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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For starters it’s important to know that ships ending up in the wrong places or getting completely lost was not uncommon. Other than that it mainly came down to two things, maps and experience. Maps were generally available, and while they were not as accurate or to scale as they are today but to an experience sailor they could give a good enough idea of what to look for. They didn’t necessarily convey true distances but there were port maps that gave the general layout of a region and the location of the ports, so the sailors would know to look for a mountain or a peninsula or what the shape of the harbor should roughly be like. Experience however, was more important. A ship would rarely sail without someone on board who hadn’t already been to the destination before that, so that he’d know what to look for.
It would often be the case that ships would not end up were they meant to, either due to limitations to navigation abilities or the weather, since the wind or the currents were not always favorable to where a ship meant to go. Usually they’d reach the coastline at some place and then sail up and down it until they found the right place. If they had no idea where they were they would stop at the first settlement they could and ask for directions. With time, and crews gaining experience, and maps being drawn and all that knowledge being shared amongst sailors, ships could generally find their way, especially in well charted and populated areas like the Mediterranean. Sailing to the Americas was more difficult, but again as long as you sailed west you’d come upon land at some point and then try to figure out how far up and down from your destination you are. What was more difficult was exploring or looking for specific islands in the ocean, because in those cases you’d have to be able to accurately chart your course through the entire duration of the trip. If you don’t come up to your desired destination you have to be able to figure out where and how you went wrong or you can’t correct it and have practically no idea where you are. In the case of exploration they were mainly just charting the coastlines but they had to be able to also go back where they came from.
Ultimately being a skilled sailor was a very valued skill for most of human history and it took a lifetime on the sea to build those skills. It did not always go well. Often ships would get lost or get sunk.
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