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It’s admittedly not a subject I know much about but Arab traders spanning the Indian Ocean in the 1st millennium are one of The Famous Things everyone knows from history. That’s kinda beside my point though, although I think we’re arguing the same thing. If the Mediterranean naval powers don’t deserve credit, especially if you’re talking about during Roman times, I’d like to hear who actually does.
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Dec 26, 2021 07:33
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One thing worth noting about Indian Ocean trade is that until the Portuguese and other Europeans arrived there weren't really any naval powers there because no one engaging in the trade really maintained navies. Indian Ocean trade was pretty much entirely private and unarmed. States taxed the trade. The dhow is a pretty simple design (not necessarily Arab in origin even) that's meant to take advantage of monsoon winds that shift between blowing west and north-east. Essentially you have a situation that's different but still reminiscent of the Mediteranean of shipfaring and shipbuidling being very much decided by the present conditions and adapting well to that (with the typically Mediterranean vessel being oar-powered galleys that would mostly hug the coast). Randarkman fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Dec 26, 2021 |
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Dec 26, 2021 07:51
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MeinPanzer posted:Really big lakes like... the Atlantic and Indian Oceans? Koramei posted:was there a civilization that was notably more competent navally until like, the Arabs? To my understanding China was also basically just hugging coasts; open sea navigation even to Japan wasn’t really happening until like the 700s.
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Dec 26, 2021 07:57
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The ocean surrounds the land, while in the Mediterranean the land surrounds the sea. Yes, and...? The Romans had naval fleets operating on the Atlantic coast and in the North Sea, and Roman traders regularly sailed across the Indian Ocean using the monsoon winds. Does that not count as "sailing oceans?"
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Dec 26, 2021 08:00
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MeinPanzer posted:Yes, and...? The Romans had naval fleets operating on the Atlantic coast and in the North Sea, and Roman traders regularly sailed across the Indian Ocean using the monsoon winds. Does that not count as "sailing oceans?" I'd contend that the Romans and Pheonicians, Athenians, Rhodians, Syracusans, Carthaginians, various Successor Kingdoms, Cilicians, the Italian maritime republics, Tunis and Algiers, the Ottoman Empire, and so on and so on, were all naval powers regardless of whether or not they checked out the box of putting a fleet into the Atlantic.
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Dec 26, 2021 08:04
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Randarkman posted:I'd contend that the Romans and Pheonicians, Athenians, Rhodians, Syracusans, Carthaginians, various Successor Kingdoms, Cilicians, the Italian maritime republics, Tunis and Algiers, the Ottoman Empire, and so on and so on, were all naval powers regardless of whether or not they checked out the box of putting a fleet into the Atlantic. Absolutely, I don't disagree. I'm just pushing back against the bizarre contention that the denizens of the Roman Empire didn't engage in ocean sailing.
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Dec 26, 2021 08:06
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Randarkman posted:I'd contend that the Romans and Pheonicians, Athenians, Rhodians, Syracusans, Carthaginians, various Successor Kingdoms, Cilicians, the Italian maritime republics, Tunis and Algiers, the Ottoman Empire, and so on and so on, were all naval powers regardless of whether or not they checked out the box of putting a fleet into the Atlantic. None of them were real naval powers because they never had ships that could hold more than 5000 people such as today's modern cruise liners.
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Dec 26, 2021 08:17
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Perhaps we’re just arguing semantics here over what counts as “traversing ocean”. How about “blue water navies”? “Open Ocean”? “Non-littoral”?
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Dec 26, 2021 09:07
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Ships have to hug the coast till you research astronomy and unlock caravels. That’s just how it is.
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Dec 26, 2021 09:43
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Platystemon posted:Ships have to hug the coast till you research astronomy and unlock caravels. That’s just how it is. Kinda yeah, not that that’s the only way to do it as the Polynesians found their own methods, but once you reach a certain distance from the nearest continent travel really does require different technologies and techniques. The Polynesians couldn’t have done it without inventing that upside down triangle sail thingy and creating an island hopping network. Western Europe couldn’t have done it without inventing their own weird sails, making new kinds of boat shapes and figuring out longitude. You can’t just point a trireme towards the Atlantic and expect to live.
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Dec 26, 2021 10:01
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Manila galleons had been crossing the Pacific Ocean for centuries by the time the longitude problem was satisfactorily solved. Longitude certainly helps sailors make safe and efficient courses, but they made do without it.
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Dec 26, 2021 10:16
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the Phoenicians managed to make it to the gulf of guinea for trade and actually came back unlike every other country where going south of mauretania just meant you lived there forever and would never be heard from again. This guy apparently showed that they had good enough tech to cross the Atlantic if they had known something was over there. S-tier definitely.Koramei posted:It’s admittedly not a subject I know much about but Arab traders spanning the Indian Ocean in the 1st millennium are one of The Famous Things everyone knows from history. using the monsoon winds is cheating imo.
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Dec 26, 2021 10:46
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Isn't there basically fuckall in the Atlantic and the only reason that genocidal rear end in a top hat Columbus made it was because he was an idiot who thought the planet was half the size it really was?
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Dec 26, 2021 10:49
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A Buttery Pastry posted:
Arguably, his problem wasn't so much being lost at sea; more like loving around too much in foreign ports, getting in trouble with women, etc.
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Dec 26, 2021 11:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Isn't there basically fuckall in the Atlantic and the only reason that genocidal rear end in a top hat Columbus made it was because he was an idiot who thought the planet was half the size it really was? Yeah he thought the earth was pear shaped and the Portuguese were wasting time going round the Cape of Good Hope to get to India when it would be quicker to go round the world at the top where it was smaller. This was especially dumb as British and Basque sailors were probably already going to the grand banks fishery so plenty of people were aware that India was not just on the other side of the Atlantic. Christopher Columbus was very dumb and also very lucky.
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Dec 26, 2021 11:13
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Koramei posted:was there a civilization that was notably more competent navally until like, the Arabs? To my understanding China was also basically just hugging coasts; open sea navigation even to Japan wasn’t really happening until like the 700s. 
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Dec 26, 2021 13:30
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a pipe smoking dog posted:Yeah he thought the earth was pear shaped and the Portuguese were wasting time going round the Cape of Good Hope to get to India when it would be quicker to go round the world at the top where it was smaller. This was especially dumb as British and Basque sailors were probably already going to the grand banks fishery so plenty of people were aware that India was not just on the other side of the Atlantic. Columbus exploring in the direction where plenty of people knew there was land doesn't sound all that dumb to me.
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Dec 26, 2021 13:31
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There is no evidence that the Basque or any other Europeans were fishing the Grand Banks prior to the return of John Cabot. L’Anse aux Meadows is real but was not known to Columbus and his contemporaries.
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Dec 26, 2021 13:52
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You're all taking the definition of "naval power" so littorally.
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Dec 26, 2021 15:38
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Platystemon posted:There is no evidence that the Basque or any other Europeans were fishing the Grand Banks prior to the return of John Cabot. I read recently about a written work by some monk which talked about viking discoveries of land west of Greenland. And that this work was from outside Scandinavia but pre Columbus Fake edit: I can't find where I first read it but this blog is talking about the same subject in greater detail. https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2021/10/markland-known-in-genoa-150-years.html?m=1 quote:
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Dec 26, 2021 17:42
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Dec 26, 2021 18:04
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a pipe smoking dog posted:Christopher Columbus was very dumb and also very lucky. You can be dumb as gently caress, but still achieve things if you're brave and willing to try. We don't know the names of most of the other "very smart" seamen of the era who didn't venture further than 50 miles off a coast.
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Dec 26, 2021 18:22
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Platystemon posted:Ships have to hug the coast till you research astronomy and unlock caravels. That’s just how it is. Unless you have the Lighthouse, of course. (Just make sure you don't accidentally reach Magnetism too soon, while all your triremes are still out exploring in mid-ocean. Learned that one the hard way.)
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Dec 26, 2021 18:25
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Do guano wars not count?
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Dec 26, 2021 18:31
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FreudianSlippers posted:If you aren't sailing between continents you're barely sailing. ...Europe and Africa?
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Dec 26, 2021 18:34
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Byzantine posted:...Europe and Africa? Sahara’s the true continental divide for these kinds of purposes
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Dec 26, 2021 18:36
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SlothfulCobra posted:Do guano wars not count? No, bats are bugs
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Dec 26, 2021 18:40
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Byzantine posted:...Europe and Africa? Northern Africa and southern Europe (also the Levant) are the same continent called Mediterranea.
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Dec 26, 2021 19:02
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Koramei posted:was there a civilization that was notably more competent navally until like, the Arabs? To my understanding China was also basically just hugging coasts; open sea navigation even to Japan wasn’t really happening until like the 700s. 
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Dec 26, 2021 20:10
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Everyone’s still just hugging the coasts of Pangaea.
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Dec 26, 2021 20:24
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A Buttery Pastry posted:"The premier naval power in the Mediterranean" is like "the premier air power of WW1". Agreed, the Ottomans, Venetians, and Genoese were utterly weak compared to the might of Spain.
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Dec 26, 2021 20:25
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:the Phoenicians managed to make it to the gulf of guinea for trade and actually came back unlike every other country where going south of mauretania just meant you lived there forever and would never be heard from again. This guy apparently showed that they had good enough tech to cross the Atlantic if they had known something was over there. S-tier definitely. Once again this is all coast hopping on the continental shelf. Your link is a guy hugging the coast, not crossing the open ocean. Even the Vikings were staying on the continental shelf to get to North America. There’s a kind of bridge of continental shelf going from Europe to the Faroes to Iceland to Greenland to NA.
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Dec 26, 2021 20:27
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galagazombie posted:Once again this is all coast hopping on the continental shelf. Your link is a guy hugging the coast, not crossing the open ocean.  Fig. 1: Hugging the coast, not crossing the open ocean
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Dec 26, 2021 20:48
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No true ocean.
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Dec 26, 2021 20:51
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King Hong Kong posted:Agreed, the Ottomans, Venetians, and Genoese were utterly weak compared to the might of Spain. I believe the turks where comparable to spain + others. The turks where also cooperating with the pirates to destroy and pillage coast towns. It was only after Lepanto that the turks where weakened enough to not be so much a huge problem in al the sea.
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Dec 26, 2021 21:04
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Powered Descent posted:
Also literally no one except them managed to get to sub-Saharan Africa from the west side and come back prior to 1400 tech innovations. If you’re doing something nobody else manages to do for 2000 years that’s impressive
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Dec 26, 2021 21:06
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These feats of maritime exploration seem very lame, to me, personally, I post while struggling to eat Doritos without staining my last clean shirt E: What's the equivalent for "internet tough guy" but specifically for history
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Dec 26, 2021 21:09
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Polynesians are the Only True Seafarers. They explored and settled over a range more than 2x as wide as the distance between Lisbon and Beijing, most of which was open ocean. They did this with minimum technology and maximum understanding of the sea.
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Dec 26, 2021 21:16
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Powered Descent posted:
Shows what I get for not reading the second half of the article where it mentions the second voyage. I did some googling though but couldn’t find anything that said if he did or didn’t use modern navigation knowledge/methods or food and water preservation though, just a fun fact about having to poop over the side of the boat .
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Dec 26, 2021 21:18
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Also literally no one except them managed to get to sub-Saharan Africa from the west side and come back prior to 1400 tech innovations. If you’re doing something nobody else manages to do for 2000 years that’s impressive Whether the Phoenicians actually reached as far south as the Gulf of Guinea is a contentious topic. This is all based on the account of the Carthaginian navigator Hanno's expedition along the Atlantic African coast in the later 5th c. BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator#Periplus_account His account (the Periplus of Hanno) is preserved in an abridged Greek form. Needless to say, the ethnonyms and toponyms included are hard to locate, and the itinerary itself is devoid of any kind of measurements of distance. Having read a bit of the scholarship on this, I think there is a very plausible argument to be made that he didn't make it much farther south than Cape Bojador in Western Sahara. (Insert no data joke here.) Interestingly, the Periplus of Hanno is the original source attesting to a race of hairy humanoids living along the western coast of Africa known as Gorillai. When the gorilla was first scientifically named in the 19th c., its authors drew on this account for their name.
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Dec 26, 2021 21:43
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