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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Ancient sailors had compasses and it’s actually not that difficult to get the latitude (north-south distances) using simple sun sights. Many old maps are fairly accurate north and south, but not east and west since that was hard and couldn’t be done accurately until about the mid 1700s. Also don’t forget that many ancient sailors got shipwrecked. Pacific island mariners used stars, wave patterns, birds, clouds, fish types etc to navigate between small islands. As an old sailor, I can confirm what a great invention GPS is.
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