How sailor going from Venice to Athens in the ancient time knew to navigate EXCTALY to the port location?
I can understand general direction by stars or even a compass but to navigate to a very specific location is other problem as I see it.
I did some foot navigation and to get to a specific point of very different then a general direction and you can’t use just general direction. If you miss your journey even in 0.5 degree you will get in totally other coast and not to the port you aimed for.
It will be even a bigger problem on the ocean travels. The Portuguese ships going to South America. How the know to land exactly at the port of Mexico or other places.
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Most ship voyages of old would pretty much never go far enough that they couldn’t see the coast from atop the main mast, so they oriented themselves using landmarks along an effectively one-dimensional path. This was called “piloting”, whereas “navigating” refers to taking a ship to open seas.
Now, to navigate to a specific port across the ocean using a sailboat, you’d first sail either north or south in order to reach either the trade winds or the westerlies, which are latitudes across the earth where the wind consistently blows westwards and eastwards respectively. You’d then reach a coast on the other side of the ocean and then pilot the ship to your desired port.
Even without that however, you only need to know the latitude of your desired port if you want to reach it without piloting, and you can know your latitude easily at night based on the angle of celestial bodies to the horizon. The North Star is the easiest one, since it doesn’t ever move in the sky. You can just hold a marked stick at the end of your arm and measure, or even hold your hand out like they do in Moanna. That’s how the polynesians did it, and even if you’re going to a tiny island, you only need to pass close enough that you can see birds flying above.
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