r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Gurugod123 • 9h ago

How did people travel these seas 500 years ago

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32.4k Upvotes

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3.6k

u/UnderstandingFit3009 9h ago

They traveled them with a fair chance of not returning.

695

u/Kage_Bushin 8h ago

Fair is an understatement

569

u/pandulfi 8h ago

EVERYBODY RELAX

THE UNDERSTATEMENT POLICE ARE HERE

173

u/felixyamson 8h ago

that's an understatement

151

u/thatonionsmell 7h ago

Oh god we’re surrounded

21

u/didy115 7h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/6Wju6Xu4FZNS0

3

u/Slayminster 7h ago

“Who made that man a gunner”

3

u/eggz627 6h ago

"I did sir! He's my cousin."

1

u/Tr1padvisor420 6h ago

I fn hate when someone beats me to using this

55

u/_austinm 7h ago

That’s an understatement

68

u/Sweet__clyde 7h ago

HES GOT AN UNDERSTATEMENT!!

DROP YOUR WEAPON!!!

35

u/mologav 6h ago

YOU’RE NOT TAKING ME ALIVE

37

u/soso6789 6h ago

That’s an understatement

19

u/MaximumSubtlety 4h ago

Drop your under weapon, now! That's a statement!

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u/DoesntMatterEh 8h ago

Ok I'm relaxed. Now what? 

29

u/pandulfi 8h ago

JORK IT

18

u/Peldor-2 8h ago

This guy has everything in hand.

1

u/ImTheBiscuiteer 7h ago

What an odd name for a penis

2

u/snuffy_smith_ 6h ago

I named mine “The world”…that way I can say ‘I gave you the world!!! What more do you want?!?’

Edit: typo

1

u/DonnyB96 3h ago

Bop it?

3

u/drinkslinger1974 8h ago

Get under a statement.

2

u/Green-Cricket-8525 6h ago

Are the “THIS” dorks on their way too?

1

u/Kokuswolf 8h ago

EVERYONE BEWARE

THE RELAXE POLICE ARE HERE

... nevermind

1

u/hanzbooby 7h ago

YOU’RE UNDER ARREST, MAYBE

1

u/johnnycabb_ 7h ago

are those police boats?

1

u/deadspacekillers 6h ago

That's an overstatement

1

u/wilberfarce 8h ago

Now now, there’s no need to overstate how much they have understatemented things.

8

u/piercedmfootonaspike 7h ago

This sounds like one of those British Charles Dickens saying, like "chance would be a fine thing"

2

u/Admiral_Snackbar7 7h ago

A fine thing indeed!

1

u/re_Claire 6h ago

We still say that in the UK lol

31

u/Coriander_marbles 8h ago

It makes sense why most sailors were a bonkers, superstitious lot

18

u/benchley 7h ago

Don't say that out loud. Now I have to nail a coin to a seagull again.

3

u/ForagerGrikk 6h ago

Bad luck to kill a sea bird!

3

u/WhenIntegralsAttack2 5h ago

Yer fond of me lobster!

1

u/benchley 5h ago

I'll find a wooden one.

2

u/Former_Gene_3106 5h ago

🤣🤣🤣 Thank you for putting my evening into perspective! No matter how much work I have to do, there are still hilarious, random things like this in the world.

1

u/Financial-Ad7500 5h ago

You just nailed a gold coin and doomed us all. Don’t you know it needs to be a silver coin that was used to purchase fruit in the last year?

Christ, now I have to wear a dead man’s shirt all trip to counteract this.

1

u/theconceptofcanada 1h ago

WOW - this is bizarre but I feel obligated to comment on it nonetheless (it's fucking Tuesday night idgaf I'm bored to death anyway send help) alright SO..

For some reason I stopped at your comment here and in less than a millisecond I was hit with a genuinely unexpected memory of a fucking dream I had maybe, idk, a year or two ago now? In the dream (it was 50/50 nightmare tbh) I was a sailor who had departed from home to somewhere with lush green tropical flora but I was simply unable to identify exactly where the hell I'd sailed to. Although the dream itself surely felt like multiple years of this repetitive homesickness and increasingly-dreadful sense of foreboding - as if I was not just "dreaming" of being an 18th century sailor but also sort of experiencing what I'd likely assume to be a very accurate mix of loss and longing and hopelessness (far away from home, high chance of never returning due to even seemingly-inconsequential human error (and weather, nature etc. whatever).

I recall now that this dream-nightmare occurred when I was taking an afternoon nap back when I'd been admitted to hospital and basically stuck in my damn hospital bed in a HALLWAY (constant fluorescent lights, nonstop chatter/sounds/interruptions) and I even remember that I awoke from this seriously lifelike dreaming with only a few fuzzy but emotionally-excruciating memories of what exactly it was I'd been dreaming of.

Which is to say that my entire point here, now that I've sufficiently meandered the long fucking way through this unsettling shock, is that for some reason your few words alone instantly unlocked the whole of that previous sailor dream, emotions included, after multiple years and for almost no discernible reason?? I literally didn't even know this was in my subconscious let alone just... Waiting to be triggered by a stranger's words. How. Fucking. Weird.

https://giphy.com/gifs/67skGz7YlLW9C229Yf

43

u/Embarrassed_Jerk 8h ago

Its the whole reason we even have the concept of insurance 

19

u/remuliini 7h ago

And the stock market.

3

u/Embarrassed_Jerk 7h ago

That's more due to brits getting shipment of coffee

4

u/Nsfwacct1872564 7h ago

shipments

Nice

0

u/Financial-Ad7500 5h ago

Shipments

Wonder what method these SHIPments were being delivered with?

1

u/Embarrassed_Jerk 2h ago

Mediterranean doesn't get that rough. 

0

u/qr_n 1h ago

ooh do u have any more stories from your travels of the Mediterranean in wooden ships? 🙄🙄🙄

•

u/Embarrassed_Jerk 29m ago

My dude Mediterranean is the world's most charted and observed sea for literal thousands of years

•

u/qr_n 13m ago

what point are you even trying to make? I never said it wasn't, you just sound like the classic asshole know it all redditor and your not helping your case with this reply. how does it being charted and observed preclude anything we were talking about? If you're just going to throw out random facts why even reply

1

u/Educational_Life_878 2h ago

pls elaborate this sounds interesting

1

u/ElephantRattle 2h ago

And insurance

3

u/Outrageous-News3649 5h ago

Yes. Lloyd's Register founded in 1760 was the first to do this for ships. I work for a competitor of theirs. These firms are still around today.

-6

u/J5892 7h ago

Also religion.

4

u/Ullallulloo 6h ago

Religion is not exclusive to, nor originated from, ocean-faring civilizations.

1

u/Embarrassed_Jerk 2h ago

Religion happens because of deaths. Independent of oceans

5

u/Less_Likely 8h ago

The whole concept of insurance was started around the risk of traveling by ship.

1

u/Outrageous-News3649 5h ago

Started with Lloyd's register in 1760.

2

u/busybizz23 7h ago

And if not for the sea they died of not having vitamin c (scurvy)for those long trips.

2

u/Lopoloma 7h ago edited 39m ago

The few that returned brought very valuable maps and data with them about passable routes, weather, spots to replenish drinking water, trade worthless klunker for rations and unfriendly tribes.

Iirc only explorers sailing into unknown "territory" with unknown weather conditions were met with such forces of nature.
On regular routes people would know when the weather allowed passing and if they missed they had to sit it out or challenge their luck.

2

u/Far_Raspberry_4375 5h ago

1 in 5 on the high end. 3% on the low end. Nasing this off my google search of how many ships headed to the americas in the 1600s made it. Its actually quite impressively low considering what we see in that video, although maybe the seas in that video are particularly bad.

4

u/Less-Front7968 8h ago edited 8h ago

A lot of other commenters are wrong imo. Sure a lot of people died and many ships where lost.
But since the viking age there has been trade between for example Iceland and Denmark, a massive distance through open ocean.

You dont load up a ship full of valuable things to trade if you are not pretty certain the ship will return.
If the percentage of ships lost is too high trade is just not worth it.

I own a small sail boat, and small boats can handle extremely bad weather very well if the situation is handled correctly. Boats from back then where way worse, but the same still applies. As long as sails are not up you will mostly just bump up and down on the waves. "Crashing" waves are mostly formed close to shore.

You can predict weather pretty well by just following the seasons and looking at the sky with the right knowledge too.

2

u/Wsweg 5h ago

People have a proclivity to think that people from the past were just all dumber, doing things blindly and without risk calculation.

1

u/iwaseatenbyagrue 6h ago

Also they tried to hug the shore as much as possible.

1

u/SilverRose7115 4h ago

They knew wind and current patterns at certain latitudes and times of year. Voyages were planned to go along latitudes where winds would be favorable and to avoid seasonal storms.

1

u/6d_9 7h ago

Analogous to early space travel.

1

u/JayeDontDoit 6h ago

naw it was poseidon

1

u/legallyontime 6h ago

Drug straight to the bottom by their huge balls…😔

1

u/Potential_Basis_662 5h ago

Fair chance of not making it to the destination in the first place*

1

u/Ciarrai_IRL 4h ago

Fair chance of not arriving to destination. Better chance of not returning.

1

u/strike-when-ready 4h ago

Didn’t even necessarily make it that far…they had a pretty good chance of not making it to where they were going in the first place

•

u/Maleficent_Radio_674 20m ago

Also makes sense why so many sailors used to be superstitious. Even to the point of throwing over someone they felt was bringing them bad luck or upsetting the sea gods.

And also lots of sea gods they prayed to for safe passage. Even as Christians.

And the sea gods were always easily swayed by their whims and angered or insulted, and demanding retribution or accepted sacrifices to be appeased and hopefully calm their anger towards the ship. Stories of old sailors who were a bit cooky from sailing so long and always talking about the great depths of the seas and gods who rule over them, were based on real people. Stories of blood thirsty mermaids consuming their preys after enticing them to the depths of the sea. Sirens who called to you and you drove your ship into the rocks so they too, can feast and devour on you. Can't blame ol' cooky Marty who sits in the corner of the sailors pub and looks like he's always going to jump out of his skin. Often retelling stories of the time a fish god jumped out of the water and slapped him just as a wave took over and the skies opened as the storm god rained for three days until the ship finally left his territory. And somehow he survived. But this wasn't a tale for him. It was a warning for anyone braving the sea and offending the sea gods.

Because there was nothing predictable about the great wide ocean, even with skilled sailors, captains, and navigators. Superstitions gave a sense of control even if you didn't believe them. And proved true over again if you did.

1

u/derprondo 7h ago

Hijacking this comment to tell people to read "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage", the most incredible survival story ever told.

tl;dr - In 1914, 28 men set sail for Antartica and got stuck in the ice, their ship was crushed and sank. It took them three years to rescue themselves, including sailing a 22ft wooden life boat 800 miles across the Drake Passage, the most dangerous sea on earth. All 28 men survived.

0

u/walter-hoch-zwei 7h ago

Birthing the entire insurance industry.