So what was the "holy shit we're totally lost and running low on food" failure rate when these things were the sole...

So what was the "holy shit we're totally lost and running low on food" failure rate when these things were the sole means of travel and long distance trade?

Other urls found in this thread:

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/AlterOrient2.png
smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/for-four-years-this-polynesian-canoe-sail-around-world-raising-awareness-global-climate-change-180951786/?no-ist
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Christofus Comlumbo tried to sail to India but accidentally reached the USA
Nuff said

50/50

0% they'd just eat the slaves

Pretty low, given that they could measure how much they had left and try to make sure they had enough to reach back home.


Much more common were disease outbreaks and storms wrecking things, although you did get a few starvation expeditions, like Magellan's.

Hunger usually wasn't a problem, unless it was a journey of exploration and the buggers were unlucky to miss any island or shoal. Notable example is Magellan's journey which passed through Southern Pacific and missed any of the thousands islands along the way.

Scurvy was the killer of seamen until late 18th century.

They'd have no fucking clue at all, in fact it was the Greeks who sailed first in the world, before that even Egyptians had no clue how to do it despite building all those pyramids and temples, building a ship is incredibly difficult and sailing even more so, 90% of the time they would be lost this is why in the odyssey Odysseus took 10 fucking years to return from troy to Greece and it's not even that far if you look at a map

>implying Columbus didn't know exactly what he was doing
>let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Christopher Columbus didn't know exactly what he was doing.

>this is why in the odyssey Odysseus took 10 fucking years to return from troy to Greece
It took Odysseus ten years to return to Ithaca because it was a story. In reality the late Bronze Age had hugely developed maritime trade routes and ships regularly sailed all over the Mediterranean.

Due people had no clue how to sail for most of history, only Greeks held that knowledge and Phoenicians and this caused huge wars, this is why they ruled the world at that point, this is why Europeans defeated American natives.

Sailing is extremely difficult, and in a fucking ocean?

you have no clue about it.

Ships only sailed via Greeks and when that knoeledge was lost it cause the Bronze age collapse, even Egyptians had no clue how to do it

>this is why in the odyssey Odysseus took 10 fucking years to return from troy to Greece and it's not even that far if you look at a map
>Being this retarded...

How are you even alive right now?

Didn't he spend like 90% of those years shagging things?

>Ships only sailed via Greeks
are you retarded?

Polynesians were traveling the entire Pacific Ocean 3500 years ago.

Yes but the point is that huge winds could strander ships and make them lose their ways, once the way is lost you can't find the right one for a long time and you were lucky if you survived, it would take literally years or decades to move from Greece to Egypt if your ships strandered, this is why there are no Hittities in the Trojan war because they couldn't sail for shit and arrive to Troy to help in time, it was a lost cause and they left it against Greek ships that were better

Is there any fucking proof of that?

I keep hearing that bullshit but there's no proof to support it, at all.

You are aware that the Hittites could have reached Troy, in Asia minor, without taking a ship at all, right?

Not him but uh...isn't the fact that Polynesians are scattered all across the Pacific proof enough?

>Yes but the point is that huge winds could strander ships and make them lose their ways
Not to any significant extent, especially in the eastern Med

It isn't a fact at all because of the ice age and the fact that people can swim

yes but they were from the other side of Anatolia, you are aware of that, right?

>and the fact that people can swim
Polynesians swam from island to island?

Tell me more, friend.

>Ice age
>Freezing reaching the central pacific

>Swimming
>Across literally thousands of kilometers from one island chain to the next

>Anatolia
>Not being part of the Hittite empire.

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/AlterOrient2.png


Were your mother and father brother and sister?

>Is there any fucking proof of that?

Yes.

You are implying that they have know how to swim for thousands of years.

>Ice age
>Freezing reaching the central pacific

You are aware that all those accounts could be made up, right?
They had fucking dragons in unexplored areas before, it's much more likely those people "native" there descended from slaves brought from Europeans

>Swimming
>Across literally thousands of kilometers from one island chain to the next

Yeah because building a fucking ocean worthy boat when you're a fucking stone age tier primitive is much more likely, right?

Such as?

There is no proof of that at all.

Is this the user that claimed it would have taken decades to sail from Sicily to Northern Italy in the middle ages like in that one screen cap?

This is good bait

>You are aware that all those accounts could be made up, right?

What possibly made up accounts of ice age freezing reaching the central pacific?

>They had fucking dragons in unexplored areas before, it's much more likely those people "native" there descended from slaves brought from Europeans

Unlikely, since the Europeans record meeting them there when they first arrived. Not to mention that they speak a language unrelated to European languages or the places they usually took slaves from.

>Yeah because building a fucking ocean worthy boat when you're a fucking stone age tier primitive is much more likely, right?

Enormously more likely. As in, it's been done by re-constructionists, so why the hell not, as opposed to requiring literal superhuman feats of strength and endurance from entire population segments.

For Europeans who built cathedrals, had philosophy, astronomy and fine arts it took an incredible level of technology to cross the atlantic, but le epic muh black powa natives were able to cross the fucking pacific 3000 years ago because black poweeeer xDD


>We wuz ocean sailors and shit!!!

This is fucking pathetic, ooga booga can't build boats, goodbye

>This is fucking pathetic, ooga booga can't build boats, goodbye

And there are the colors.

You know what's sad about the return of the Magellans expedition?
On the way back many died and suffered from scurvy and they had no idea all the vitamin C rich spices in their holds were a cure.

I'm pretty sure the Polynesians didn't swim to each island

>For Europeans who built cathedrals, had philosophy, astronomy and fine arts it took an incredible level of technology to cross the atlantic,


I wouldn't call the Vikings any of that.

>ut le epic muh black powa natives were able to cross the fucking pacific 3000 years ago because black poweeeer xDD

Because they built pretty good boats and had a system of navigation, and more importantly, had a social structure based around living in tiny islands whose resources would regularly deplete, forcing you to move every so often, thus making striking out into the unknown a more attractive prospect.

Europe had nothing similar.

>This is fucking pathetic, ooga booga can't build boats, goodbye

Eyes wide shut, I see.

smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/for-four-years-this-polynesian-canoe-sail-around-world-raising-awareness-global-climate-change-180951786/?no-ist

But the Atlantic is much colder, stormier, and rougher than the pacific you mong

Plus the Europeans DID sail across the Atlantic

>Because they built pretty good boats and had a system of navigation

yes because le epic primitives can build sea worthy boat but live in fucking wood huts, sure, sounds reasonable enough to me.

>I wouldn't call the Vikings any of that.

It's controversial if Vikings reached America

wat.

>yes because le epic primitives can build sea worthy boat but live in fucking wood huts, sure, sounds reasonable enough to me.

Yes. Real life isn't like your civilization games, user. People develop technologies that are useful and practicable.


>It's controversial if Vikings reached America

No it isn't. You have considerable archeological evidence for the Newfoundland settlements, and a few more scattered stuff for further inland exploration and brief colonization.

>swimming from island to fucking island

You do realize that just swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco can be extremely taxing, right? You're saying they swam for kilometers on end to reach another island instead of, more possibly, building a fucking boat.

I am now imagining whole tribes of Polynesians just swimming across the pacific. They begin their journey as desperate tribespeople- the population of the island they're on isn't sustainable. They have to strike out and swim in the hopes of finding a new home for themselves among the Pacific.

The children drowned first, unable to withstand the long stretch of ocean. Then, the women, with their weaker bodies, are decimated by the journey. The weakest men also fall, and by the time the remaining dozens of people manage to settle on the island, the remaining demographics of the tribe are horribly skewed towards a large male population. With only a few women left, only the strongest men are able to reproduce. Perhaps the tribe will flourish and prosper. If so, resources will still be scarce and eventually they will swim out into the pacific again, perhaps fruitlessly- never finding an island and drowning in the cold waters of the ocean.

Just because you can make sea worthy boats doesn't mean you're suddenly hyper advanced and can't live in wooden huts anymore.

I'm guessing that, as a result of your eurocentrism, you have this mental image of Polynesians exploring the pacific in big 17th century European ships with 300 polynesians per ship. Imagine small boats instead.

Not that small though. 20 meter sailing catamarans are not exactly little rowboats.

Good lord you are stupid

It is not controversial at all, you trolling world nigger.

A wood hut is an ideal shelter for an island that never veers far from 80 Fahrenheit. Spending a lot of time making a European style dwelling meant to withstand tough winters would be a complete waste of energy and limited resources.

Men who crewed ships like that were generally life long professional sailors and they had became pretty damn good at it. Loss of a whole vessel was a very rare occurrence, and almost always the result of heavy weather.
Their capability to navigate was also significantly more sophisticated than you are imagining.

Is this the same guy who thought no one lived in sardinia during the black death?

Read up on the story of Hudson's Bay. You'll have a great laugh.

Fuck you're dumb

I thought so, or a imitator

What I love is when /pol/ optimistically over estimates the capabilities of Europe in past centuries in any capacity until it just becomes silly.

There are plenty of accounts of starvation among ships

But in 18th century ships, it was pretty uncommon, user; and usually only the result of some other disaster forcing them to either abandon stores or to go far, far off course.

How big a problem was scurvy really? I know the polynesians got around it due to the fact that they packed a ton of fruits and other plants that lasted a long time at sea with high ascorbic acid contents for settling islands.

Prior to the discovery of its cause? A major one,
Afterwards death due to it became a rare occurrence that was almost always caused by poor planning, bad luck, or, everyone's favorite, both.

Are you that guy that thought it took 10 years to get to Sardinia from the mainland?
Somebody has to have the screencap.

Only a retard with no fucking clue would think island were inhabited consistently before historic times,there only a few strandered people on those islands, people didn't have the skill to build ships back then, Britain was a wasteland and its few strandered inhabitants were paleolithic who could only built big stone henges, of course the same counts for every other big islands such as Australia, Sicily or Sardinia, it was with the Greeks that things started changing.

if you can make a wood hut you can make a sea worthy boat

carbon dating genetic and linguistic analysisputs the polynesian expansion somewhere between 3000 and 1000 bc and the seaworthiness of traditional polynesian outrigger canoes is proven.

His predictions on the circumference of the earth were dead wrong. If he hadn't hit the Americas his fleet would have died long before reaching India.

Quality bait

I hate supporting idiots who enjoy getting attention in the form of (you)s, but damn this b8 is entertaining. Continue convincing me the Europeans are responsible for a massive Polynesian migration that took place over centuries

I'll give you two internets for exclusive film rights

18th c? pretty good. by that point unless you were in the far south pacific, most of the world's oceans were pretty accurately charted. navigation was good enough that you could get a pretty reasonable latitude and approximate longitude.

with illness, your survival chances were better than 50/50 on a voyage as a general crewmember, if on a military ship that wasnt in war, maybe better.

the early days of the colonisation of the new world, that was a different matter. Magellan's circumnaviagion lost 80% of the ships, and 219 of the 237 crew. 80% fatality rates on successful voyages were common then.

oh god, I remember that guy.

absolutely stark raving mad. incredible. I should've screencapped that entire thread.

Laughed my fucking head off

The reason it took so long for Odysseus to return was because he could only travel by the coast because the Greeks hadn't researched optics yet. Actually everyone had to travel by the coast till the Renaissance when Caravels were invented.

>people didn't have the skill to build ships back then,
Except they did

I agree. That's how it works in civilization V. So that must be how it works in real life

How can you not hit The Americas? They stretch nearly from pole to pole.

... because they didnt know they were there and hadnt planned for there to be a whole new land mass in the way? Their plan being to sail across thousands more miles of utterly empty ocean where American is.

Is OP the same mong who was screaming that the black death was made up because jews and poland and they could have just closed the borders, a few nights ago?

It has to be.

oh no
ohhhh nooooooooo
nooooo nonononoooooooooooooo

I have a feeling this is the kind of person that would deny man-made climate change because he thinks the world is 1000x bigger than it actually is.

Seriously though how many people died before reaching shore in all of history?

9 or 11, there is some debate among scholars, some argue that the last two, Wilfred Smithee and Tonya Waldorf, may have died after their ship reached a dock while others argued that they died at the sight of coast but still in the sea.

oh god my sides

>Surrounded by water to drink and fish for food
You cannot fail

i know, right?