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WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Rough Guides to Navigation in Stormy Seas
the coasts of the Mediterranean. They were not very accurate but they were better than nothing and gave medieval sailors some idea of the dangers to avoid. This site aims to chart some of the dangers facing modern navigators through the oceans of mis-information, propaganda and downright lies that swirl across the media daily and hourly. It will reproduce a number of the author's older efforts in this direction as well as up-to-date comment on current events, problems and personalities. As Bertrand Russell warned early on in the last century before he himself succumbed to the ailment he warned about; as Karl Popper never ceased to point out: perhaps the greatest danger facing civilization was the increasing tide of irrationality that was threatening to inundate Western culture and wipe out the advances in science, philosophy and the arts in the centuries since the Renaissance. This state of affairs has not improved since Russell and Popper wrote. Indeed evidence of unreason seems to increase in proportion to advancing mastery of technology. That the latter is not the same thing as science is generally misunderstood. Two consequences of this misunderstanding are on the one hand growing distrust and fear of science and, on the other, naive scientism or a blind belief in what are mistakenly believed to be scientific methods, thought to be applicable in all spheres of human endeavour. Portolani for Our Times will attempt to unravel some of these confusions. But because the task is Sysifean and the author only too aware of fallibility it is expected that readers will bear in mind that early navigators were succeeded by others who had at their disposal better charts and better instruments
TO THE SHIPS OF EVERY NATION AND TO ALL WHO SAIL IN THEM.
born near Oporto in Portugal and my mother, my brother and I near Liverpool in England: two great seaports. My brother, who travelled twice round the world, was a sailor as well as an actor and after he died on the Pacific coast of the USA, his ashes were scattered over the ocean as he wished. I was brought up on the English coast of the Irish Sea and in the fourteen years from 1927 to 1941 I made many ocean voyages, most of them between England and Portugal. Altogether I must have sailed in at least ten different vessels. Two of my journeys, however, were between Britain and America in wartime when the Atlantic was a battleground that was to become the graveyard of thousands of ships. In 1940 I sailed with my mother and brother on a Portuguese diplomatic passport out from Liverpool to New York on the Cunard liner SS Scythia. Towards the end of 1941 we sailed back from New York to Greenock in Scotland in the Blue Funnel freighter SS Myrmidon. Both voyages were risky undertakings. Censorship during the war years did not permit reports of Allied shipping losses so I discovered only after the war how real the risks had been. It was then I learned of the tragic fate of Scythia (sunk with over eighty children drowned) and Myrmidon (with all hands), and that every single ship I had ever sailed in during my childhood had been lost to enemy action together with their crews. An account of my wartime adventures appears in the Memoirs section of this site. ~~~~«»~~~~ |
| A Portolan |
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| PORTOLANI FOR OUR TIMES Patricia Lança's Web Site |
PREFACE