Most recent data from the EIA:
Did the dollar have anything to do with this today? Unlikely. The dollar is stronger today than it was yesterday. Long-term trend: down.
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The Geography Page
The Greater Antilles: a grouping of the larger islands in the Caribbean Sea:Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands.
Antilles: Europeans used the term Antilia as one of the mysterious lands featured on medieval charts, sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as continuous land of greater or lesser extent, its location fluctuating in mid-ocean between the Canary Islands and Eurasia.
The Lesser Antilles: a grouping of smaller islands that form an arc between the northern/northeastern coast of South America, extending up to the Greater Antilles. The Lesser Antilles islands form the boundary between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.
West Indies: the Greater Antilles; the Lesser Antilles; and the Lucayan Archipelago (northeast of Cuba, east and southeast of southern tip of Florida).
From 1421: The Year China Discovered America, Gavin Menzies, c. 2002
The author:
- 1953: joined the Royal Navy at the age of 15
- seventeen years in the Royal Navy
- 1968 - 1970: commander of the HMS Rorqual; took her from China to Australasia, the Pacific, and the Americas
- guiding stars in the southern hemisphere are Canopus and the Southern Cross; crucial in his discoveries
- educated by a Chinese amah for the first five years of his life
- spent years traveling back and forth to China and around the world; tracking Chinese voyages of exploration
- mentions Chinese porcelain, silk, votive offerings
- medieval chart dated 1424, signed by Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano
- coastlines of Europe were accurate
- the map also included a group of four islands far out in the western Atlantic: Satanzes, Antilia, Saya, and Ymana
- two largest islands
- Antilia
- Satanazes
- antilia -- anti-- on the opposite side of
- ilha -- island --
- "island on the opposite side of the Atlantic from Portugal"
- Satanazes, "Satan's or Devil's Island" -- a very distinctive name
- author suggests:
- Antilia: Puerto Rico
- Satanazes: Guadeloupe island, in the Caribbean
- this meant that someone surveyed the islands before Columbus
- con/ymana: "volcano erupts there" -- on map where there are three volcanoes on Guadeloupe today
- the volcanoes had erupted twice between 1400 and 1440 but o/w dormant
- someone had established a colony on the island 68 years before Columbus
- it appears the Portuguese had obtained a slightly later -- 1428 -- chart that also showed the same islands
- like Sherlock, author eliminated all other global navies at the time, and by default: the Chinese were left
- all European explorers owed a huge debt to the great figure of Henry the Navigator (1394 - 1460), the Portuguese prince whose base in southwest Portugal became the academy for explorers, cartographers, shipwrights, and instrument makers
- problem: in the mid-15th century almost every Chinese map and document of the period was deliberately destroyed by officials of the Chinese court, following an abrupt reversal of its foreign policy; far from embracing the outside world, after these momentous discoveries, China turned in on itself; anything commemorating its expansionist past was expunged from the record
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