I was looking at the Cantino Planisphere with its amazingly accurate outline of Africa. This seems even more amazing when you see that even parts of Europe like the British Isles and Scandinavia are far less accurate.

The map was supposedly made in Lisbon in 1502, and thus the available geographic knowledge of most of the coastline of Africa would have derived from a small number of voyages in the preceeding couple of decades. However when you look at example voyages, e.g. de Gama's first voyage to India, it doesn't seem like they tracked the coast closely enough to be able to produce maps of such accuracy.

What's the explanation for this? I guess it could be that the recent and important voyages to India had stimulated more accurate mapping than previously, with Portuguese navigators having little need to accurately navigate around Scotland or into the Baltic. However I'm still wondering how the voyages of Dias, de Gama etc. were able to provide this detail.

Edit - I just found an article by historian Patricia Seed explaining how the map making process worked for Portuguese explorers of the African coast, it's quite comprehensive and interesting. It also notes though that much knowledge of this exploration period was lost in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Portugal in 1755.

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s theme comes to us from /u/itsalrightwithme!

Oh my, you shouldn’t have gone to such trouble… The theme today is unwanted gifts, so please share historical tales of presents that the recipient really didn’t want. Diplomatic presents, personal presents, heads on platters, whatever.

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: trying a more esoteric theme; we’ll be talking about the scent of history. Get ready with any information about smelly smells from history, good smells, bad smells, or just whatever smells.

If you go to the British Monarchy website there's a drop-down list of Commonwealth realms.

I'm pretty certain that the realms are listed in the order that they were officially constituted as independent Commonwealth realms, at least according to the historians at Buckingham Palace.

The strange thing is that Canada comes after Australia and New Zealand. This is a bit surprising. Canada became a dominion in 1867 before Australia (1901) and New Zealand (1907). Canada adopted the Statute of Westminster when it was passed in 1931 before Australia (1942) and New Zealand (1947). Canada gained full legal control of its constitution in 1982 after New Zealand (1947) but before Australia (1986).

Does anyone have any theories about how they are determining the official order?

It seems important to me, because it could be the closest we have to an official independence date for each country.

Like this old thing, the Venus of Willendorf, that's over 25,000 years old. Couldn't it just be a dirty gag gift from one stone-age guy to another?

Sir John Franklin's 1846 expedition to find the Northwest Passage was lost to the last man, with little historical evidence about the cause of one of the greatest of Arctic exploration disasters. One of the most accepted theories has always been that both ships of the expedition, the flagship HMS Erebus and companion ship HMS Terror, were frozen into the ice off the northwest of King William Island near Victory Point and, due to several severe winters in a row, were never able to be freed. As food and supplies ran low, the survivors (who already had an unexplained but unusually high mortality rate -- including Sir John Franklin himself -- as reported in one of two brief notes that are the only surviving records of the expedition) struck out overland on foot, man-hauling sledges from Victory Point toward Back's Great Fish River. That much is supported by the two notes, and it's always been assumed that the remaining survivors died on the march, with the last remains found at Starvation Cove on Adelaide Peninsula. In this theory, the two ships Erebus and Terror were never released from the ice, and either sank in place or drifted in the pack ice until they eventually broke up and wrecked (map showing survivors' overland route according to this explanation.)

In 2014 the Canadian government's Victoria Strait Expedition found a ship which has proven to be HMS Erebus. It is far from the landing location at Victory Point: the exact location is not being given to prevent looters, but the Erebus was found somewhere between Royal Geographical Society Island and Hat Island in the Storis Passage of Victoria Strait (approximate map location.) The ship was found in remarkably well-preserved condition, which seems to argue against it drifting unmanned from Victory Point to its present position.

There is another theory on the fate of the Franklin Expedition, one put forth in 1991 by David Woodman of McGill University and based on his interpretation of contemporary Inuit testimony, which posits that the notes about leaving for the Great Fish River don't indicate a total abandonment of the ships, but instead an attempt to mount a hunting expedition on the south side of King William Island (where there was known to be more game) during the brief Arctic summer, as well as scout the prospective overland route toward the Fish River. In Woodman's theory, the men left on foot and camped on the southern side of the island, met with some Inuit hunters (as is oral tradition among the Inuit), found that travel to the Great Fish River overland on foot would be too arduous, then hunted game that they brought back to Victory Point where they re-manned at least one of the ships. The accepted theory is that all Franklin expedition survivors were dead by the summer of 1848; Woodman posits instead that, despite grievous losses from starvation, scurvy, and whatever other mysterious causes decimated the expedition, the remaining men formed a crew and, desperately short-handed, managed when the ice broke up in spring 1849 to sail one ship around the southeast coast of King William Island to the Storis Passage before becoming iced in again. The remaining men then abandoned ship for the final time and struck out for the Adelaide Peninsula, hoping to walk to Back's Great Fish River and a Hudson Bay trading company outpost. In Woodman's theory, these men are the 35 to 40 skeletons found at Starvation Cove, and some may have survived, with sporadic help from the Inuit, until as late as winter 1850.

I'm an amateur Franklin enthusiast, and it seems to me that the discovery of HMS Erebus so close to where Woodman predicted one of the ships would lie based on Inuit testimony gives a lot of weight to his otherwise unpopular theory. It definitely seems to completely explode the prevailing idea that all of Franklin's men abandoned ship in 1848 and never returned, and as far as Erebus is concerned, that Erebus and Terror were never sailed from the ice at Victory Point. It's an utter game-changer in terms of the ultimate fate of the Franklin expedition. Yet I've seen very little of this aspect of the discovery mentioned anywhere; in fact, almost every news article I've seen in the past year since the finding of HMS Erebus repeats the standard theory of the expedition's fate right along with the news of the discovery that punches a hole straight through the middle of it. Am I misunderstanding the significance of the discovery of HMS Erebus? If I am, what is the correct way to understand the impact the discovery of one of the ships in this location has on the prevailing theory?

Thanks! (Hoping we have some maritime or Arctic historians here.)