Welcome back, again, to My Dog Ate my Blog, where a 13 year old girl tells super interesting stories about the units she does in school!! Yaaaayyyyyy!! Ok guys, I was just joking, some of my other posts might be kind of boring, but this one, this one is going to be AWESOME!! Oh yeah, it’s all about explorers from around the 15th century and what they do. This came directly after the renaissance (which was my last post so go check out “This changes….. EVERYTHING” it has a cool gif of the Mona Lisa on the front so… yeah) It’s all about how peoples mindset completely shifted to one that was completely different before. Like every single post on this blog, it starts with a driving question in which I will answer through out the post, the lucky question of the day is….. How does exploration have different consequences for different groups? And there are a few secondary questions that go a long with that such as:

. What motivated YOUR exploration to the new world?

. What challenges and obstacles did YOU and the explorer face on your journey to the new world?

. What were the long term effect of YOUR exploration to the new world?

As you can see these ones are more personal and more for the end project which you will find out about later, or actually, it’s about time we get started!!

P.S. The top picture 👆👆👆, is Ferdinand the bull from this really funny movie, and it was pretty weird because the explorer I chose for the project, his name was Ferdinand Magellan. So I named the post “That Ferdinand?” I kinda made a joke out of it, purposely mixing up the Ferdinands. So yeah, that’s all, you probably get it now! Back to the post 👉

Before we begin, I would just like to let you folks know that a huge part of this project was reading comics. So we created a comic chart with four columns. One for Tin Tin comics, one for super hero, one for Anti-hero, and one for New age comics. This helped us for our final project which included a lot of knowledge about comics. Each week we read one group of comics and then filled out the chart for things like design, themes, and the plot. I really enjoyed reading the comics most of the time as it really helped me with the final project, but sometimes it was a bit of a chore, especially when it wasn’t an interesting collection. Overall, I think it was a great addition to this unit and it wouldn’t be the same without it.we did it in groups so we could compare our answers, my group was Anika, Fraser, Sam, and Ben. Here is just one section so you can get an idea of what the chart would have looked like:

WHAT MOTIVATES EXPLORATION?

Usually people don’t just explore for no reason, most explorers have a motivation, a drive. An example from an extremely long time ago, like ancient times was Beringia.  Beringia was a land bridge that crossed between Alaska and Siberia, allowing plants, animals, and people to move to each side. Now remember this was a looooonnggggg time ago so it does not exist anymore, it is covered by the ocean! This was a helpful source for plants to grow past their boundaries and into new places. Following them came the animals since plants are their food source, and then humans followed them. It was kind fo a domino effect. The land bridge allowed more than just for things to go back  and forth, but areas that were unpopulated before were now populated, this is when a lot of places became full of people.

Now, it’s hard to believe that 3 very different cultures, especially in this time could have things in common, and they did. These three cultures are the Norse the Portuguese, and the Chinese. Yes, you are wondering what they have in common, and it’s not the ships they sailed on or what they had to trade, it’s actually the fact that at one time or another they all ended up in Canada, usually by accident. I mean, who would want to come to cold, wet Canada? The Norse were first, also known as the vikings. There were many tales of sightings of a land covered in forest, that did not quite fit the description of Greenland (which had been discovered already), young Leif Eiriksson set off on a voyage in search of this land, and with luck he found it.

Voyages such as these take motivation, something driving the person to do this. One reason why people explored was to expand trades. To say this simply, they wanted more stuff. Things like spices had to be transported a long way making them more expensive meaning people get more money. Another reason was to expand gold supply. Back in the renaissance there was only one currency, one way of paying and that was gold coins. Unlike now when we have cards, paper, and coins. The last big reason people were motivated to explore is to spread Christianity, or really any religion. So, in summary, the three huge reasons people explored was to expand trade, gold supply and religion.

WHAT CHALLENGES DO PEOPLE ENCOUNTER?

From what you’ve heard so far, exploration probably sounds like a walk in the park, but it definitely isn’t. Everything comes with danger, and in the case of exploration, there is lots of it.

First things first, let’s look back at what people used to explore, there means. Now, I’m not necessarily talking about like tools and things, I’m talking about mindsets and skills. The biggest thing you needed to have was curiosity, you needed to wonder what was out there since back in the renaissance, they knew close to nothing. People would go on explorations and write journals about them and make maps for later expeditions to follow. This is an important mean because then you have some guidance and you aren’t sailing into the complete unknown. But sometimes these journals could be fake or the stretched truth, so it was hard to know which ones to trust.

To overcome challenges, another thing that you need are navigational tools. Navigational tools are extremely important, they help to know where you are and where you are going without a modern day gps which will run out of batteries. We did a small project on this part so I will tell you about it to help explain. We were given one of many tools or ships to do a bit of research on, Taylor and I received a cross staff. The cross staff was a tool used for measuring the altitude of the pole star above the horizon to measure the latitude. This is what it looked like, a staff with many smaller ones crossing it.

We had to find the modern equivalent of it through research and then do a small presentation. We discovered that a surveying staff which is used in construction for seeing the different layers of the land and building buildings. With this knowledge of the tool from the past and the tool now, we created a diptych which is a two panel piece of art (not really in this case) that could be one image all together or separately. Here it is, it is not quite art, but it just shows what the two look like:

 

Since we now know why and how the explorers explored, let’s take a look at where they went and how they chose the places they went. Well, they actually kind of went everywhere, they kind of competed to see who get the most land, discover the most places. This is called an expansionist worldview. And with territory comes power, that’s what they wanted. We learned about people like the Portuguese as well as many others and how they discovered what they called, “the new world”.

WHAT ARE THE LONG TERM EFFECTS OF EXPLORATION?

These brave explorers, didn’t just explore the whole world for nothing, it wasn’t like a one time thing, these explorations and voyages had huge long term effects on everyone. There is one important hint we have to remember through out this section, when I say “new world”, it means new world to the European explorers, it really wasn’t a new world at all because guess who lived there first? The First Nations. One fairly well-known example of someone travelling to the supposed new world was John Cartier. John Cartier was a French explorers who was the first man to trade furs with the First Nations.

And guess what they did for centuries after, trade furs with the First Nations. Another time that impacted people was the Middle passage. The middle passage was the sea journey undertaken by the slaves from West Africa. Explorers may have traded things like spices and fur, but eventually they even started trading people for money, they made them do the work. But the worst part was the journey from Africa back to Europe. They stuffed boats full of slaves, conditions were terrible, a lot of them died. So, we did a min project on the middle passage where we read five different articles about it from different perspectives, maybe it was from a slaves point of view, or a doctors, or even a captains. A lot of them were surprisingly bias, definitely no the same things we learn, but I think it’s good to see both sides of the story. Slave trading was something that went on for years after this. So things like trade with the First Nations and the middle passage were all explorations, but they impacted everything up until even today.

THE PROJECT

With all the information that was shoved into our brains, comic, explorers, expansionism and sosososososo much more, we had a task to complete. There were two parts to this final project. STEP #1: We researched an explorer from a choice of a couple different countries and my group got Portugal. We then had to choose out of a few explorers and I chose Ferdinand Magellan who was the first man to circumnavigate the world.

We did a load of research on him before…… (wait for it), it was time to make our own comic!! Earlier in this post I talked about our comic chart, well that’s when that comes in handy, all of that information was transformed into our own comic. Mine was about a young man, name Antonio Almeida, who was a crew member on the voyage to discover a route to the spice islands. He saw many things and experienced many too so it’s all about his tough journey. There voyage was to the spice islands to trade spices with the people there which had never been done before. Here is the finished product of my comic, The First Circumnavigation!

Now, writing a comic might sound kinda weird, like really, what does that teach you? But it’s surprising how much I learned from writing my own comic. I had to use a ton  of my creativity skills to come up with a interesting, engaging story line, I had to know my facts so that everything in it was as close to valid as possible, and I even needed to put my artistic skills to the test. That was only step one, and you thought we were done! But no, so here’s STEP #2: After writings comic about the voyage we went on with out beloved captains, we had to create a persuasive presentation about how we think the queen should fund us for another voyage of our choice, but this time, your character would be captain. Here is an infographic about persuasive presentations that I quite like:

We had to create a visual to go along with it so I made a keynote, which if you don’t know is like a slide show showing pictures that add to your presentation. You can see it in the video below!

The last step was to actually present to the court of the queen (our class and our teacher) asking for funding. Luckily, with my persuasive skills and valid examples I got funded fore another voyage back to the spice islands, but it would be more successfully this time, more peacefully!

History wasn’t something I knew much about before grade 8, we didn’t really learn it in elementary school. So the past few units we hav done about pre-renaissance, renaissance, and now after renaissance have been very interesting for me. I’m always engaged and excited to learn when it comes to history. But this unit in particular, about the new world and who discovered it, really stuck. Like imagine if no one knew what was out there until a ton of brave pioneers set forth on expeditions, discovering the world that we know today. Some of there ways may not have been right, but without these explorers, we would still think the world is flat. So I’m going to end this post with a quote, one that fits well, If you want something you never had, you have to do something you I have never done.

~Jordyn 😁