and stories are of Vedic character and of great antiqulty. The Mahabharatha has been the source for innumerable poems and dramas of later days. In fact there is a school which traces the source of the Ramayana itself to the Mahabharatha.
"Purana" means an ancient legend or tale of olden times. The Puranic period succeeded the Itihasa or epic period. The oldest of the Puranas, Vayu Purana, may date back to about the sixth century. and some of the others may be as recent as the thirteenth century. The Puranas are eighteen in number, and in adition to these there are eighteen Upa Puranas or subordinate works which were written at a later date. Among these are the Sthala puranas, which deal with the legendary histories of places, especially temples. The Upa-Puranas share with the Puranas the characteristic of extolling the virtues of one particular deity while recognizing other deities as subsidiary.
Other modern works exist, to which the term Purana has been applied. The Purunas are all written in verse, and their invariable form is that, of a dialogue between an exponent and an inquirer. interspersed with the dialogues and observations of other individuals. Whereas the epics treat of the legendary actions of heroes as mortal men, the Puranas celebrate the powers and works of Gods. But perhaps the most charateristic feature of the Purunas is that they are essentially diffuse and expansive and deal with almost every topic of interest to mankind. Thus, there are philosophical speculations, theology, and mythology all combined together within the expository narrative.
Sankaran, Chitra. The Myth Connection: The Use of Hindu Mythology in Some Novels of Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan. Ahmedabad, Bombay, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Bangladore, Lucknow, Calcutta, New Delhi, Maadras: Allied Publishers, 1993.
This document has been adapted for the Postcolonial Literature and Culture Web with the kind permission of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS). It derives from a project directed by Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English, the Queen's University of Belfast.
There has always been a problem for Canada with the definition of its national identity. In fact, it would almost be fair to say that an unease about the lack of such a collective identity is what defines Canadians the best. This page briefly considers some of the causes of this situation, and then goes on to consider some broad themes which might be described as distinctively and characteristically Canadian. Obviously, this is a very tricky area, as any discussion of national identities must be, with the twin dangers of oversimplification and essentialism. But the purpose here is merely to convey to the uninitiated a little taste of what Canada is and has been, in cultural terms.
It has always been apparent that Canada a constructed nation. Now while this is in some senses true of all nations, the ancient European countries have been able to disguise their constructedness through gradual evolution and myths of national origin. Before the Europeans arrived, what came to be known as Canada was a vast, mostly uninhabited wilderness, and the various peoples who did live there had as little sense of a collective identity as they did of international borders. The early history of European settlement consisted mainly of fur trading with the Natives, and a steady trickle of French immigration into a relatively small area in what became Quebec.
Northrop Frye has written of the "garrison mentality" of these early settlers, faced as they were by a huge and inhospitable wilderness, and the constant threat of attack from the Natives on whose land they had built their homes. It was not until 1763 that Britain gained control of the northern territories with the conquest of New France; and the independence of the French speaking Canadians has remained an issue until the present day. And of course it is one of the integral notions of the European concept of nationhood that the state should be based on the existence of a community of common language speaking inhabitants. Canada has, in the late twentieth century, witnessed an even wider diversification in cultural and linguistic identities with the arrival of massive numbers of immigrants from Asia and the Third World. She, at an official level, has tried to adopt the self-image of the "mosaic", rather than trying to assimilate the various groupings to the more or less hegemonic English speaking culture. Nonetheless, tensions continue to run high between the cultural and political notions of nationality.
It would seem, on the face of it, that the problems faced by Canada are remarkably similar to those of the United States. Why, then, has the latter country been able to form a comparatively clear and coherent sense of its own identity? An important point to bear in mind here is that the chief original motivation for Canadian national unity was anti-Americanism and a resistance to continentalism. This united the English and French as nothing else could. Thus, at the outset, Canada defined itself in negative terms, and for a long time afterwards its political life was pragmatic and inductive: what mattered was what worked, what would ensure survival, independence and economic growth. By way of contrast, the US has largely had a deductive politics, founded on the tenets of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They defined what was to count as American and what was un-American. She was the "New World", and she was intent on abandoning old world pragmatism for a fresh political idealism. Partly because of this, and partly because of its historically close relationship to the British Crown, Canada has often tended to be culturally and politically conservative where the US has been radical (her constitution and parliamentary system are still largely based on the British model). In recent decades, however, there has been an increasing willingness to accept multiculturalism and participation in a global environment where national boundaries are becoming less and less important. On the other hand, efforts to foster a national consciousness, albeit of the "mosaic", continue unabated, and governmental subsidisation of the arts, which are seen as vital in this area, is among the most substantial in the Western world.