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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Monsoons and trade winds. After boats with oars, sails became invaluable.
As soon as sailors learned to harness wind power, they found the wind patterns to move them along trade routes.
Excellent book on the birth of commerce and trade routes “A Splendid Exchange” by Wm Bernstein. [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2413423.A_Splendid_Exchange](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2413423.A_Splendid_Exchange)
Well, if you’re looking for Mexico in South America, you’re already in for a long trip lmao
Mexico is in North America, with it’s eastern portion in the Caribbean.
A Scottish sailor called Crichton Miller made a convincing case that the Celtic Cross was a representation of an ancient maritime navigational tool. He demonstrated how it could be used to measure latitude and longitude and patented the idea.
Consistently checking your heading. Just like walking in the woods with a compass. You don’t take one reason and just walk. You take a reading and walk straight for 100 steps and take another reading.
Triangulation. Using land based land marks or stars to check your actual location vs where you think you are and then correcting.
Pretty much the same way we did right up until the birth of GPS. Detailed maps. Landmarks. Star charts. Lighthouses. Sailors and navigators with experience. Frequent adjustments.
There’s a reason such voyages took months and would often never make it to their destination.
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.
While it has been theorized these ancient sailors had unique and super exceptional navigational skills allowing them to find a small atoll in the vast ocean, there is the real possibility it was sheer luck.
By sticking to coast as much as possible, dead reckoning precisely to right place was simply not possible. Not only did they lack basic tools like compasses, they also lacked proper maps and didn’t know where places were precisely in relation to each other. Look at old maps sometimes, the older they are the worse they get.
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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