"NAVIGATORS" .. an exerpt ..
"Gathering verbal momentum but still managing to direct my own somewhat serpentine rowing efforts, Fuller described how the earliest navigators gradually spread throughout the island world of Micronesia, and how they had gained great influence, because of their seemingly magic power to go great distances and return with treasure from no one knew where; they guarded the secrets of navigation, he said, and even lived apart from the other members of their tribe while they were onshore. They became the high priests and witch doctors and spiritual leaders of their people, and they continued to develop their secret mathematical knowledge, and their successors grew more and more proficient at mathematics and astronomy, and more and more daring in their navigation. They reached India, where they built tall star-sighting towers on the mainland, and they learned how to ride the monsoons across the Indian Ocean in dhows until eventually they went overland to the Mediterranean. The descendants of these navigators formed the priesthood of the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, became famous as Phoenician navigators, and established the brilliant and powerful Minoan civilization on Crete, still without relinquishing the secrets of the mathematical knowledge that was the source of their power, and their descendants, in turn, pushed on, in bigger and more seaworthy boats, all the way up the Atlantic coast of Europe to England and Scandinavia, where they became known as Vikings, and down the rivers of Russia and out across the North Atlantic to Greenland and America. When the Ionian Greeks overwhelmed the Minoan civilization at Knossos, on Crete, however, the secret mathematical code was finally broken, and immediately afterward, to the amazement of all subsequent historians unacquainted with Fuller’s theory, Greek science suddenly blossomed forth with quadratic equations and other highly advanced methods of calculation. “And now,” Fuller said, “We come to the Garden of Eden story in the Old Testament, and we find that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, and I am going to tell you that Eve was not a woman at all—she was the boat. Boats have been feminine from the beginning, and Eve was the ribbed, deep-sea ship that took the man Adam into the great globe-girdling experience that proved to him the earth was round and therefore finite. And the apple from the tree of knowledge represented the earth, and the serpent was Naga, the great god of the sea, and this is really the very, very long-hidden story.”
As Fuller told it, the whole rousing saga sounded absolutely irrefutable. He expects to write a book about it within the next year or so—one of five books by him that the Macmillan Company has contracted to publish—and the film director John Huston, a friend of his, has said he wants to make it into a motion picture.
There is no doubt whatever in Fuller’s mind that the whole development of modern science and technology has resulted from a willingness on the part of a very few men to sail into the wind of tradition, to trust in their own intellect, and to take advantage of their natural mobility. According to Fuller, the influence of this tiny minority, the navigator-priests of pre-history who ventured into the outlaw area and returned with the new wealth that was knowledge, was always far greater than that of the kings or other rulers to whom they were officially subject, and the situation is no different today; it is modern technology, rather than political leadership, that directs the real movement of contemporary history. “Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months over two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death,” he has written. “Take away the politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries and leave them their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production, and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.”
Bay of Fundy sailor .. 2018
