How did wooden boats make it across the ocean?

Question

I just watched a video of a big military boat going over HUGE waves. How the hell did we send wooden boats across the ocean without them being completely destroyed?

In: 5

Answer 1

Worth noting survivorship bias. There probably aren’t records for every ship that didn’t make it, especially considering the number of ships that set sail before we started keeping such records. So we know about all the ships that made it across the oceans, but we do not know what percentage of ships that set sail those represent. Remember that old maps would be adorned with “here be monsters”, so at the time people knew that ships would be lost in certain areas