Yes and no. As I was saying, you need a foundation, which is the 'few hundred years of development.' But having said that, the foundation can start getting laid at any time. The Polynesians were undertaking much more impressive sea voyages with stone age technology.
Romans cross the Atlantic
- Thread starter LXEagle
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Yes and no. As I was saying, you need a foundation, which is the 'few hundred years of development.' But having said that, the foundation can start getting laid at any time. The Polynesians were undertaking much more impressive sea voyages with stone age technology.
I have no essential disagreement with that. I was not suggesting that it could only begin in the 14-15th C.
"Stoneage" thru late medieval Europeans (or Maghrebis or other Africans) would still need that foundation of adequate technology (the Polynesian voyaging canoe was a marvel of deceptively simple but very effective technology that never really had an analogue among Mediterranean and Atlantic cultures until much, much later -- the Viking knarr maybe being the first Western craft suitable) and the requisite understanding of how the currents and winds of the Atlantic worked, and a navigational system that worked out of sight of land.
Again, the Polynesians were way ahead of the game in this regards in their expansive corner of the World. Truly without peer.
The issue is kickstarting that foundation building plausibly earlier. Motivation is necessary. What gets a culture to start blindly sailing West across a seemingly infinite Atlantic, not knowing if there is anything (not even having rumor or traditions of anything) --- especially anything worthwhile? Especially as there was so much at hand that was tangible via coastal sailing, along the European and African coasts.
OTL, I think the Madeiras were the remotest Atlantic lands ever ventured to by Classical era peoples. Even that must have been an epic accident.
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I think you're correct in all particulars. There is some potential for Island hopping for the Macaronesia Island complexes, and truthfully, they were all discovered during the age of exploration. Some of them may have been found in Antiquity, but were judged without value.
For an effective POD, we would need some motivation for either the mediteranean cultures or atlantic cultures to venture out into the Atlantic. What could that be? Possibles:
* FISHING or bulk fishing/deep sea fishing.
The trouble is that fish decompose quickly, unless preservation measures are taken. So you don't want to fish too too far from population centers.... most of which are not close. The other point is that the Mediteranean has plenty of fish.
It seems fairly clear that the Age of exploration was driven in part initially by pursuit of sea harvest, particularly Basque fishermen and whalers, who were travelling to locations as remote as the Grand Banks and Svalbard.
I'm just guessing, but the Norse seafaring tradition might have evolved from the need for coastal fishing to supplement harvests, and possibly to reach otherwise inaccessible fjords.
But from what I can tell, Atlantic sea harvest, for fish at least, doesn't seem sufficient.
* WHALING might do the trick. But you would have to have some sustained cultural priority for a very valuable and very fungible whale product - ambergris, blubber, baleen etc., which doesn't seem to have been there.
When I did my Ice and Mice timeline (apologizing in advance for the self referentiality) I posited the evolution of an Inuit deep sea tradition evolving from coastal whaling in Greenland, that lead to colonizing most of the arctic islands.
But here, while there might be potential, I'm not sure how viable it would be. The Ancient world was crazy for aromatics - myrh was worth more than its weight in gold and frankincense was a number one trade good. So maybe there might be a crazy lucrative market for ambergris or whale (fish?) based aromatics? Possibly enough to sustain continuous economic activity and an evolving ocean tradition? But the aromatics trade was well established and based in and around Somalia/Arabia trade routes. It's quite speculative to suppose that possibly unreliable, unsophisticated traders from the other side of the ancient world might enter that market.
As to other whale products - whale meat? Simply not enough storage or portability for what amounts to a relatively low value, high bulk foodstuff. Possibly you might develop a market for baleen, whalebone, whale ivory or oil or some esoteric product. But it seems farfetched.
* ISLAND HOPPING - So far as anyone knows, nothing valuable enough on the Macaronesian islands was there to encourage a settlement and regular traffic, or consequent leapfrogging, discovery and colonization.
* TRADE TO REMOTE LOCATIONS - Again, there's nothing in place.
Tough one....
British archaeologists have found similar shipwrecks, too, of vessels about the size of the 1492 ships. They were fishing/sailing the seas around England and the North Sea and up into the Baltic, for amber. They knew about Iceland, according to historians. They were mainly coasting but could have gone much further, Captain Cook used a coal hauling coaster when he went around the world. Basque fishermen are thought to have been fishing off Newfoundland before 1492.
If you read attentivly the thread, you have certainly see that it's not the size that matters, but the technological advancement (immaterial and material). Romans neither Celts didn't have at least at our knowledge.
Hell, anglo-saxon and frisian ships in North Sea could have been bigger than norse ships that discovered Americas, but size simply doesn't allow everything (or Chinese fleet would have discovered Americas looong before Castillans).
There's an *huge* difference between coastal navigation, and trips that would take at best more than one month in plain sea without any knowledge of the winds or seas in Atlantic Sea or possibility to orient precisely.
No, we know that medieval Irishmen went to Iceland, but we've nothing about Antiquity's knowledge of the island.
And if you gonna tell me "Pytheas did", his descriptions really more fit Danemark and Sweden than Iceland.
Yes, in the late Middle-Ages, when they had a motivation to do so. The first mention (as they didn't let archeological evidence) of Basque fishermen in North Atlantic was in 1412 when they were spotted by Icelandic fishermens in the east of Groenland.
It's safe to assume they began entering this sone not much earlier than the end of XIII century, making the Norse discoveries largely anterior (thanks to already quoted immaterial and material technology).
Why shouldn't they have been afraid of the great seas? As you said, they had a decent knowledge of the size of the earth, which greatly discourages an Atlantic voyage since they have no idea there's a couple of continents floating out there. There would be absolutely no reason to sail on from there, especially since unlike the Polynesians they don't have the skill or necessity to sail the oceans. And it must be mentioned that the Norse didn't cross the entire expanse of the Atlantic, they "merely" crossed from Greenland to Labrador in boats better suited to these kinds of voyages with sailors adept at this task as well. So basically, one of the great seafaring cultures with more skill and necessity to make an ocean voyage than Rome could still only do so from a point much closer to the American mainland than the Canary Islands. Meanwhile you are proposing Rome do what, sail straight across the Atlantic in search of a land they have no reason to believe exists in search of natural resources they have no need of? The Norse were extremely desperate for lumber, and the Polynesians needed more land to settle. Romans have plenty of both already.Well, I am sure that if the ancients knew about America they would travel there...I mean...just the choclate! mm..
Sure enough, the vikings, polynesians and the celts did have better oceangoing vessels. And the romans were not a seafaring people. However they had a history of quick and pragmatic adaptiveness. They knew that the world was a globe, and had a fair assessment how big it was.
Perhaps they were just afraid of the great seas?
I would think that would be the other way around. Italy was heavily deforested under the Romans, as Greece was under the Greeks. There were fleets of 'wood ships' bringing firewood to Italy (from the Black Sea, probably). Their ships were built with fairly short pieces of lumber. The Norse had a smallish population, were from heavily wooded Norway, with Sweden and Finland next door. They ran into lumber problems in Iceland after they deforested whatever was there, and had to import from Norway.
I was referring to the Greenlanders. Greenland is very barren. America however is not, therefore the Greenlanders (who were the ones to actually go to America, they didn't sail straight from Norway or Iceland) immediately saw the benefits to making the difficult passage to the mainland. Italy however is surrounded by heavily forested places and would never have to cross an ocean to get lumber.
I'm not gonna comment on the plausibility of the Romans because they were far less advanced in the sciences and ship building than the hellenistic greeks (and for shipbuilding) the Phoenicians. But would it not be out of the realm of plausibility for some Greek intellectuals (or Greek navigators) to postulate that since the earth is so large, there is likely (or merely the possibility of) there being another continent in between?
Or perhaps they know the size of the earth but just assume Asia extends a lot further east, thus lowering the amount of ocean they believe to be in between?
Actually, IIRC, they did exactly that, and it was a great religious contoversy in Middle-Ages about these lands : were they inhabited or not?
It was also considered, nevertheless, that heat of the south permanently separated these lands for theirs.
Finally, when they heard about far expeditions, as Pytheas or Nechao's sailors, they were really really prone to dimiss them as jokes or lies.
Shipbuilding technology of the Phoenicians and Greeks was simply subsumed by the Romans, it didn't disappear, in that Semitic and Greek traders and sailors simply just continued what they were doing, in the ships they were familiar with, only paying taxes to new masters or being owned or patronized by Roman interests. The Greeks carried on trade to Arabia and India until the Crisis of the 3rd C. seemed to abruptly curtail it. Also, ships didn't cease evolving during Roman times, although being Mediterranean and coastal focused, this evolution didn't necessarily carry over into producing ships suitable for bluewater sailing.
As to Greek and other thinkers postulating the existence of other lands beyond the "World Ocean", do you know of any such speculation OTL?
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This is more a tech-question. Suppose they know about the choclate, and the tomatoes. Could they build or develop technology to sail across the great oceans?
Why build ships to cross the oceans (why beggining from scratch technologically speaking) when you have a T.A.R.D.I.S. that allowed you to know about New World's product before sailing your way to it?
Even assuming that, by the grace of ASB, they knew about it, no : tomatoes aren't worth huge investements on a totally new way, when you had much more interesting stuff right front the door (amber, spices, ivory, notably, but not limited to).
BigDave1967
Banned
They might have,I remember hearing stories that Chinese explorers made it to the American Southwest and Mexico.
Saying it politely, these theories are considered as pure speculation based on none credible source. As in "lolno".
Any ships, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian or what have youthat originated in the Med during this time period would, in all likelihood, have been coasters. There is very little sailing to be done out of the sight of land between the Pillars of Hercules and Colchis. It is possible that the ancients could have circumnavigated Africa, but it still would have been a coastal voyage.
The Vikings, or what would become the Vikings, did not become a significant people until the middle ages. Regardless of when they appeared, they really did fairly short blue water voyages and these did occur during a milder period of the Earth's climate. around the millennium.
There has been discussion about motivation for such a journey. Fishing has been mentioned and dismissed due to the perishability of fish. Salting of fish was practiced in ancient times so fishing could be a legitimate possibility, but fish was abundant in the Med and in the waters surrounding Iberia and Gaul.
Any long voyage out of sight of land would have required carrying substantial stores of food and water which would reduce the amount of cargo that could be carried, a real money loser. I doubt if the ships of this period would have sailed from Ostea, Alexandria or Piraeus with sufficient supplies for a voyage of two weeks, much less a month or more.
So if the ancients discovered the Americas I believe it would have been:
1, Unintentional because the ship was blown out to sea.
2, For some reason they were unable to back track.
3, They were over-supplied with foodstuffs and water or very lucky fishing and in very rainy weather.
4, They were in the right place at the right time to catch winds and currents that would move them across the Atlantic to a safe landfall on the coast of South America, the Caribbean or the eastern seaboard of North America.
Any way, that is MHO.
The Vikings, or what would become the Vikings, did not become a significant people until the middle ages. Regardless of when they appeared, they really did fairly short blue water voyages and these did occur during a milder period of the Earth's climate. around the millennium.
There has been discussion about motivation for such a journey. Fishing has been mentioned and dismissed due to the perishability of fish. Salting of fish was practiced in ancient times so fishing could be a legitimate possibility, but fish was abundant in the Med and in the waters surrounding Iberia and Gaul.
Any long voyage out of sight of land would have required carrying substantial stores of food and water which would reduce the amount of cargo that could be carried, a real money loser. I doubt if the ships of this period would have sailed from Ostea, Alexandria or Piraeus with sufficient supplies for a voyage of two weeks, much less a month or more.
So if the ancients discovered the Americas I believe it would have been:
1, Unintentional because the ship was blown out to sea.
2, For some reason they were unable to back track.
3, They were over-supplied with foodstuffs and water or very lucky fishing and in very rainy weather.
4, They were in the right place at the right time to catch winds and currents that would move them across the Atlantic to a safe landfall on the coast of South America, the Caribbean or the eastern seaboard of North America.
Any way, that is MHO.
I once posted on a similar thread, the voyage times in the Mediterranean during Roman times. I believe from Puteoli (near Naples) to Alexandria (one of the longer Mediterranean routes ---about 1000 miles) was 9-10 days with favorable winds.
It took 30 days or longer from Massalia (Marseilles) to Alexandria (1800 miles) which definitely was not an intentional non-stop voyage in ancient times and there were plenty of available points to re-provision en route.
As a point of comparison, it is about 4600 miles (7000 km.)from Gibraltar to Brazil (the most likely landfall if early (unfortunate) voyagers made the Canary Current and the favorable winds off the W. African coast.
Good luck (with the technology available to the era in the Med.) in surviving that voyage.
Here is a good source on ancient sailing times:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html
BigDave1967
Banned
Polynesian islanders sailed thousands of miles to Easter Island and Hawaii. He's something about them sailing to Easter Island.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/pioneers-of-easter-island.html
For the freagging Nth time : Polynesians sailed the ocean for millenias, continuously. They had far more immaterial technology to do so than Romans never ever dream to had.
We've gone over this earlier on the thread. NO European or African culture (or really any other Asian culture) produced anything like the Polynesians in pre-Age of Exploration times.
They also had sufficient motivation (need for land to settle) to make their voyages and they weren't sailing absolutely in the dark. They had a sufficient tech kit (their multi-hull voyaging craft, time-gained knowledge of winds and current in the Pacific, navigational aids and even maps.
The Classical age cultures of the Mediterranean did not have a sufficient developed tech kit suitable to long-distance bluewater sailing. More importantly, they had no motivation to develop one at the time.