- Joined
- Jun 14, 2024
Not disputing that trans-oceanic travel isn’t dangerous as hell, nor that the pioneers of it weren’t some of the bravest SOBs to ever live.You know why we didn't cross the oceans until 8000 years after the invention of sails?
But trans-oceanic travel happened far earlier than the age of discovery, which is what I’m assuming you’re referring to.
Austronesians probably made it to South America around 500 years prior, using more primitive tech. And that was via the pacific, which is a far larger ocean. I’ll admit this isn’t an entirely fair comparison, because they did that more piecemeal via island hopping. But at the same time, the initial discovers of Easter Island likely took a route that is around equidistant to some of the shorter trans-Atlantic routes.
And there’s archeological evidence that the ancestors of Micronesians came there from the Philippines via sailing around 2000-1000BC. That’s a route that’s about 200 miles longer than the passage from Ireland to Canada.
The point being that while trans-oceanic sailing is exceptionally difficult, it’s also something that can be done with far simpler technology than many people think. And that those two crazy hippies absolutely could have sailed across the Atlantic if they knew what they were doing. People have been sailing longer routes for literally thousands of years.
Note: this admittedly isn’t an entirely fair comparison because of the differences between sailing the pacific vs the Atlantic, let alone the North Atlantic, but I don’t have the time to get into that point right now.