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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Away from land, people got lost a lot. For a long time we knew latitude using the stars, but longitude was a problem until the 18th century when the chronometer was invented.
This is a great book that probably answers your question in more detail:
[https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/080271529X](https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-Problem/dp/080271529X)
>Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that “the longitude problem” was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.
Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison’s forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.
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