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.
In: 166
In order to get from Venice to Athens it is fairly simple as most of the trip is within visible range of the shore. The places where you are crossing open oceans are not far so you can easily just point in the right direction and sail for a day or two until you hit land. Even if you are a bit off you will recognize the land and then follow the coastline until you get to the right destination. But experienced sailors would know the winds and tides well enough to get pretty accurate.
Crossing the Atlantic is more impressive though. You can no longer rely on dead reconing. At least you need a good compass to know which direction you are going and good measuring and logging techniques to get a very accurate track. But you also need to navigate by the sun and stars. Taking measurements of where these are and how high they are above the horizon at any point in time to calculate where you are. It is much easier to do this if you only need to know how far north or south you are, such as when traveling east or west. Fortunantly most of the trade routes over open ocean is going east or west. So basically if the sun is rising too high in the middle of the day that means you have drifted south towards the equator and you give the helm orders to keep a more northernly course. You do this until you hit land.
Latest Answers