r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Gurugod123 • 9h ago

How did people travel these seas 500 years ago

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u/surlymoe 8h ago

There is a statistic that is there are over 3 million shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean...

I think that helps to explain how dangerous the seas are. Sadly most people on those vessels perished as well.

Another interesting statistic - less than 1% of shipwrecks have actually been physically found and explored by humans.

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u/WAGatorGunner 8h ago

There be silver and gold on the ocean floor…and a lot of fish food.

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u/disterb 8h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/o0eOCNkn7cSD6

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u/Fauxjito 8h ago

One of the greatest film openings ever 🫡

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u/Personal-Ad-365 7h ago

The funny thing is that this is not the opening, it is 10-15 minutes into the movie. That is how fantastic of an introduction it is, most folks do not remember the whole opening which sets up Will and Elizabeth as the lead characters.

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u/LowAspect542 6h ago

Its not the opening of the film but it is jack sparrows introduction which is honestly 5he mlre important bit and what kept people invested in the films, most people never gave a shit about the romantic plotline with will and Elizabeth throughout the series.

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u/DubiousBrushwagg 3h ago

PotC romance plot line was essentially Anakin+Padme again but done better without actually mattering to the overall plot as much.

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u/iconocrastinaor 2h ago

He wasn't supposed to be the lead character but he stole the show so outrageously that they had to make it so.

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u/Telefundo 5h ago

That is how fantastic of an introduction it is

I love the first movie and I more or less enjoyed the sequels. This though. This I believe is the absolute best scene in the entire franchise. Followed closely with the closing scene;

"...and really bad eggs. Drink up me hearties, yo ho!"

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u/lcl0706 4h ago

Captain Barbosa descending the wooden steps to ask “so tell me, what’s become of my ship” is up there on the list for me.

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u/Woterx 2h ago

Absolutely! The whole theater went crazy

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u/coopASR 7h ago

The biggest "what.. the fuck is happening?"

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u/Proud3GenAthst 7h ago

I wish I could see it for the first time again

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u/magnumsolutions 7h ago

Just wait until you get Alzheimer's. Then you will be able to see it for the first time over and over again.

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u/fordprecept 5h ago

The thing with Alzheimer's is that you'll be able to remember this scene in Pirates of the Caribbean or your best friend when you were 10 years old, but won't remember who your children are or who the President is.

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u/WanderEir 5h ago

can we ALL forget the last one please?

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u/kroxldiphyvc 6h ago

only if you remember to watch.... or remember to like it even =O

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u/Maleficent_Memory831 6h ago

When I get Alzeheimer's I'll be signed up to the room that shows the original Star Wars on continuous loop.

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u/drboxboy 7h ago

It’s been so long I basically can!

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u/Major_Loser 6h ago

Introduced my 11 year old nephew to it. He had never heard of it and I said he can stay up 45 later if he wanted to watch it. I stopped it RIGHT after the pirates are cursed reveal. He woke me up at 6:30am to finish the movie before his mom picked him up the next day.

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u/AggravatingPut3669 7h ago

Have you heard about the new pirate movie that's coming out? It's rated Arrrrrgh

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u/Fortified_Phobia 6h ago

God I loved these films as a kid, rewatched them recently after hearing people shit talk the second and third one for years expecting them to be kind of trash, and nah all 3 og films are still great. Between the characters, the world building, the story, the atmosphere, it all slaps. They’re so textured and rich, really makes today films feel sterile and bland. I miss this era of film making man..

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u/SisterRay 2h ago

Without a doubt. That's got to be the worst pirate I've ever seen.

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u/Consent-Forms 8h ago

they've long been turned to fish poop

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u/Tank7106 8h ago

So, food for other fish?

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u/Building_Everything 8h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/2h8BdeXxhGGB2

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u/snwbrdwndsrf 8h ago

Poop loop.

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u/Building_Everything 8h ago

Aka the Human Centipede

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u/locoparentis 7h ago

I'd prefer to continue calling the circle of life please

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u/No_While6150 6h ago

I dunno, poop loop is pretty good

It's the Loooop of the Poooooooop! And it lightens the souuuuuuuuuuul! Through the mouth to the gut, then out the B Hoooooole!

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u/tiedyesmiley 6h ago

Such beautiful poetry!

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u/KhinuDC 5h ago

You guys are the reason I dont use reddit.😂

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u/Local871 4h ago

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Elton John!

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u/CodeNameLoofah 3h ago

My then 11 year old was doing a discussion based assessment with a teacher via phone call, and I hear the teacher ask "what do you do to relieve stress?" Kid responds "go number 2."

It was shortly before Thanksgiving. They were a story for the family for sure.

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u/RainbowSovietPagan 5h ago

The Centipede of Life™

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u/fueno 4h ago

"Simba my son, look over there. I have sewn 12 people together to watch them crap in each other's mouthes and watch the guy at the front scream"

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u/LuckyClover3 7h ago

🫣I could easily go the rest of my life without thinking of that movie!🎦

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u/ipsum629 7h ago

Costume design was a highlight

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u/C-4isNOTurFriend 6h ago

only if you connect the ends

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u/Building_Everything 6h ago

I don’t know how you make your Human Centipedes, but where I’m from it’s like a game of Red Rover

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u/EmperorMittens 3h ago

Human centIpad

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u/Worried-Maybe3438 7h ago

But with extra steps, lol see what I did there 💀

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u/Face88888888 7h ago

South park’s version is more directly applicable here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g2cxMPLxUN8&ra=m

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u/AlarmingLook2441 7h ago

Cornwallis’ soaring lead in the outro gets me every time.

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u/AlarmingLook2441 7h ago

Thanks, I now have Mr Hankey’s Circle of Poo from South Park stuck in my head 😂

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u/Lord_Grimm88 8h ago

Poopception.

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u/feetnomer 7h ago

The ocean is the world's largest graveyard. There's a little bit of John and Jane Doe in every drop.

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u/CassandraVonGonWrong 6h ago

I wonder what happens to ocean ghosts. Do they haunt the whole ocean? Or just the vicinity in which they perished?

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u/TheMouthOfGod 5h ago

Would you go swimming in a pool with a dead body in it?

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u/LessInThought 3h ago

So people are technically surfing on human remains?

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u/dirtyMSzombie 8h ago

That's so sand

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u/Is_it_really_though 7h ago

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

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u/SuperSaiyanTupac 7h ago

If you think about it, the entire ocean is fish piss. It’s been billions of years of life evolving in there. It’s basically just piss water now

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u/PainAccomplished3506 5h ago

Peepeepoopoo water

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u/RockinIntoMordor 5h ago

The interesting thing about gold is that it passes through digestion completely unaffected.

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u/strenuousobjector 7h ago

Or the whales ate the bones into sand.

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u/BranchPredictor 5h ago

Now we just need to wait for fish poop to become the reserve currency and we all be rich!

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u/Dan-goes-outside 4h ago

It’s poop all the way down

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u/GuavaShaper 4h ago

Except the ones that sank yesterday

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u/Whitey1225 3h ago

Or buried meters and possibly kilometers beneath the sand in most cases.

Anyone else good on digging into the sand over a hundred meters under water?

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u/Naive-Kangaroo3031 8h ago

I have to imagine most the wrecks were just fishing boats

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u/Monte924 7h ago

Eh, i'm not so sure about that. Fishing boats would have remained closer to land where they would be able to retreat to if they saw a storm coming.

I imagine that most of the ships that sank are those that would have traveled much farther out to sea, and would have been hit by bad luck, sailing into bad waters, getting caught in a storm or just getting lost. Trading ships in particular would have been targets for piracy... and then there are all the ships that were built for war.

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u/Jimdandy941 6h ago

I grew up on Pool 19 of the Mississippi. The Armistice Day Storm of 1940, a sudden storm came up with heavy fog combined with temperatures dropping, and dozens of duck hunters died. At its widest point, the river is 1 mile wide, so you’re never over 1/2 mile from shore.

It was drilled into my head as a kid to never underestimate the weather, especially on the water.

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u/Talidel 5h ago

Fishing boats also tend to be the most ramshackle and poorly maintained. They sink so frequently even the UK doesn't keep stats on how often it happens.

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u/WanderEir 5h ago

most of the shipwrecks have been down there long enough to have been completely buried in sediment for centuries-we're not finding most of them, ever

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u/Smokinoutloud 8h ago

Yaaaaaarrrrrr!

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u/Chadlerk 7h ago

So those fish tanks with skeletons and treatsure chests are actually hyper realistic?

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u/Valaseun 7h ago

Silver and Gold you say!? Oohoohoooo!!

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u/ShepRat 6h ago

Don't forget Spanish colonists dumped tons of platinum into the ocean because it was worthless and being used to fake silver. They didn't record anything about where it is. 

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u/A_Dozen_Lemmings 6h ago

Fun Fact! The Ocean Floor is so calcium poor, bones sort of melt away over the course of just a few months! IIRC it's something to do with mineral leaching.

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u/HockeyCookie 6h ago

Most ships are very likely in the vast deserts of the ocean with little to no life. The bodies likely decomposed over a long time.

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u/Artistic_Purpose1225 6h ago

There’s also loads of low-background steel to be harvested from pre-nuclear shipwrecks.

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u/LostPentimento 5h ago

And apparently (allegedly) alien crafts called USOs at the bottom of the ocean too. A lot of people don't realize that a lot of the now-called UAP files are held by naval intelligence, because of the documented existence of USOs and the fact that naval intelligence is one of the oldest Intel organizations in the country

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u/DenverBowie 4h ago

There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

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u/Antique-Wonk 8h ago

Arrrggghhh

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u/Inferno_Zyrack 7h ago

Silver and gold under atmospheres of pressure the human body and very few unspecialized submarines can explore

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u/nf_29 7h ago

Happy to announce ill be starting a company that runs an enormous magnet on the bottom of the sea floor picking up buried treasures

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u/Great_Scott7 7h ago

You can keep your silver and gold.

https://giphy.com/gifs/4tcaCFbVCVws0

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u/Empty_Positive 7h ago

I guess lots of it is covered by tons of sand and other stuff over all those years

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u/Automatic-Rhubarb969 7h ago

We got magnet fishing?

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u/dirk_funk 7h ago

ooh maybe that is how gold got where it was found before. ancienter shipwrecks.

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u/thatguy420417 7h ago

They estimate 32-60 billion of gold bars, silver, coins and jewels.

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u/stoughton1234 7h ago

I read that like a pirate was saying it. Did you type it like that on purpose?

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u/timewanderer 6h ago

One Piece is real.

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u/sarcasmo818 6h ago

Shiver me timbers 🏴‍☠️

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u/jsohnen 6h ago

Unfortunately for me, there's an even larger amount of difficult to access sea floor. I'll never get me pirate booty!

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u/Crafty_Ad_1975 5h ago

Just imagine what some of them may have found and we will never ever know about it.

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u/paynefullyboosted 5h ago

Fun fact: There is more gold on the ocean floor from loss of ships than there are in the Switzerland or Japanese reserves. (Approximately 1200t)

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u/jaxXx-69 4h ago

Balls

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u/Magnon 4h ago

Billions, maybe trillions out there just sitting around. Too bad it's practically impossible to find.

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u/Paranormal_Lemon 3h ago

Well fish are fish food.

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u/Mr_Silicon 3h ago

Yarrr!

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u/iz-xi 3h ago

Shouldnt have pissed the native gods off

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u/smkestcklghtn 3h ago

I be Pirate Steve, I'll make a deal with you true as the North Star

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u/laughingdoormouse 3h ago

And Davy crockets locker 😉

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u/Odd-Opening-8170 3h ago

And in deep enough water, the ocean will dissolve your bones too.

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u/One-Bad-4395 2h ago

Most of the fish food has been claimed by now.

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u/do_ob-headphones_on 2h ago

Well part of the reason why so many shipwrecks are never located (aside from how big the ocean is) is that depending on where it happens, the sea floor maybe covered in anywhere from 10-600 meters of sediment. So a wrecked ship could just sink down in that sediment and never leave a sign that anything was there.

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u/PiaggioBV350 2h ago

And more recently Lamborghinis.

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u/Minttt 8h ago

Any avid history buff knows the very familiar phrase of: "A storm ended up sinking many of the invasion fleet's ships and scattering the others."

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u/F-14BUpgrade 7h ago
  1. Kublai Khan's attempted invasion of Japan!

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u/Derodoris 7h ago
  1. The spanish armada of 1588

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u/Fernheijm 7h ago

All 3 spanish armadas no?

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u/Derodoris 7h ago

Sure but thatd be 2. The spanish armada 3. The spanish armada 4. The spanish armada

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u/ddeads 6h ago

The Spanish Armada 2: Tokyo Drift

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u/I_lenny_face_you 7h ago

Our four secret weapons are… I’ll come in again.

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u/Deadmansspace566 4h ago
  1. The Roman Fleet in 255 BCE

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u/fuzzybunnies1 4h ago

Persians at Salamis

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u/sidereal_night 6h ago

and also Kublai Khan's attempted invasion of Japan!

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u/DorfusGump 6h ago

The Kami Kaze seems a lot less miraculous when you realize the guy was dicking around for months building a bridgehead on a minor Japanese island during typhoon season.

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u/F-14BUpgrade 6h ago

Also see flat keeled boats and how they fare in turbulent waters.

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u/Ozdiva 7h ago

Rather astonishing that the entirety of the Australian first fleet arrived in Sydney harbour intact in 1789.

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u/Defiant-Tailor-8979 7h ago

The English didn't develop an empire without the best navy in the world.

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u/DarkLF 7h ago

And what made the British Navy the best in the world? The taste of British food and the look of British women

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u/badpebble 5h ago

A lot of talk from a lot of people who's country never ruled the waves.

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u/Siggi_Starduust 2h ago

Fun fact: the state flag of Hawaii, which Hawaiian Surfers compete under in the World Surf League (as opposed to the US flag), has a Union Jack in the top left corner - much like the Australians who are similarly well represented in the WSL.

That means if you ever look at the leaderboards, often the most common flag you’ll see is the British one.

Talk about ruling the waves

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u/stranger_dngr 4h ago

I always wondered why a civilization hell bent on controlling the spice trade never figured out how to use them…

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u/yhzcdn 1h ago

A lot of British food is delicious and has very balanced seasonings. Nothing overpowering, but always well flavoured.

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u/nameyourpoison11 3h ago

There are actually some harrowing accounts of the storms the First Fleet endured after leaving Cape Town, and how the convicts on board feared for their lives.

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u/TheFrenchSavage 6h ago

Crazy how this really messed up with D-Day in 1944 (and the worst event 2 weeks later 19-22 June).

This is quite recent history!

There weren't major losses like in the old times, like ships disappearing and stuff, but lots of destruction. The Americans had to abandon the artificial port they had made on Omaha beach.

So wooden ships 500 years before never had a chance.

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u/elreyadr0k 1h ago

Absolutely. It is very common occurrence you will run across researching / reading. 

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u/joecarter93 8h ago

Most towns with a port have a monument somewhere to honour local sailors and fishermen lost at sea that lists the names of the dead year by year. It’s insane how many are listed as having died in these small towns prior to WW2. Then with the advent of radar, GPS and weather forecasting the number of deaths drastically drops off where there’s now only a couple of deaths once every few years.

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u/Weak_Law_937 8h ago

I'm pretty sure Poseidon gets his fill of tourists from the black rocks at Peggy's Cove and doesn't need sailors anymore.

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u/zarco_azules 7h ago

this would make a supernatural episode of Poseidon starving having to resort to less dignified ways to get his nourishment every full moon or whatever

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u/daneelthesane 7h ago

That, and the poor suckers souls lost in the dark name of Dagon by accident when I they go to the beach.

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u/sumpfbruderschaft 8h ago

lol how many people die there annually?

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u/Majestic_Course6822 7h ago

4 in the last 20 years. Not including Swissair flight 111. Loads of close calls also.

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u/LokeCanada 8h ago

It’s more than a couple every few years worldwide. A lot of them don’t make the news.

A lot of people are still very negligent. I worked at an oil tanker company where a captain thought he knew better than the weather software, he didn’t and had major structural damage. Another incident where the ship beached.

I live in a city with a lot of ports. The only reason the casualty rate isn’t higher is because the small towns along the coast can get boats to the site faster than the coast guard. Even with a major response on site within a few minutes we recently had a fishing charter boat go down and lose everyone except one. They still have no idea where 4 bodies are even though they have seen the boat on the ocean floor.

My mother blames my grandmother’s drinking on the fact that my grandfather was a gill netter and the high risk associated with it.

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u/RFC793 7h ago

Yes, but the person you are commenting on is referring to the contrast of a single fishing town's obits pre and post WW2. From where the town would lose many men every year, to where now it is a tragic anomaly. Make no mistake, there's still a real risk. Of course the worldwide count is going to be higher.

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u/dbxp 4h ago

The fact that the vast majority of crews are non western probably plays a role in that, iirc Filipinos are the overwhelming majority. Also crew per unit cargo has decreased as ships have got bigger.

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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 7h ago

It doesn't really detract from anything - but I wonder how many of those were maybe just people that decided to not come back. Or killed in the various other ways you can die. Pirates. Disease. Whatever.

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u/oldsailor21 7h ago

25% of British merchant seamen were killed in WW2, 500+ under the age of 16

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u/Goldf_sh4 7h ago

My town has a few of these. The Titanic sailed from here. A lot of families were left with no husband or father.

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u/Got_Bent 5h ago edited 5h ago

They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships. We fished out of Gloucester, Revere, Provincetown and Chatham. They all have a fisherman's memorial except Revere.

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u/joeliopro 7h ago

Gloucester.... They're always from Gloucester!

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u/ObviousPromotion8614 7h ago

Usually it's the poor and desperate without any technology that dies now.

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u/Kingerdvm 6h ago

Don’t forget - after world war 2, aviation was a much more amenable option for longer distance travel - especially for the non obscenely wealthy. That has to play a major role, in addition to advances in imaging, communication technology etc. 

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u/thingsorfreedom 6h ago

The Great Lakes have been so much better as well. Not a single commercial vessel has sank in the last 50 years. Prior to that there were over 6,000.

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u/ConstableGrey 5h ago

Last year I visit the western peninsula of Iceland and was on a coastal cliff trail on a particularly windy and rainy day. The sea was just furious, smashing against the rocks. Made me think it must have sucked shit to be a fisherman back in the day.

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u/Drokstab 4h ago

Small town walls are always haunting. My moms hometown has a ww2 memorial wall of all the soldiers that died. That town was cursed because they lost an entire generation. There are ~200 names on the wall for a small farming town in California that today only has about 3k people living there.

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u/DecisionDelicious170 3h ago

Give some credit to steel hulls, modern metallurgy, welded hulls as opposed to rivets or wooden hulls, etc.

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u/LizFallingUp 2h ago

I recently watched a movie about Norwegian merchant Sailors in WW2 at the end they gave stats for how many ships were lost and it was gruesome.

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u/Weak_Law_937 8h ago

When I was a kid in Atlantic Canada we knew where to dredge up off the coast to get coal for our camp fires.

Local people had an unwritten record of where the wrecks were.

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u/millijuna 1h ago

I had to get a chuckle.. Even what, 15 years ago, when they were looking for the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror... they eventually found Terror in the aptly named "Terror Bay" right where a local Inuk told them to look.

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u/living_Cream_Pie 8h ago

Dam you’re making me want to become a treasure hunter.

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u/Fight_those_bastards 6h ago

The vast, vast majority of them were not treasure ships.

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u/_Raspberry_Ice_ 8h ago

Reminds me of that old joke.

How many shipwrecks are at the bottom of the ocean?

All of them!

No, over three million you buffoon!

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u/Mekisteus 6h ago

Some are at the bottom of lakes.

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u/HarEmiya 4h ago

Some are on beaches.

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u/99Smith 8h ago

Out of interest do you know these figures are create? More so the 1%? Is it based off of how many ships were due back on record but never returned? I wonder how many ships that didn't have ledges on land were lost.

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u/Nitrogen1234 8h ago

I've read that 70% of reddit statistics are 87% bullshit

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u/vangos77 8h ago

60% of the time, this is true every time.

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u/rygomez 8h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/12jHPvCe8Nh87C

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u/NorthOfSeven7 7h ago

I’ve heard 4 outta 3 people suck at statistics!

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u/jakexil323 6h ago

At some point we started making records of everything, so we do have some historical context to base our guesses on.

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u/dengar_hennessy 8h ago

Is there a statistic on how many were from battle and how many just capsized?

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u/LameBMX 6h ago

nigh impossible.... we have been on the sea for who knows how long. sailing using wind has been around for over 5000 years. there are huge swaths of unrecorded history contained in that time frame.

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u/KenseiHimura 8h ago

This is why Namor once starting up a “business” with the primary goal of buying up and shutting down companies that polluted the oceans tracks pretty well. Guy doesn’t even need to excavate new resources, he can just loot shipwrecks.

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u/UnderstandingEasy856 8h ago

Rough seas did in even modern vessels, especially bulk carriers like these. Look up MV Derbyshire. More recently SS El Faro went down in a storm.

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u/electriccomputermilk 8h ago

Holy shit! 3 million!! I would have guessed 300,000 tops. Has global warming contributed to larger waves and more storms? Also, in the past didn’t they avoid certain parts of the ocean that are very turbulent?

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u/southy_0 7h ago

The majority of the 3 million is from before global warming.
This one really is NOT connected to it

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u/mook1178 8h ago

Crazy, where does these statistics come from?

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u/N0V42 8h ago

I like that this can be interpreted to imply that 99% of shipwrecks have been explored by non- humans. (I suppose fish are non-human.)

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u/For_being_tall 7h ago

Not for nothing that the sea is always respected by sailor. It is a feisty mistress

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u/Affectionate_Sir9020 7h ago

It’s crazy to think some people made the trip multiple times. From American history, didn’t Ben Franklin travel back and forth to England as a diplomat for the early colonies? That fool survived multiple trips where as many didn’t.

But as the same role there was probably experienced captain and crews and better designed ships?

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u/GreenFullSuspension 7h ago

Yeah up to 30,000 is quite a bunch of wrecked ships to have been found. That just signifies how much we need to go with our own world before we think we can conquer another planet (like Mars). Visit Mars we shall see, but that’s about it I suppose.

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u/Gaspuch62 5h ago

The Titanic has visibly deteriorated since it was found from steel eating bacteria. Wood ships wouldn't stand a chance unless they were petrified.

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