Exploration | A Moment in Time

Quest for Mt. Everest II

October 4, 2016PermalinkNancy WaldoToday's AMITBritish History, Exploration, Technology

Lead: The challenge of Mt. Everest was clear from the time its height was determined in the 1800s, but attempts to reach the summit are not known to have begun until the 1920s.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: The peak of Mt. Everest is one of earth’s most hostile places. The air is thin. No crops can be grown there. No domestic animals can live there. Any attempt on the summit would require taking along those things necessary to sustain life. Long months of adaptation to the high altitude, supplementary oxygen in tanks, food and water would have to be dragged up nearly impassible terrain which, in the early days, no one had ever crossed. The key to the eventual success of the assault on Everest was a nomadic people, Tibetan-speaking clans who struggled for survival on the lower slopes of the mountain by trading and herding livestock. These are the Sherpa. They were capable of carrying the large loads of supplies that made the climb possible.

Quest for Mt. Everest I

October 3, 2016PermalinkNancy WaldoToday's AMITBritish History, Exploration, Technology

America’s First Century: The Mother Country, 1607 II

January 1, 2001PermalinkNancy WaldoToday's AMITAmerican History, English History, Exploration

Lead: The England that sent out the first colonists on the Virginia Adventure in 1607 still very much saw itself as a part of The Great Chain of Being, a society ordered top to bottom from God to dirt. Virginia helped break the chain.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: In the 1700s European writers spoke of a Great Chain of Being, an idea which had been around at least since Greek civilization and which described the universe as a hierarchy with God at the top, in His heaven and all creation, in perfectly ordered ranks descending down, down, down to inanimate stones. This world view emerged from the military requirements and feudal realities of the medieval period and was ideally created to bring order out of chaos. Even by 1600 most Englishmen, obsessed with regulation and stability, thought they fit somewhere in that comfortable arrangement. The higher one’s station or status in society, the closer one was to God, thereby meriting deference and respect. The King was higher than nobles, masters over servants, husbands over wives, men over women and so on. Wherever one fit on the chain was his or her allotted place in life and they should be content in there in their place. If, by some good fortune, either, financial, military or political, one moved up the chain, then it was a clear sign of God’s favor and blessing.

America’s First Century: The Mother Country, 1607 III

January 1, 2001PermalinkNancy WaldoToday's AMITAmerican History, English History, Exploration

Lead: Changing economic conditions and social challenges laid the foundation for England’s colonial enterprise. Seeking new markets and new fortunes adventurers found their way to places like Virginia.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Since deep into the medieval period, the basis for England’s national wealth had been wool. Over the centuries, tons of raw wool had been harvested on English hillsides and shipped to the Continent where it was fashioned into cloth, but by 1600 the wool trade was on the wane. Markets had been disrupted by religious and economic conflict in Europe and there had developed a glut of wool in France and Holland the traditional buyers of England’s raw goods. The Crown, which derived much of its income from import and export taxes on foreign trade, encouraged merchants and traders to find new markets for English wool.

America’s First Century: The Mother Country, 1607 I

January 1, 2001PermalinkNancy WaldoToday's AMITAmerican History, English History, Exploration

Lead: Nearly four centuries have passed since a fledgling English outpost barely clung to life on the rim of the vast Chesapeake Bay. Yet, the survival of Jamestown reflected a new place for England in the world.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Europeans were not the first humans to inhabit North America, nor were the English the first Europeans to settle the New World. Norsemen, Basque fishermen, the colonial Spanish and Portuguese, a few lost Englishmen, and, of course, of most ancient vintage, Native Americans had visited, hunted, fished, mined, pillaged, cultivated, or settled North, Central and South America for centuries. Long before the three little ships of Christopher Newport’s armada dropped their human cargo on the misty peninsula in the Powatan estuary in 1607, the so-called Western Isles supported, in some places, quite brilliant human civilization.

Leadership: Magellan, A Leader Loses His Way – II

November 20, 1999PermalinkGabe OffenbackToday's AMITEuropean History, Exploration

Lead: On March 6, 1521, having surmounted open mutiny, uncharted waters, freezing temperatures, excruciating hunger and a seemingly endless voyage across the Pacific, the tiny fleet of Ferdinand Magellan landed in the Philippines. He then lost his way.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: How is that a leader as determined, as focused, as careful as Magellan could lose his way, in his case with fatal consequences? It began in the expedition’s second week in the Philippines. They were in the Viscayan Islands. Magellan’s servant, Enrique, purchased many years before in Malaya, was native to the region, spoke the local language and was welcomed by the natives as one of their own. Enrique was the first man to circumnavigate the globe and his master was ecstatic. Magellan had been vindicated. All the pain and suffering, now seemed worth it.

Maori v. European: Cultural Clash in New Zealand – II

November 13, 1999PermalinkGabe OffenbackToday's AMITEuropean History, Exploration

Lead: With the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand the indigenous culture of the Maori faced a challenge which they were in the end unable to resist.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In December 1642 Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sailed into what became Golden Bay on the northern coast of New Zealand’s south island. He received a curious, but hostile reception as did British Captain James Cook a century later. Cook’s trip was for scientific exploration, he was commissioned to examine and classify new species of plants and animals, but his claim of the islands for Britain set the stage for the arrival of colonists, traders and missionaries during the following decades.

Maori v. European: Cultural Clash in New Zealand – I

November 13, 1999PermalinkGabe OffenbackToday's AMITEuropean History, Exploration

Lead: Inevitably, the ever-expanding European colonial enterprise discovered Zeelandia Nova, but when Dutch arrived in New Zealand in 1642 they found a well- established culture already there.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: New Zealand, rugged, rich, wildly beautiful, hidden behind a vast oceanic barrier, was the final large land mass colonized by the human race. It is estimated that not until about AD 800 did Polynesian explorers, probably manning large capacity outrigger canoes, find their way to the northern of New Zealand’s two major islands, so remote that it is 1000 miles southeast from the closest part of Australia. Their arrival was the culmination of one of humanity’s greatest colonial expansions. Out from the East Asian land mass into the southern Pacific archepelago these Austronesian-speaking colonists exploded. 2000 years before the Vikings ranged west to North America, Indonesia, New Guinea, Tonga, Fiji, Rarotonga, and Tahiti were prosperous outposts of this eastern expansion. Finally, wheeling southwest they came to New Zealand.