Why did it used to be harder to sail over deep ocean, compared to shallow waters
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Because we couldn’t see the land. The depth of water wasn’t the ACTUAL reason. It was just a corollary reason .
For a long time most sea travel happened within 10 miles of land. Otherwise ships didn’t have the advanced mathematical tools like sextants, or compasses to navigate by earths gravity or the stars, making it hard to find home again if you were sailing
I am going to disagree with other commenters here and say that in rough conditions it is actually shallow water that you want to avoid. Deep ocean waves can get very large, but are typically swells which are long waves and so not dangerous. When a wave reaches shallow water the front slows down, and so the back of the wave catches up and all the water piles up. Waves entering shallow water get taller and steeper, eventually breaking. You will probably have seen this phenomenon in miniature at any beach. Steeper waves are much more dangerous because they can capsize a vessel.
And this effect is present at any shallowing, there are patches of the Northern Atlantic (and no doubt other seas I am not familiar with) that you might want to avoid for the above reason, despite them being many dozens of metres deep.
it also has to do with tools of the trade. sailors could always figure out their latitude fairly easily, but calculating their longitude wasn’t available to anyone until the late 18th century. so the idea of crossing into the unknown was a very daunting task.
It wasnt harder to sail over , but once out of site from land you had nothing to use to navigate by. Really until some version of a nautical chart was invented, and a compass, you really couldn’t dead reckon your position, so you could easily get way off course.
There’s a really good book about this: Longitude. One.of the reasons to stay in sight of it the shore was because you knew where you were.
Before accurate sea going clocks (not until the 1700s for all practical matters), once you couldn’t see the land you had only a rough guess as to where you were.
This is caused [huge problems](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilly_naval_disaster_of_1707) – 2000 British sailors died because the *British royal navy* didn’t know where they were. In 1707.
It’s really hard to fathom what travel was like just a few hundred years ago – most long journeys (even over land) were very uncertain.
There is a great book called Longitude by Dava Sobel that gets into the big problem of deep ocean travel: that you can’t really tell how far east or west you are without landmarks to navigate by so it’s challenging to tell your longitude exactly on long distance voyages at sea. Only a few cultures found methods to mitigate these problems before sea clocks were invented.
Pleasure boat sailor here. Well, the biggest issue is the lack of a static reference point. You’re pretty much blind and must rely heavily on your compass and GPS to keep a straight heading. Near land, you can always say “Well point the bow towards that buoy, or hill, or this much right of the coast and boom, you’re sailing straight. If currents makes you drift, you have the shore and other landmarks to see that something is off.
In the high seas, outside of clouds and the sun, both of which are constantly moving, you don’t have a frame of reference.
Currents will affect your trajectory, and must rely on your GPS or, back in the olden days, sextan to know your position, else currents, or simply slight steering errors may cause you to drift off course. You may as well be in complete bindless as outside the stars and sun to tell you kind of sorta where you’re pointing, you have no idea where you’re actually heading. And unlike the shore, those clouds, stars and the sun, well, THEY MOVE.
That’s how the SS Atlantic sank in 1873. It was heading to Halifax for an emergency refuel, in fears of running out of coal before making it to New York. The sky was cloudy, seas were stormy. The ship drifted to the left because of currents and they ended up hitting shore rocks.
Also, seas can be rougher when off shore. Near shore, geographic features sort of dampen the swells.
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