Text 7142, 85 rader
Skriven 2013-03-03 11:33:20 av Roy Witt (1:387/22)
   Kommentar till text 7120 av Ward Dossche (2:292/854)
Ärende: WebFido
===============
Ward Dossche wrote to Roy Witt:

 RW>WD>> He "knew" as the world was round by sailing west he eventually
 RW>WD>> would get somewhere.

 RW>> Fortunately for Chris and crew, there was a lot of Caribbean islands
 RW>> and a Central America to back them up. Else he would have sailed on
 RW>> to China.

 WD> That was the whole idea. He never went to look for the Americas.

Sure. But where did the continent of Bergonia come into play?

 WD> The primitive maritime navigation of the time relied on the stars and
 WD> the curvature of the spherical Earth. The knowledge that the Earth
 WD> was spherical was widespread, and the means of calculating its
 WD> diameter using an astrolabe was known to both scholars and
 WD> navigators.

Not to mention the use of a compass and dead reckening.

 WD> He knew that when sailing westward long enough using the trade-winds
 WD> that he had to end-up somewhere in Asia.

Thing is, if he had sailed westward, he would have landed in Nova Scotia
and not the Carribean islands. The other odd thing is that on all voyages
after the first one, he ended up in the same place every time. Never
finding 'America' at all. Which is probably why the continent is named
after Americus and not Columbus.

 WD> Unfortunately Columbus had no clue about longitudinal degrees and
 WD> heavily relied on a compass (as a matter of fact, he discovered
 WD> "compass deviation" in the middle of the Atlantic) and thought he was
 WD> way further than he actually got.

Actually, Columbus underestimated the distance traveled on purpose. The
crew would have wanted to turn around if they knew how far they had
actually gone.

 WD> The 1474 Toscanelli map of the world had him totally confused so he
 WD> really thought at first he landed in China and Japan ... as you
 WD> probably know.

That's the claim, but ole Chris had sailed up an down the African coast so
many times by 1484, that he proposed a crown supplied crossing to the king
of Portugal, but was refused.

 WD> In a very litteral way he was in uncharted territory.

So were Lewis and Clarke, but they made it to the west coast and back with
just as ancient technology as ole Chris's...

 RW>WD>> His only problem was food and water ... and morale.

 RW>> I guess throwing a line overboard with a hook on it never occured to
 RW>> him or his crew. Salted bacon is good fish bait...then there is the
 RW>> small matter of evaporating sea water to remove the salt content.
 RW>> Each man could have his own.

 WD> Maybe you are unaware but there is very little to fish for mid-ocean
 WD> where it is 3-4000 meter deep.

They entered the waters of the Canary islands, which would have given them
ample opportunity to fish. But they hardly needed to fish even then, as
they carried plenty of supplies onboard.

 WD> Fishing was not an option for them, certainly not with the state of
 WD> fishing technology in those days.

People have been fishing for 40k years. I'm sure that fishing in the
moderen era of 1492 wasn't an unknown, especially to a sea going crew.

 WD> Second ... you've probably never been on a 15th century vessel in its
 WD> original lay-out. There's no way they could desalinate seawater, not
 WD> in 1492.

It's not rocket science and I'm sure that in 1492 there was plenty of
seaman who've seen salt where there used to be water.


         R\%/itt


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