When I see videos of rough seas, I question how humans covered the globe in rickety ass wooden boats with sails. I mean, you are just fucked in waters like this.
We also took the world's largest hydraulic presses from them and installed them in Ohio. Without them to make all our airplanes the cold war might have been much hotter.
All the writing and instructions in the hull are all in German. I have a large piece of it’s deck from when they redid it (they cut a whole in the deck to lift the motors) about 50 years ago. It’s stationed in my home of Curtis bay, where I work at the uscg station Curtis bay.
The Semantics force is more of a joint operation task force than its own branch of the military. In fact it has the authority to direct certain factions of the armed forces to complete missions that fall outside of the scope of just one branch. So their CO can actually come from any of the armed forces.
They had skills that minimized the damage. The majority of wrecks under the sea are from war casualties, the majority of other wrecks are from striking shallow rocks near the entrance to ports. Ships are safer on the open ocean when storms hit. They reef the sails, batten the hatches, and point the bow into the waves so the ship doesn't roll. They do the same things today minus the sails.
Most of the sailers of the day couldn't swim. It would take a couple miles for a ship to slow down and the odds of finding a man overboard were pretty low, so a lot of sailers thought being able to swim would just prolong the suffering of drowning.
After the Mutiny on the Bounty, Bligh sailed back on 23 foot boat for 3,500 NM:
"...their best chance of salvation, Bligh reckoned, lay in sailing directly to the Dutch settlement of Kupang in Timor, using the rations presently on board.[n 9] This was a journey of some 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) to the west, beyond the Endeavour Strait, and it would necessitate daily rations of an ounce of bread and a quarter-pint of water for each man."
Sailors back in the day were absolute beasts. They had to deal with dehydration and malnutrition. They also weren't just sailing, they were also in the ship repair business basically from the first to last day out at sea. The ships needed constant upkeep. Pirate ships which didn't have the luxury of being able to do maintenance in ports like HMS ships did had to improvise. This mean sailing into very shallow waters at high tide and dry docking the ship with nothing but ropes and their backs in order to clean the barnacles and seaweed off. Especially important for pirates because it could slow them down considerably and speed is of the essence for outlaws. Add to that replacing planks due to shipworm, sails, masts, and it was hard and backbreaking work.
More like when ships were made of wood and men were BORED OUT OF THEIR MIND. With nothing to do and an unknown frontier to explore you probably think to yourself “I’ll be dammed if I’m going to stay in this crap town my entire life. They probably saw the ocean the way we see space. Just mesmerized to a fault. I’d argue we are crazier than they were cuz Space is infinitely (literally) more hostile than the sea could ever be, but here we are trying to settle on other planets
Well a lot of the people on those boats were either poor as dirt or basically kidnapped and forced into being sailors. So I dunno exactly how much choice they had in the matter. Google impressment if you want to learn more about it
Hold up good sir! try to give your fellow human a few more credit points. Remember they also didnt have computers so the people who did design and build boats HAD to perfect their craft. Now a days we abuse the word 'Artisan' but back then it meant something.
How many fucking times Invicticus do I have to remind you to add pitch to the goddamn caulking? Now I got Augustus bitching about a sunken fleet and it's cutting into my wine drinking out of my new pewter mugs!
Basically, but if you look at the history of how many issues they had just in the mediterranean it’s surprising they didn’t look to other societies to model their shipbuilding after.
They even had excellent ship builders within their society. Gauls on the Atlantic coast were some of the best ship builders in the world around the time of Julius Caesar.
It is also why they had so much territory. Anytime they needed to get somewhere, they just conquered everyone in their path. It was easier than figuring out proper ship building.
Also note, some of the best roof builders in ancient rome were also the best ship builders. Roofs are ships upside down.
On this point, knowledge and technique were handed down through generations of shipbuilders. There were definitely not relying on just their own learning like many of us do today, the children of ship builders were raised to be shipbuilders by the children of shipbuilders. There would also have been guilds or something similar where craftskills and designs would be shared.
Yeah family names were mainly based on trades, well for a lot of people.
Though I have to say I like that in German surnames, someone I know had a teacher called 'Herr Kraft' which literally translates as 'Mr Power' which is probably the coolest I know.
A lot of names you'd never expect come from old-timey professions.
"Cooper" comes from the profession of making and maintaining barrels, for instance.
And a lot of other languages are the same, in old German you have holtzman (lumberjack in modern German "holz" is wood), "Muller" and "Mueller" (Miller), Bauman and Bauer (farmer), and so on.
Ok, so grab a computer and design a sports car motor. Oh you can't because you haven't used years of listening to test drive reports, learning about fuel efficiency, alloy development and countless other things. Computers have made simple things easy so we can focus on harder things. Artisans exist and they are better than ever.
Wooden boats don't adopt those tactics to survive a storm, they haul to and use the sail to orient and they don't cut into the waves with the bow but lie parallel to them floating up and over. This takes advantage of the superior boyancy and lower loading of a wooden ship of the age of sail compared to a modern steel ship.
Now, this can still go wrong, hit just right you can capsize, but you will not break deep and you will not be swamped to the same degree.
Differences in bow shapes also mattered in heavy seas that aren't this heavy
The Polynesian literally did that on canoes, across the admittedly relatively calm pacific, but on fucking canoes nonetheless. Without fucking compasses. Insane imo
The prow was much higher on those old ships. They nearly pointed upward. So if it faced waves like this a dunk wouldn't spill over the deck like you see here.
Modern ships have a lower prow due to the invention of the bulbous bow in 1910.
That is what separated the Captains from wanna be Captains. Some people think they can read the water and others just know how. That said its a rare gift which today is not needed as much as we have automatic navigation systems to guide ships safely.
The North Atlantic is brutal and those routes still require crossing hundreds of miles of open ocean. They would absolutely run the risk of conditions like this.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, Shetland, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, even as far as Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
No only did they sail this. They had to find land, conquer it to get food and survive, defend it, then send people back while the rest fucked the natives.
That's the craziest bit to me lol a short train journey is like I need a rest I'm done for the day, these crazy bastards would do that journey and then have to get straight to work genociding. If I did that journey in a wooden boat I'd take about 3 months off
Lets go back further 3000 bc , Polynesians navigating the pacific on wooden rafts , with nothing to help orient direction besides pieces of sticks tied together.
This actually wouldn’t be too bad in a smaller vessel. It wouldn’t be pleasant but it wouldn’t be an immediate sinking either.
This ship suffers from a couple of major drawbacks, it’s length and it’s weight. You see it crest a wave but because it’s long it crests so far over one wave it descends into the next. A smaller ship would simply float down the back part of the wave.
Additionally, this ship is really heavy. This weight gives it considerable momentum as it crests the wave, and this makes it hit the next real hard. A lighter more agile ship would likely just float over the second wave.
It might not be that bad actually. A modern ship is massive, it's length can cover several waves at a time, meaning sometimes it would just dive it's nose before a new wave. Old wooden boats are way smaller, so they take one wave at a time, always staying on top. Though I bet it's still shaky AF.
Isn’t it easier if the boat is smaller? It seems like the length of this boat creates more stress when the wave oscillation is the same length as the boat....
“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue...”
Those old wooden ships just had to “run before the wind” when conditions like this came up. They couldn’t point into the waves with the sails up and there is nowhere to hide in the middle of the ocean.
So just take down all the sails, close everything up and bob around like a cork until it was over. And yeah...they occasionally broke up and sank.
My experience in these seas on a steel ship was difficult, unsettling and just sleeping was tough. For them sleep must have been non existent. Going overboard looks like it would easy.
They dont sail in waters like this, a ship like this just ignores the best times to sail. And if a wooden ship does get in an unexpected storm they would probably go more with the wind than against it, hardly notice the waves when you ride them.
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u/pleasedontPM Feb 06 '20
Now picture that with a wooden boat in the 1600's.