Alternate History: ‘Real’ Odysseus Sailed to the Bahamas and Back

Author-Sailor Also Suggests Florida Might Have Been ‘Hell’

Peter Swanson Jul 20

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Henk van Oosten is a Dutch sailor and professional predictor of the future. When van Oosten retired from his job as an innovation expert, he combined sensibilities from both vocation and avocation, reexamined historical assumptions and proceded to rewrite The Odyssey.

Why Is This of Interest to Sailors Today?

• The author assumes an early Western European maritime culture with bluewater-capable craft plying trade routes outside the Mediterranean.
• He posits a lost system of celestial navigation more akin to traditional Polynesian methods but not exactly that either.

One of the greatest works of literature of all time, The Odyssey is also one of the earliest examples of a sequel. Writing around 800 years BC, Homer chronicled an epic war of Greeks versus Trojans in his poem The Iliad. The blind Greek poet hooked his audience: The war was caused by Helen, the unfaithful queen with a “face that launched a thousand ships.”

With the release of the Christipher Nolan movie “The Odyssey” last week, a massive amount of attention is being paid to the story.

Odysseus, the central figure in The Odyssey, was fresh from winning the Trojan War with his idea for the “Trojan horse” ruse de guerre in The Iliad. If you think of the Greek heroes of that war as celebrities such as, say, the Beatles, Odysseus would have been “the clever one.”

What van Oosten had done in a series of academic papers and a book was to upend the Homeric versions and create an entirely different narrative, set not in the Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean but the Atlantic Ocean.

In van Oosten’s retro-futuristic imagination, Odysseus takes a ten-year lap around the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, then the Bahamas, Florida and the Azores before returning to his kingdom in southwestern Spain.

Hilariously, van Oosten identifies Florida as possibly the Hades of Homer’s account. That is, a Hell on earth.

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Van Oosten was inspired by a 1990 book that posited Troy as a fortress in England, not what is now Turkey. Speaking to Fiona Cameron Lister in a July 22, 2020 story on the Medium website, Van Oosten said:

As a scientist, I disliked the fact everyone was saying the same thing about Troy — that it was Greek and on the coast of Turkey. The few people saying something different and that the Odyssey was possibly on the Atlantic were completely dismissed by classical historians and archaeologists…In searching for other perspectives to interpret the Iliad and the Odyssey, I am taking my own approach. As a reader, but also as a traveller and sailor.

Van Oosten’s inspiration was the shield of Achilles, another Trojan war hero conventionally assumed to have been Greek. According to Homer, the shield was made by a god for Achilles and decorated along its rim by a depiction of Oceanus, now called the Atlantic Ocean. The waves of Oceanus surround a dome of the sky with the sun, moon and four constellations.

Which can be used, van Oosten theorizes, for navigation to guide voyagers on the somewhat circular route still used for small boat voyages from Europe to the Caribbean and back. The fact that the Oceanus motif rims the circular shield suggests the Gulf Stream, he said.

The Iliad records the first reference in history to celestial navigation. Homer describes the nymph Calipso giving Odysseus sailing directions using the very same constellations on Achilles’ shield, according to van Oosten:

Ocean navigation is determined, more accurately than by the sun, by constellations on the Achilles shield. Using the SkyMap astronomy software, it is possible to study the night sky in 1400 BC. The Great Bear is always in the north. If there are two stars on the horizon perpendicular to each other, that is the right course.

Stars Like Range Lights

Odysseus’ Imagined Route

The story is pretty involved, of course. Epic, you might say. So one of van Oosten’s papers is included below for those who want to get deep in the weeds, or you could read van Oosten’s book on the subject.

	Trojan Tin War And Odysseus Ocean Route 1.35MB ∙ PDF file
By Henk van Oosten, Wageningen University
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Helen of Troy doesn’t exist in van Oosten’s narrative. The Trojan War is a powerplay between various peoples along the Iberian Atlantic and British Isles involved in the mining and distribution of tin. Tin was perhaps the most strategic commodity of the Bronze Age since it was the element in bronze alloy that kept edged weapons sharp.

The absence of Helen doesn’t mean van Oosten entirely ignores the love angle. None of the mentioned Atlantic islands were populated in 1400 BC, according to conventional thinking, but the science is not definitive. That gives van Oosten the wiggle room to speculate.

In those places, Odysseus dallies with the same assortment of nymphs, witches and queens as had been assigned by Homer, thus maintaining a plausible explanation of why it took 10 years to sail from Cornwall in the Southwest England to his wife in Huelva.