Su Pocket è disponibile una recensione del libro The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages dello storico e archeologo François-Xavier Fauvelle sul medioevo africano.

The most intriguing story in Fauvelle’s book comes from the kingdom of Mali in the early fourteenth century. More than a century and a half before Columbus’s voyages, a Malian ruler named Abu Bakr II was said to have equipped an expedition involving two hundred ships that attempted to discover “the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.” The expedition failed to return save for one vessel, whose survivor claimed that “there appeared in the open sea [as it were] a river with a powerful current…. The [other] ships went on ahead but when they reached that place they did not return and no more was seen of them.” Some modern historians (Michael Gomez, Toby Green, and John Thornton, among others) have interpreted this to mean that the Malian ships were caught in the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Current, which sweeps everything in its path westward at about the same latitude as Mali.

Immagine da Wikimedia.