Exploration by the wind
Modern historians seem to assume that deep water navigation is a recent invention and until it’s mathematical problems had been solved it was impossible to undertake an ocean voyage. I had a lesson in basic navigation while sailing dinghies at Stonehaven near Aberdeen in a fog. I was a bit concerned but the skipper explained that, in those conditions, if you keep the wind in the same quarter, you will sail in a straight line. If the wind changes it will blow the fog away. I doesn’t account for tidal drift but it’s accurate enough to get you home. Now consider a man who lives his life on the sea. If the wind is warm, it’s from the south. If the temperature drops, the wind has turned northerly. An ocean swell changes little as it depends on prevailing wind and ocean current. If you keep the sun on your right shoulder from sunrise to sunset, you will travel east in a wide arc. In the northern hemisphere the stars in the extreme north travel much more slowly than those at the equator. At any time of the year, if you get on the track of the stars that go over your hut, it will take you home.
In any case, except in the wild reaches of the Southern Ocean, it doesn’t matter how far north you go, if you turn east or west in the Atlantic or Pacific, you’ll find land. Provisions? In the days of the Phoenicians, the sea was full of fish.
The old seamen would be far more aware of conditions than we are today and, like the Native Australians, who think their way through the bush, would read signs we barely notice. Of course, some got lost, but when has that ever stopped humans from exploring?
Because of this, I am convinced that people were connected by trade long before the great voyages of discovery and that in many instances the explorers set out to confirm rumours and tales told by fishermen and traders rather than went dashing off into the unknown to prove a mathematical theory – after all, the only seamanship Archimedes knew was in a bath tub.